End of a patriarchal myth: women were hunters in the Stone Age

archeology
End of a patriarchal myth: persecuted women in the Stone Age

by Gernot Kramper
December 6, 2020, 10:15 pm

Hunters and Gatherers: Until now the division of labor was clear: Stone Age men threw themselves on mammoths and bears armed only with spears, while women looked after children and picked some berries. At least this is how male-dominated archeology envisioned life back then.

But presumably it was a rear projection of his own bourgeois world. When the bones of a 9,000-year-old hunter were discovered in the Andes a few years ago, it was believed that a man had been found for the first time. Who else would have been buried amid projectile points and blades at a height of nearly 4,000 meters? But even then, the small, lightweight bones were noticeable and suggested a huntress was found.

But one was not sure. To do this, the tooth enamel had to be analyzed first. Once curious, the researchers examined other finds from hunters’ graves and were able to find ten other women who were buried with arrowheads and hunting weapons in the United States. In 26 graves with hunting weapons rested men in 16 and women in ten. This is a nearly equal distribution and it is certainly no exception. Obviously, it was not an isolated incident.

The myth of the daring hunter

This discovery has far-reaching consequences, which is now collapsing a theory. “This discovery, and our analysis of early burial practices, overturns the ancient ‘man the hunter’ hypothesis,” said Randy Haas, assistant professor of anthropology and lead author of the “Hunters of the First Americas” study.

This supposed early division of labor served for decades to “scientifically” corroborate certain gender stereotypes. The man was credited with character traits such as bold, brave, and enterprising; the woman was assigned the sphere of care and home. “These results have changed our understanding of the most basic organizational structure in hunter-gatherer societies, and thus of the evolutionary history of our species,” Haas said. “The sexual division of labor between hunters and gatherers appears to have been much weaker or non-existent in the past.” How social life was organized in groups at that time is largely unknown. It is conceivable that not all birth mothers will also care for their own children.

The huntress was among the fossilized remains of six people at the Wilamaya Patjxa archaeological site. Two dead were buried with the valuable hunting utensils. The person with the most impressive arsenal, after analyzing tooth enamel, turned out to be a woman. The other hunter was male. Studies of the carbon and nitrogen isotopes in the woman’s teeth showed that throughout her life she had eaten a typical hunter’s food made from the meat of animals and plants.

Martial women

In recent years, other findings have shown that male-dominated science had long suppressed all evidence of belligerent women in some way. A Viking woman was only accepted as a warrior after genetic makeup was analyzed (“Viking Warriors: The Denied Amazons of the North”). As there were traces of injuries on his remains, the argument that his weapons were only used as ornaments did not help. The Scythians are an exception. Women fighters are so common among warrior horsemen that they are supposed to be the model of the Amazonian myth (spears, gold and the proud bearing of women warriors, thus four Amazons were buried).

Also, most of the Scythian tombs were found in the area of ​​the former USSR. And science there was not intended to support an ideology that located the essence of women mainly in domestic work.

Quelle: hunters of the first Americas

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