(CN) — Though we’ve come a long way since the times when the only avenue available to women was to become a housewife, there are those who believe that society should revert to those days. Women, they say, have always been relegated to this role, all the way back to ancient history, referring to the widely accepted idea that men had always gone out to hunt for food, while women stayed home to collect plants for food and care for children.
In a study published Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE, a team of researchers from Seattle Pacific University are fighting against the commonly accepted belief that only men hunted and only women gathered in historical and prehistorical foraging communities.
According to the study, analysis of previously collected archeological data from the past century showed that women have been hunters alongside men throughout history, opposing previously accepted theories about a gendered division of labor in foraging communities.
Using dozens of ethnographic reports of foraging societies throughout the Americas, Africa, Australia, Asia and the Oceania region, the team of researchers found that, out of 63 societies that have explicit data on hunting habits, 79% had documentation on women hunting, proving that women hunting is a consistent pattern, rather than anecdotal outlier.
They also found that over half of the societies investigated described hunting by women as an intentional behavior rather than an opportunistic one where women only killed animals while performing other activities. According to the study, women were involved in hunting game of all sizes, including large game.
Researchers also noted that women were more flexible than men in their hunting strategies and hunting tools and were more likely to hunt with dogs and with children. The study described the Agta people of the Philippines, whose men reportedly consistently hunted with bow and arrow — but Agta women were also known to use knives and be accompanied by dogs during the hunt.
The research team say that their analysis indicates that the concept of men as hunters and women as gatherers is not inherent to foraging societies and that it should prompt reinvestigation of the prior research that have typically concluded men exclusively hunt and women exclusively gather in subsistence communities.
“Because the hunter/gatherer paradigm has prevented the recognition of contributions by women to hunting, a new framework would enable past and future discoveries to be evaluated in the context of female hunters,” researchers wrote.
The study comments that researcher bias has generally impacted interpretation of older discoveries and previously collected data.
Study co-author Cara Wall-Scheffler, a professor with Seattle Pacific University’s Department of Biology, said in an email interview, “It is important that science has as much diversity as possible. Everyone brings their own ideas and cultural norms to understanding data. The more diverse the people analyzing the data, the better we will be at understanding what is happening around the world.”
Wall-Scheffler and her team give the example of a 9,000-year-old burial in Peru, where female remains were discovered alongside stone projectiles and animal processing equipment. According to the study, researchers would have been more likely to presume the projectiles were hunting tools if they had been buried alongside a male but would be hesitant to make the same assumption with female burials.
Researchers say that this demonstrates a clear trend of hunting among women in foraging communities that directly opposes the long-held strict binary idea of hunting and gathering in these societies. Nothing, the researchers say, was so exactly divided.
“Even groups that had specific taboos about women hunting generally had anecdotes for women who were widows or without a large family to help them doing activities that would normally be forbidden. People want to survive and there will always be times when rules must be flexible,” Wall-Scheffler said.
She added that men were not exclusively hunters either, saying that “there were some times of the year that men might focus on hunting, there were also situations where men would go out with women in order to gather and/or bring in small animals. In the Aka, men carry their children 50% of the time, and will do the childcare while women are hunting.”
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