Yes! Women used to be a part of hunting clans too. The excavations at Wilamaya Patjxa (Now Peru) revealed the burial site of a 17-19-year-old woman along with artefacts and stone projectiles, knife, and other tools to scrape open an animal. Her bones revealed evidence that meat was her staple diet.
“Our findings have made me rethink the most basic organizational structure of ancient hunter-gatherer groups. Among historic and contemporary hunter-gatherers, it is almost always the case that males are the hunters and females are the gatherers,” said Randy Haas of the University of California and Davis who is one of the authors of the study.
“Because of this – and likely because of sexist assumptions about division of labour in western society – archaeological findings of females with hunting tools just didn’t fit prevailing worldviews. It took a strong case to help us recognize that the archaeological pattern indicated actual female hunting behaviour,” he added.
Recharged with this discovery, archaeologists and researchers have now set off to discover if there were more women who were hunters in that particular time period. Nevertheless, 429 individuals buried across 107 burial sites were found looking at burial records from Pleistocene and early Holocene burials that were dug up in North and South America respectively. Out of these 429 individuals, 27 were buried with hunting tools, 11 of which were women, as a matter of fact.
Researchers have asserted that these findings are evidence enough to conclude that women were specialist hunters too and they played an active role in hunting expeditions.
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