Walking quietly in the desert of the Lord Andes Mountains, Ancient hunter-gatherers capture a herd of Vicuania. The hunters easily threw stones, killed some animals and scattered the rest. The Vicuas, the wild ancestors of the Alpacas, fell and skilled hunters – both men and women – went to test their victories.
This fictional narrative is somewhat contrary to the accepted history of such hunter-gatherers: the ancients hunted the big game, while hers collected herbs and plants. According to a study published in November, a recent discovery of a 9,000-year-old, blood hunter’s burial and analysis of other prey carcasses shows that early hunter-gatherer women in the ancient United States hunted as much as men. According to a study published on .4 in the journal The advancement of science.
Randy Haas, an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said: “These findings reflect the idea that the gender roles we accept in society today – or are accepted by many – may not be as natural as some might think. “Lead author Randy Haas said. Anthropology at the University of California, Davis.
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In 2013, Haas was working on a separate excavation in the Andes Mountains when a local from the southern Peruvian community of Niti, near Mullah Fasiri, reported that hundreds of old stone tools were scattered here. Five years later, with funding and the support of locals, Haas and his team began excavating the site, known as Vilamaya Patjaksa.
In 2018, researchers found six human corpses at Vilamya Patjexa (they did more research later in 2019). Two of the six burials also had hunting tools, but one was particularly interesting.
Haas told LiveScience that in the sixth mortuary, about 9,000 years ago, “we began to uncover this truly rich artistic assembly” which included projectile points and a hunting toolkit with flakes. The burial is believed to have belonged to a hunter-gatherer, who died at the age of 17 and 19, based on a dental development test. As the excavation continues, “People started speculating, wow, he must have been a great hunter, a very important person in the community,” Haas said.
The prejudices that color history
James Watson, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona and co-author of the study, was the first to suggest that he was not a man. Watson examined the bones of the hunter-gatherers and said that because they were smaller than the others found in the area, the skeleton could be a female. Indeed, a detailed analysis of Protein The young hunter’s teeth confirmed that he was a sherat.
But then Haas and his team began to wonder: Is this the only hunter-gatherer, or is it part of the larger behavior among Native Americans? To find out, they added literature for more hunter-gatherer burial reports of late. Pleistocene (Which ended about 11,700 years ago) and soon Holocene (Which began about 12,000 to 11,500 years ago.)
The team identified 429 skeletons from 107 ancient burial sites across the United States; Of those individuals, 27 —11 female rats (including newly discovered rats) and 15 male – were buried with large-game hunting tools. Analysis of other data suggested that between 30% and 50% of these populations were female predators. “What we see is that the dead distances of females and males are as likely to be related to the big-game hunting tools,” Haas said.
Related: Photos: The human skeleton sheds light on the first Americans
“The authors make a strong argument that the troubled skeleton was probably a big game hunter and that such discoveries are not entirely uncommon in the indigenous population,” said Marin Pilod, an associate professor in the university’s anthropology department. , Which were not part of this study. “If the same artistry was attached to the male skeleton, there would be no question that the man was a hunter.”
“Many cultures don’t have and still don’t have gender binary,” Piloud told LiveScience. “When we step back from our own gender bias, we can examine statistics in a way that is potentially more culturally accurate.”
It is not clear if hunters in other parts of the world regularly participate in hunting, but it is possible to find such discoveries anywhere, he said. He added that it would be interesting to see how this female rat’s diet compares to other fe feeds on the site or similar sites to determine if she ate the same food as other males or other females.
“This study will help convince people that women are involved in big-game hunting,” said Kathleen Sterling, an associate professor of anthropology at Binghamton University in New York, who was not part of the study. .
In fact, hunting methods and the size of social groups at that time meant that we had to accept all of this, because most children and adults needed to be run on herds or in nets, or “the same.” To set fire to kidnapping projects on flocks in the direction, “Sterling told LiveScience.
Age was probably more important than gender when it came to who hunted in these societies, but “our gender rules are so strong that not everyone will believe,” she said.
However, if a person is buried with hunting tools, it does not necessarily mean that the person was a hunter, it means that their society considered it appropriate to bury things with them, Sterling said. . But when the means of hunting are found in the corpses of men, they are generally considered prey. So “we have to make the same assumptions about hunting tools buried with women until we have a good reason to say more,” he added.
Originally published on Live Science.
