9,000-year-old burials find men were not the only hunters, women ace in it too

It is men that we associate with generally when it comes about the image of hunters during the ancient times, but a new discovery has found that this phenomenon was not always true as women ace in hunting too.

The excavations at Wilamaya Patjxa (present-day Peru) in 2018 has made such claims.

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As per the discovery, the remains of a 17-19-year-old woman was found with artefacts like stone projectile points, knife, as well as objects for gutting and scraping an animal, reports Indiatimes.

The bones of the woman suggest that she used to eat meat.

"Our findings have made me rethink the most basic organizational structure of ancient hunter-gatherer groups. Among historic and contemporary hunter-gatherers, it is almost always the case that males are the hunters and females are the gatherers," said Anthropologist Randy Haas of the University of California, Davis, who is part of the research.

"Because of this – and likely because of sexist assumptions about division of labour in western society – archaeological findings of females with hunting tools just didn't fit prevailing worldviews. It took a strong case to help us recognize that the archaeological pattern indicated actual female hunting behaviour."

The burials in Pleistocene and early Holocene found remains of 427 individuals who are buried across 107 sites.

In these burial sites, 27 people were found with hunting equipment and 11 out of them were women.

The researchers claimed that the study has provided enough evidence that women were involved in hunting too.