What you think you know about ancient human history might be wrong. A significant number of hunters in prehistoric times may actually have been female. The theory that men and only men used to hunt has been put into question for decades. However, it’s only been relatively recently that the updated information about prehistoric gender roles and the division of labor has begun spreading among the public.
TikTok video creator @allie_202_ went viral on the internet after sharing this discovery with her viewers. Like most other people, Allie was shocked to discover that some prehistoric women used to hunt, too. She noted how our biases affect our perception, even in an area of study that should be objective, like archeology. Scroll down for Allie’s full video and thoughts, as well as to read how the internet reacted to her discovery.
Bored Panda has reached out to Allie via Instagram, and we’ll update the article as soon as we hear back from her.
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Allie went viral on TikTok after sharing that she recently learned how a large number of ancient hunters may have been female
Image credits: allie_202_
Image credits: William MacKenzie
‘The first things we learned about early human history is that men used to be hunters and women used to be gatherers’
‘So tell me why I was today years old when I found out that 30 to 50% of hunters may have been female this whole time?’
Image credits: Matthew Verdolivo, UC Davis IET Academic Technology
‘Flashback to 2021, a researcher from my university realized that the body they had just dug up with a bunch of hunting tools around it was the body of a female and they were like, “That is surprising. We should look into it.” They checked out data from 400 other burial sites and found that of the 27 hunters that had been dug up, 11 of them were female. That is a third of all the hunters, y’all. Obviously to the general public, this was like massive news.’
Image credits: nationalgeographic
Image credits: nationalgeographic
‘At the same time, people were going on TV saying, “Hold your horses, feminist-oriented archaeologists have known this for a really long time, y’all just weren’t listening.”‘
Image credits: france24
‘Here’s the deal. When it comes to archaeology and ancient history, in general, we’re always playing a little bit of a guessing game. Like, I’m not gonna sit here and pretend to know for sure whether females were hunters or not. What I will say with sociological certainty is that when we are evaluating science, we are always imprinting our own biases onto the data that we see, in that if archaeologists expect that only men were hunters, they’re going to look for evidence that supports that and it’s possible that females were hunters all this time, but that information could have just gone right over their heads.’
Image credits: allie_202_
You can watch Allie’s full video right over here
@allie_202_ Have we been getting ancient gender roles wrong this whole time? It’s possible! More archaeology will be needed to confirm or deny this theory :) Regardless of the outcome, this is a solid lesson in how our biases create blindspots… even for scientists. #women #gender #feminist #science #greenscreen #fyp #music #viral #us ♬ JDM Trap Beat X Mr Smokey – Yan 394
Most people still cling to the belief that all women used to be gatherers and only men hunted in prehistoric times. The general belief was that it would be difficult to hunt while taking care of children. However, this appears to be an oversimplified view of the past. It’s easy to understand and to put in a school history book, but it’s not the whole picture. The reality likely was far more nuanced.
Archeologist Randall Haas, from the University of California, and his team of researchers were excavating 9,000-year-old buried remains in the Andes Mountains of Peru back in 2018 when they came across a stunning discovery.
The person had been buried with a hunter’s stone tools. “He must have been a really great hunter, a really important person in society,” Haas told National Geographic that, at the time, he and his colleagues assumed that the hunter was male.
They were flabbergasted when a closer inspection of the bones revealed that they most likely belonged to a woman. This wasn’t a unique case, either.
After this discovery, a review of previously studied burials throughout the Americas revealed that 30 to 50% of big game hunters could have been women.
Pamela Geller, an archeologist at the University of Miami, had this to say to National Geographic: “With few exceptions, the researchers who study hunting and gathering groups—regardless of which continent they work on—presume that a sexual division of labor was universal and rigid.”
She continued: “And because it is commonsensical, they then have a hard time explaining why female-bodied individuals also bear the skeletal markers of hunting or have hunting tool kits as grave goods.”
The reality probably was that big game hunting required as many skilled, fit, capable adults to participate as possible. Regardless of gender. Archeologist Kathleen Sterling, from Binghamton University, noted that after a child is weaned, the mother would be able to help during big hunts. Moreover, they would be able to assist on hunts even while their children were still being breastfed, so long as some other members of the community would be willing to help nurse them.
In short, the idea is that prehistoric communities were far more flexible and adaptable than we all might have learned back in grade school. In a relatively low-tech period of history, pretty much everyone had to be willing to lend a helping hand where needed. It’s difficult to imagine the hyper-specialization of skills in a small community. Hence, a greater focus on egalitarianism than many would have assumed.
The University of Calgary points out that “ancient female hunters are an expectation, not a surprise.” That’s not to say that all prehistoric communities had female hunters, though. “Women are perfectly capable of hunting, yet in most hunter-gatherer societies they don’t do it very often.”
Here’s how some TikTok users reacted to the revelation that prehistoric women also hunted
The post Woman Reveals Ancient Gender Roles Might Not Have Been What We Were Taught, As 30-50% Of Hunters' Bodies Are Identified As Female first appeared on Bored Panda.
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