April 2023
According to recent archaeological findings published in the journal ‘Science Advances’, up to half the women in the Americas were big-game hunters. “An archaeological discovery and analysis of early burial practices overturns the long-held ‘man-the-hunter’ hypothesis,” lead author Randy Haas, assistant professor of anthropology at University of California, Davis, commented in a news release by the same institution.
To determine whether the discovery was an exception, Prof. Haas examined 429 skeletons spread across 107 other burial sites in North and South America from around 8 000 to 14 000 years ago. Of the 27 individuals buried with hunting tools, 11 were women. The study estimates that somewhere between 30 % to 50 % of hunters were women during that time.