🏹 TIL: "Man the hunter, woman the gatherer" was coined at a 1966 symposium at the University of Chicago. The archaeological record tells a more interesting story.
At Wilamaya Patjxa in the Peruvian Andes, archaeologists excavated a 9,000-year-old burial with a full big-game hunting toolkit: projectile points, scrapers, a knife. The first assumption was a great male chief. Bone and protein analysis showed the hunter was a 17-to-19-year-old woman.
That discovery triggered a review of early burials across the Americas. Of 27 people buried with big-game hunting tools, 11 were women and 16 were men. Statistical modeling suggests women made up 30 to 50 percent of big-game hunters in the early Americas.
Women also hunt in living foraging societies around the world, often intentionally and with a wider range of weapons and tactics than men (researchers actively debate the exact percentage). And physiologically, women may be better built for endurance hunting: estrogen and the hormone adiponectin help the body burn fat efficiently over long distances.
One more: analysis of hand stencils in European Paleolithic caves suggests around 75 percent were made by women.
Read more:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abd0310
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0287101
https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/women-leave-their-handprints-cave-wall
