Women did the gathering, men did the hunting—right?
Or so the theory goes.
For too long, this theory has been used to support the idea that their are “natural” gender roles and clear divisions of labor between men and women.
But what if that theory is completely wrong?
Nurith Aizenman wrote about the fallacy of the hunter-gatherer gender assumptions for NPR this week. It turns out that the widespread belief that men were predominantly hunting and women were mostly gathering was only studied through observational and anecdotal impressions. That is, scientists made conclusions based on what they saw without actually collecting hard data.
They didn’t actually count how many men and women were hunting.
In new research published in the journal PLOS One on June 28, 2023, a team from the University of Washington and Seattle Pacific University challenges the long-held belief that early humans had a division of labor with men as hunters and women as gatherers.
The study, led by biological anthropologist Cara Wall-Scheffler, reexamines ethnographic accounts from various hunter-gatherer societies by doing a systematic tally of what the observational reports share about women hunting.
Turns out, women were hunting all the time—scientists just didn’t account for it.
Their findings — published in the journal PLOS One this week — is that in 79% of the societies for which there is data, women were hunting.
Previous assumptions about gender roles in early human societies were largely based on anecdotal impressions and personal fieldwork. Wall-Scheffler and her team sought to go back to the original ethnographic reports to assess the evidence for women's involvement in hunting.
Not only were women hunting, they were often hunting with their own tools. They were training their girls to make tools and to hunt.
“Grandmas were the best hunters of the village.”
One of the problems with scientific studies can be the bias that people hold going into any kind of researcher. For decades, the idea that men are the “natural breadwinners,” and are more violent and aggressive has led to many in science to see only men as hunters.
In one example, a team in Peru “found a 9,000-year-old person buried with an unusually large number of hunting tools.”
"We all just assumed this individual was a male," [Randy Haas, an antrhopologist at Wagne State University] recalls. "Everybody is sitting around, saying things like, 'Wow! This is amazing. He must have been a great hunter, a great warrior. Maybe he was a chief!'"
Haas didn't even think to question the person's gender until about a week later, when a colleague who specialized in analyzing bone structure arrived and delivered a bombshell assessment: The remains seemed to be female.
The team then used a technology newly available to the field. Scraping the enamel from the teeth found in the grave, they found proteins that confirmed it unequivocally: This apparent master hunter was female.”
These findings have significant implications, particularly in challenging gender stereotypes and societal norms.
The belief that men are natural hunters and women are natural gatherers has been used to influenced policies that prioritize men as breadwinners and limit their involvement in caregiving responsibilities (by denying them paternity leave, for example), while also imposing traditional motherhood roles on women.
There are likely lots of subtle and nuanced differences between genders, and much left to be studied. The troubling implications of this research—and our widespread default beliefs about gender—often get reinforced by those at the top of the food chain [pun intended]: when the majority of researchers are from one gender, there is a tremendous amount that might be missed.
It’s too easy to be blind to the existing cultural assumptions and find the results that you’re unconsciously looking for, rather than seeing what’s actually in front of you.
Better go back and check again.
— Sarah Peck
CEO & Founder
Startup Parent
The entire article on NPR: Men are hunters, women are gatherers. That was the assumption. A new study upends it. July 1, 2023
The Myth of Man the Hunter: Women’s contribution to the hunt across ethnographic contexts. June 28, 2023
I do not find this particularly surprising. Both sexes were hunters and both were gatherers. We would not survive otherwise as a species. Hunting usually implies hunting stags and elephants. What people hunted was probably predominantly smaller prey for the pot. Only the largest prey required more physical strength and more risk taking which was rewarded with social status which was rewarded with better access to sexual mates. And hence our prejudice about males being exclusive hunters. Keep in mind that prey amounted for minor part of calories in comparison with gathered food.