The sexual division of labor among human foraging populations has typically been recognized as involving males as hunters and females as gatherers. Recent archeological research has questioned this paradigm with evidence that females hunted (and went to war) throughout the Homo sapiens lineage, though many of these authors assert the pattern of women hunting may only have occurred in the past. The current project gleans data from across the ethnographic literature to investigate the prevalence of women hunting in foraging societies in more recent times. Evidence from the past one hundred years supports archaeological finds from the Holocene that women from a broad range of cultures intentionally hunt for subsistence. These results aim to shift the male-hunter female-gatherer paradigm to account for the significant role females have in hunting, thus dramatically shifting stereotypes of labor, as well as mobility.

The sexual division of labor among human foraging populations has typically been recognized as involving males as hunters and females as gatherers. Recent archeological research has questioned this paradigm with evidence that females hunted (and went to war) throughout the Homo sapiens lineage, though many of these authors assert the pattern of women hunting may only have occurred in the past. The current project gleans data from across the ethnographic literature to investigate the prevalence of women hunting in foraging societies in more recent times. Evidence from the past one hundred years supports archaeological finds from the Holocene that women from a broad range of cultures intentionally hunt for subsistence. These results aim to shift the male-hunter female-gatherer paradigm to account for the significant role females have in hunting, thus dramatically shifting stereotypes of labor, as well as mobility.

    • swope@kbin.socialOP
      4·
      2 years ago

      Yes, when I think about it that way it makes the whole “men hunted, women gathered” concept seem really silly.

    • Thepinyaroma@kbin.social
      4·
      2 years ago

      I bet subsistence leads to a level of pragmatism we haven’t seen on a societal level since. It takes a certain level of your needs being met to start making up rules.

      If the best hunter in the tribe is a woman… Get to it, we all want to eat right?

  • LiveLaughLoveRevenge@kbin.social
    2·
    2 years ago

    This is why everything you hear from pop-evolution theories in sociology is likely bs.

    “Women like shopping because they used to be gatherers” or other such garbage.

    It’s all trying to simplify human behaviour based on half-baked knowledge of the past, and to pass it off as scientific insight. It’s not much different than the pseudoscience used to fuel racism 100 years ago.

    Human behaviour is complex. And even though our societies are more complex now than 10000 years ago, it doesn’t mean people back then were simple.