![]() It has fueled the idea, she says, that "men are supposed to be violent, they're supposed to be aggressive – one of the core elements in the soup of toxic masculinity" used to excuse damaging male behaviors, including rape. "I think that next to the myth that God made a woman from man's rib to be his helper, the myth that man is the hunter and woman is the gatherer is probably the second most enduring myth that naturalizes the inferiority of women," says Hamlin. The implications of these results are potentially enormous, says Kimberly Hamlin, a professor of history at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, who specializes in ways that evolutionary science has figured in the wider culture. "That piece has just been really underappreciated," she says, "even though it's right there in literature." Wall-Scheffler says she was expecting to find evidence of women hunting – but not to this extent. In other words, "the majority of cultures for whom hunting is important train their girls and their women to make their tools and go hunting," she says. Grandmas were the best hunters of the village." The vast majority of the time, she says, "the hunting was purposeful. Moreover, says Wall-Scheffler, this wasn't just opportunistic killing of animals that the women happened upon. Their findings - published in the journal PLOS One this week - is that in 79% of the societies for which there is data, women were hunting. ![]() And rather than relying on summaries of those accounts – as scientists often do when analyzing large numbers of them – Wall-Scheffler notes "our goal was to go back to the original ethnographic reports of those populations and see what had actually been written about the hunting strategies." ![]() Wall-Scheffler and her collaborators combed through accounts from as far back as the 1800s through to present day. "We decided to see what was actually out there" on hunting, says the lead researcher Cara Wall-Scheffler, a biological anthropologist. "No one," says Kelly, had done a systematic "tally" of what the observational reports said about women hunting.Įnter the researchers behind the new study: a team from University of Washington and Seattle Pacific University. Until now, the general sense among scientists has been that these accounts overwhelmingly pointed to men mainly hunting and women mainly gathering, with only occasional exceptions, says Robert Kelly, professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming and the author of influential books and articles on hunter-gatherer societies.īut Kelly says that the views he and others held of the typical gender divisions around hunting were based on anecdotal impressions of the reports they'd been reading, combined with the field work many had engaged in personally. Anthropologists and other specialists have gained these groups' permission to live alongside them and have produced detailed observational reports. So scholars look to them as a sort of window into humanity's past. But all over the world, there have been groups, often in remote areas of low- and middle-income countries, who still live a hunting and foraging life. Direct evidence is limited because that phase ended about 9,000 years ago, as people slowly began to develop agriculture and settlements.
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