Ancient Mystery: Teenage Hunter’s Unexpected Role in Big Game Pursuits 9,000 Years Ago Revealed
Was this really a common cultural practice or was this girl just an anomaly? To find out, Haas and his team reviewed previous studies and records of burial sites across the Americas from the last five decades. Researchers found that 11 out of the 27 individual remains that were uncovered with big game hunting tools were women while 16 of them were men.
“At that point, we felt… pretty confident that there was something different going on among these past hunter-gatherer groups compared to more recent ones,” Haas said.
A factor that may have contributed to this cultural difference between ancient groups and more modern hunter-gatherer societies is their hunting methods.
Randall Haas/University of CaliforniaIt was one of many burials found that featured women hunters in the last 50 years.
“We think that people were engaged in more group hunting practices,” said Shannon Tushingham, an archaeologist and director of the Museum of Anthropology at Washington State University who was not involved in the new study.
“It would make sense that men and women and children were all dispatching these large animals.” In other words, everyone played a role in making sure that there was enough food for survival.
Archaeologists also suspect that these ancient cultures practiced alloparenting, a form of collective child-rearing which would arguably relieve women members from the sole responsibility of looking after the children.
Authors of the study contend that “a degree of contemporary gender bias or ethnographic bias” among researchers may be why the notion that these ancient cultures were as gendered as contemporary societies continues to persist.
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