Time for us to Just Be HUMAN: Hunter-Gatherer Gender Roles Are Myths
Breaking the Cave Man Hunter Stereotype
If you grew up before the 1980’s, then you are familiar with the stereotypes for the roles of men and women. Men are strong warriors. Women need protection. Men are hard and tough. Women are kind and loving. Men hunt. Women gather.
Although gender equality was part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UN General,1948), it took 37 more years for the “birth of global feminism” to finally bring women’s issues and rights to the mainstream. Patriarchal values not only impacted the way most modern societies operated, they also affected the way data about ancient human societies was interpreted.
Many point to the “fact” that cave men hunted and women gathered as proof that gender roles are part of our human make-up and perhaps even hardwired into our DNA.
But as you are about see, this is a lot like our misconceptions on lion prides: Lionesses do most of the hunting, not the so-called King of the Jungle. But for decades the story of male lion dominance was the only one being told.
So too with the Men Hunt-Women Gather paradigm of human societies.
This widely held belief of ancient gender roles is being challenged thanks to a new study published in June 2023 PLoS One using a re-analysis of evidence from the archeological records. The results are uplifting for women everywhere!
Citation: Anderson A, Chilczuk S, Nelson K, Ruther R, Wall-Scheffler C (2023) The Myth of Man the Hunter: Women’s contribution to the hunt across ethnographic contexts. PLoS ONE 18(6): e0287101. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0287101
Gender Roles Are Not Archeological Fact
The female research team re-examined the records of foraging societies to look specifically at accounts of women hunting. They only included studies that had explicit data on hunting. They further looked for evidence as to whether the women were hunting on purpose or just opportunistically.
Some of the recent findings of women hunting include the discovery (2020) of an adult female buried with hunting tools, dated to be 9,000 years old in Peru. Another study in the Americas showed 11 females at 10 burial sites, buried with the tools for big-game hunting. In the end, the researchers were able to compile information from 63 foraging societies with explicit data on hunting.
And the results? 50 of 63 societies (79%) had evidence of women hunting!
Where there was clear data on whether women hunted intentionally or opportunistically, 36 of 41 societies (87%) described women hunting as intentional.
The evidence clearly shows that women were skilled hunters, often having their own tools and strategies compared to men within the same society. In some societies women hunted with dogs and with their children. They were not relegated to small game or opportunistic hunts either. Women were found to hunt a full range of prey species, including big game. Women were active in both teaching and leading hunting.
How did we not know this before now?
Well, the gender stereotypes of past researchers likely played a role in how the evidence was interpreted. And in full fairness, new sites, new discoveries and new ideas come along all the time to upset the applecart of our beliefs of how the world works.
The New Paradigm of Cave Women Hunters
If you have been reading along with me for a while, then you know I like to talk about our ancient brains and what is hard-wired into us as humans and how this affects us still in the modern world.
This latest research joins others calling for a re-evaluation of the old hunter-gatherer bi-modal model of early human societies.
Gender roles relating to food and sustenance are NOT something hardwired into us after all.
Modern society did not evolve from ones in which women were weak, subservient, and relegated to lesser roles in the provision of food and survival. That means all those arguments used against global feminism and equality that fall back on the cave man hunter story fall away. They are just stories created that don’t actually fit the facts (and perhaps never fit the facts in the first place).
And while I am cheering this on – as a woman scientist and farmer – I have to admit it also boggles my mind as I try to undo old thinking and old fall backs because “that is how it was” - a story I have heard repeated since kindergarten.
For myself, my decision to raise my own food was a direct response to the growing alarm I felt over factory farming. If I was going to continue to be an omnivore, then I had to either source my food more ethically or grow it myself. I chose the latter.
That meant I had to come to terms with my own ethics and find the inner strength to eat the animals I was raising (because that was the point right? To raise the animals well and eat them . . that journey is a story for another day).
What is relevant here, is that when the time came for me to face killing a bird I had raised, I didn’t think of my Dad, strong as he was. I thought of my Mother and my Grandmother!
I never met my Grandmother Bernath. She was gone long before I was born. My Mother grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan. They raised animals, grain and other food to support the family. And I have this beautiful picture of my Mother walking among the chickens (and wow I have looked at this picture dozens of times and never realized the bird on the right is a turkey!).
When the time came for me to provide for my table, I channeled the strength of my Grandmother to provide for her family. I put aside all my modern conundrums about what women do, and I remembered who SHE was and what was normal for her. And I felt proud to stand in an unbroken line of women who knew what to do and how to do it (well, eventually anyway, I got good at it).
Human societies came together in so many ways and with so many cultural practices in order to survive. We’ve lost track of some of those stories.
And our modern societies are currently blending into one global technological soup (for lack of a better word). I sometimes wonder if there will be any distinct cultures left in another 50 years. The practices of how we feed ourselves, and the skills to do it, are fading down to the knowledge of how to press the microwave keys. Just not the same thing at all.
I’d like to leave this here with the words from Katie Jgln whose Medium story on this research inspired my own version that you’ve been reading:
“We can either keep clinging to all those patriarchal fantasies of club-waving cavemen and courageous male warriors and longingly look back at the past that only ever existed in our heads.
Or recognize that perhaps not everything we assumed about men and women over the past centuries is accurate or set in biological stone and allow ourselves to just… be human. Without imposing rigid ideas of masculinity and femineity and forcing people to squeeze themselves into boxes that don’t fit.”
-Katie Jgln
It is indeed time for us to “just be human”.
Happy hunting to you all!