‘Woman the hunter’: Studies aim to correct history
Archaeology tells more of the story of ‘woman the hunter’
Several archaeological findings indicate prehistoric women not only shared in the resulting injuries of the dangerous business of close-contact hunting, but that it was an activity held in high esteem and valued by them.
“We have constructed Neandertal hunting as an up-close-and-personal style of hunting,” Ocobock said, “meaning that hunters would often have to get up underneath their prey in order to kill them. As such, we find that both males and females have the same resulting injuries when we look at their fossil records.”
Ocobock described those traumatic injuries as being similar to those received by modern-day rodeo clowns — injuries to the head and chest where they were kicked by the animal, or to the limbs where they were bitten or received a fracture.
“We find these patterns and rates of wear and tear equally in both women and men,” she said. “So they were both participating in ambush-style hunting of large game animals.”
Second, Ocobock said, there is evidence of early female hunters in the Holocene period in Peru where females were buried with hunting weapons.
“You don’t often get buried with something unless it was important to you or was something that you used frequently in your life.”
“Furthermore, we have no reason to believe that prehistoric women abandoned their hunting while pregnant, breastfeeding or carrying children,” Ocobock added, “nor do we see in the deep past any indication that a strict sexual division of labor existed.”
The bottom line, Ocobock noted, was that “hunting belonged to everyone, not just to males,” especially in prehistoric societies where survival was an all-hands-on-deck activity. “There weren’t enough people living in groups to be specialized in different tasks. Everyone had to be a generalist to survive.”
Fighting bias
“This revelation is especially important in the current political moment of our society where sex and gender are in a spotlight,” Ocobock said. “And I want people to be able to change these ideas of female physical inferiority that have been around for so long.”
When talking about reconstructing the past in order to better understand it — and to conduct “good science” — Ocobock said scientists have to be extremely careful about how modern-day bias can seep into one’s interpretations of the past. She cautioned that researchers have to be aware of their own biases and make sure they are asking the proper questions so the questions don’t lead them down the road of looking for what it is they want to see.
“We have to change the biases we bring to the table, or at least to give pause before we assign those biases. And in a broader sense, you cannot outrightly assume somebody’s abilities based on whatever sex or gender you have assigned by looking at them,” Ocobock concluded.

Bibliographic information:
Woman the hunter: The physiological evidence, American Anthropologist (4-Sep-2023), DOI: 10.1111/aman.13915
Press release from the University of Notre Dame, by Tracy DeStazio.