While the young woman's remains were not well preserved enough for the researchers to learn much about her life or how she died so long ago, Haas found it telling that she had been buried with such care.Īrchaeologists work at the Wilamaya Patjxa site. "For individual, all of these observations are about as secure as we can hope for in archaeology, and that's unusual," noted Haas. Since the site had not been disturbed over the millennia by nuisances such as rodent activity, associations between the artifacts buried with the young woman could be judged clearly. The female's burial site proved to be an archaeological jackpot, allowing the researchers to estimate her sex and secure radiocarbon dates with high confidence. Bone structure and dental analyses identified one hunter as a 25- to 30-year-old male and - to the researchers' surprise - identified the second as a 17- to 19-year-old female. Two findings in particular captured their attention - early Holocene individuals buried with tools that indicate they were likely once hunters. In collaboration with the local Mulla Fasiri community in the Andean highlands, Haas and colleagues team uncovered more than 20,000 artifacts within a 36.5 square meter area, including five human burial pits. Doing so occasionally reveals surprising human behaviors in the past."
But archeologists long ago figured out that we should check our assumptions about human behavior against the archaeological record whenever possible. We just projected behavior back into the past. "There was good reason to work from that model. "Until this point, I - like most hunter-gatherer anthropologists - assumed that big game hunting was an overwhelmingly male behavior," said Haas. Even so, others have been hard pressed to consider that prehistoric females may have practiced an activity steeped in modern and recent historical visions of male bravado - even when hunting tools were occasionally uncovered at female burial sites. While hunters are overwhelmingly male in modern hunter-gatherer societies, some scholars have suggested a role for women as hunters in ancient subsistence communities.
"More broadly, I hope that Wilamaya and the other female hunters of the early Americas might help people further recognize that there may be nothing 'natural' about the many gender disparities that persist in societies today," he added. "Sexual division of subsistence labor appears to have been much more attenuated or even absent among hunter-gatherers in the past." "The findings have changed my understanding of the most basic organizational structure in hunter-gatherer societies and thus our species' evolutionary history," said Randall Haas, an assistant professor in the department of anthropology at the University of California, Davis, and the lead author of the study. These findings suggest that hunting over 8,000 years ago may have been a far more gender-neutral endeavor than previously assumed. The findings led to a further analysis of 27 individuals at other sites in the Americas associated with big game hunting tools, which indicated that between 30% and 50% of Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene big game hunters in the region may have been women. Scientists have discovered the 9,000-year-old remains of a young woman buried with a well-stocked big game hunting toolkit at the Wilamaya Patjxa site in Peru, according to a new study in the November 6 issue of Science Advances.
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