Discovery of Female Hunter-Gatherers Question Gender Role Hypotheses
A read for when you still doubt the equality between men and women
Until now, it was generally agreed by the scientific and historical communities that early male hunter-gatherers hunted animals and the women gathered herbs, fruits, vegetables, and reared the children.
However, in 2018, the discovery of the burial site of a 9000-year-old woman in the Andes Mountains, Peru, by Dr. Randall Haas and his team started to shed some doubt on that hypothesis. Indeed, the woman was buried with an impressive array of twenty-four stone tools that an ancient hunter would need to take down big prey.
The grave goods (items buried with the dead) were to be used by the deceased in the afterlife; therefore, their favourite foods or everyday objects were left with them. Often, social status played a role in what was left.
When looking at more recent hunter-gatherer societies, the repartition of the daily tasks was very sexualized. One could think that sexual inequalities might have been seen as natural. But this discovery provides a commencement of proof that tends to show that gender roles between men and women were more equal in our distant past.
However, this could be an isolated case.
The only way for the palaeontologists to be sure was for them to analyze the remains of 429 individuals in 107 sites linked to the same time frame as the Andes huntress. The results from the study were undeniable: 30% to 50% of hunters were probably biologically female.
In a society that presumably had a more binary gender role distribution of daily tasks, age was probably more important than gender insofar as criteria to be allowed to hunt.
Our ancestors were equal
Another study from five years ago, led by the anthropologist Dr. Mark Dyble, suggests that male and female hunter-gatherers tended to have equal influence on where their group lived and who they lived with. The idea that sexual equality is a modern invention might be a fallacious assumption.
Dyble said: “There is still this wider perception that hunter-gatherers are more macho or male-dominated. We’d argue it was only with the emergence of agriculture when people could start to accumulate resources, that inequality emerged.”
Sexual equality may have been an evolutionary benefit for early human societies. It would have given them a broader range of social networks and interactions with unknown individuals. When you can communicate with more people on an equal level, it allows you to share innovations, ideas, tools, and to have more opportunities to reproduce.
This recent discovery supports that, as a modern society, we still have a lot to learn from our ancestors. We see ourselves as an evolved society in comparison to the hunter-gatherers but, at the same time, we are so far behind when it comes to the way we presently deal with the gender roles between men and women.
When studied, our history can be a great tool to learn and grow as a society.
