Prehistoric women engaged in hunting, their anatomy suitable for it: US researchers

PTI, Nov 26, 2023, 7:20 PM IST

Representative image (source: iStock)

New Delhi: Prehistoric women not only engaged in the practice of hunting, but their anatomy and biology would have also made them intrinsically better suited for it, scientists have claimed.

Drawing their conclusions from both archaeological and physiological evidence, the researchers from US universities found that “hunting belonged to everyone, not just to males.”

They said that through their studies, published in the journal American Anthropologist, they were “trying to correct the history that erased women from it,” instead of erasing or rewriting history.

Their archaeological findings regarding the women’s injuries and the women being buried with their hunting weapons suggested that no “strict sexual division of labour existed,” especially in prehistoric societies, where survival was an all-hands-on-deck activity.

“There weren’t enough people living in groups to be specialised in different tasks. Everyone had to be a generalist to survive,” said Cara Ocobock, an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame.

The researchers found injuries in the women resulting from close-contact hunting, akin to what is attributed to Neanderthals’ “up-close-and-personal style of hunting,” which meant that the 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,” said Ocobock, adding, they found the patterns and rates of wear and tear equally in both women and men.

Further, in Peru, they found evidence of early female hunters of the Holocene period 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,” said Ocobock.

“Furthermore, we have no reason to believe that prehistoric women abandoned their hunting while pregnant, breastfeeding or carrying children,” she added.

The physiological findings told the story of the prehistoric women’s capabilities of performing the arduous physical activity of hunting prey and their ability to hunt successfully for prolonged durations, the researchers said.

They found that the female body was both metabolically and structurally advantageous in terms of endurance and effectiveness for prehistoric hunters.

Metabolically, the hormones estrogen and adiponectin, which are typically found in greater amounts in women than in men, enabled efficient burning of fat for energy and protecting the muscles from breaking down, they said.

The hormones helped the women to endure, “which would have been critical in early hunting because they would have had to run the animals down into exhaustion before actually going in for the kill,” according to the researchers.

Structurally, the typical “wider hip structure of the female” enabled them to rotate their hips and lengthen their steps, eventually helping them get farther faster, Ocobock explained.

“When you look at human physiology this way, you can think of women as the marathon runners versus men as the powerlifters (or weightlifters),” she said.

All these revelations together find importance in the current political moment where sex and gender are in the spotlight, she said.

“And I want people to be able to change these ideas of female physical inferiority that have been around for so long,” Ocobock said.