I am currently on research break, but this is an interim episode on a subject that came up in a listener response to episode 15.1 Agriculture: Was It a Bad Idea? I got a lot of positive feedback about that episode. More than usual, in fact. But I also got one response with a whole lot of objections about my underlying assumptions and wording choices. I’ll be adding some clarifications to that episode, but one of the clarifications was simply too long to include there, and it was about the statement that, in general, women gathered and men hunted in hunter-gatherer societies. So if you’ve read any contrary reporting on that subject, you’re not alone, and this is a bonus episode with that clarification.

I’m going to start by admitting that my field is history, and the question of whether women hunted in hunter-gatherer societies is not one that history can answer. History, by definition, is the study of the written records of the past. Writing was invented by agricultural societies. By the time there are written records, the people doing the writing are usually not hunter-gatherers. So on this subject, history can only say what literate agriculturalists said about their hunter-gatherer neighbors. What they wrote was quite often neither very kind nor very accurate. Even more often, they didn’t say anything at all because honestly, they didn’t care. Therefore historians have no reliable data to work with.

The people who can say something on this subject are archaeologists and anthropologists. Both of those scientific fields got going as a serious field of study in the 19^th century and ramped up significantly in the early 20^th century. It is important to bear that in mind because while these early scientists were interested in hunter-gatherers, they still weren’t necessarily very kind or very accurate. Some of them did try to be. But they were largely middle- or upper-class white men in a world where both racism and sexism were explicitly taught as God’s own truth. White patriarchy was the natural order of things, mostly unquestioned, undefended, often unmentioned.

It is very easy for us to denigrate these early scientists now because their biases are so obvious to those of us who did not grow up being taught that white men were naturally superior to everyone else. But honestly, I doubt that future generations will look at us any more kindly. Most people believe what they have been taught to believe, even when presented with contrary evidence. You and I undoubtedly believe in truths that will turn out not to be self-evident or even true.

On the subject of hunter-gatherers, these early anthropologists informed us that men were the hunters and women were the gatherers in the societies that they observed. That fit right into stereotypical gender roles of their own time period, so everybody nodded their heads and said, “Yes, that makes sense” without questioning it any further. There is also no doubt that while gathering can be very hard work, it is easier to envision doing gathering while heavily pregnant, nursing, or carrying a small baby, than it is to envision spearing down a woolly mammoth while heavily pregnant, nursing, or carrying a small baby. So it seemed to make sense on a biological level too.

Archaeologists found a lot of male skeletons surrounded by hunting tools, and that fit. But here’s the rub: Until the advent of very recent testing methods, most skeletal finds couldn’t be proved to be either male or female. Most of the bones aren’t that different between men and women, and most skeletal finds do not include an entire intact skeleton. Unless a whole skeleton was found, determining gender was super chancy, maybe as low as 20%.

What this means is that those early archaeologists quite frequently weren’t saying that hunting was done by men because they only found hunting tools buried with male skeletons. They were saying that the skeleton must be male because it was found with hunting tools. The part about only males hunting was just taken as a given because the anthropologists said so and because it fit neatly with their conception of the world.

There’s a whole lot of modern criticism about those early anthropologists and their methods. Everything from outright fabrication, to seeing only what they expected to see, to observing only the men because the women weren’t important, to observing only the men because women are so important they couldn’t be trusted with foreign men, to observing for an insufficient amount of time, etc., etc., etc.

In more recent years, archaeologists have thrown a lot of doubt on the issue too. DNA analysis helps. So does analysis of tooth enamel, which I would not have guessed, but the point is that modern archaeologists have much better methods for determining whether the skeleton surrounded by hunting tools is male or female, and some of them are unquestionably female. For example, one of the most spectacular finds is a 9,000-year-old Peruvian burial of a woman with a very impressive hunting toolkit. There has also been some revisiting of old digs to further analyze hunters who were assumed to be male when they were excavated, but it turns out, they were female all along.

News sites like CNN, NPR, the Smithsonian, and others love to report these finds because they are of general interest to the nonscientific population, and every time they present it both as brand new information and also as proof that the old stereotypes were totally wrong! Women hunted! You go, girls! Hooray for prehistoric gender equity!

There has also been much vaunting of a 2023 paper which surveyed what anthropological data we have for hunter-gatherer groups from the 1800s to the present day. They reported 391 total groups, with explicit hunting data from 63 of those. From those 63, they found evidence that women deliberately hunted in 79% of them. Again, the popular reporting is that the old stereotypes were totally wrong! Women absolutely hunted! And they did so a lot! 79% of the time, which is way more than half. If you caught the shift in logic there, good for you. The 79% figure does not refer to how much women hunted in those societies, just how many societies had any women hunting. It’s easy for the casual reader of a second or third-hand account to misinterpret statistical results.

What doesn’t get so much reported is that there are scientific critics of these scientific developments. For example, it has been pointed out that just because a female was buried with hunting tools doesn’t mean she used those tools in life. In fact, there are cases where we are quite sure she did not because the female in question was an infant. As for the paper that said women hunted in 79% of societies, there’s some question about their sampling. How exactly did they choose the 63 societies that got included? Because other researchers have reported much lower numbers: like 7% instead of 79%. That’s a huge discrepancy. Obviously, how you choose the societies is going to have a big impact on your results, and not everyone is convinced that the 79% study did it very well. In fact, one of the critical responses says that the original study doesn’t fully explain how they chose the 63 societies, which in and of itself is a red flag.

There are also some serious questions about the validity of treating whether women hunt as a binary variable: either they do hunt or they don’t hunt. That 79% study didn’t quite treat it as a binary variable, but almost, which presumably means that if even one woman is recording as going hunting once, her society counts in the 79%. Even if she spent far more of her time gathering. Even if the men went hunting every single day. Even if she was the only woman who went hunting.

If that’s the case, then a 79% figure is maybe not so much wrong, as it is misleading. It helps to think of it the other way around. Even in this study, which probably overestimated women hunting, 21% of the societies found no evidence of women purposefully hunting. Not even one woman. Not even one hunt. Since that is a pretty extreme statement, it does not seem likely to me that the other 79% all had total gender parity on this subject. Probably a great many societies fell somewhere in the middle, with some women occasionally hunting, even though it might not be their main occupation. Or in the words of one of the critics, “female foragers sometimes hunt, yet gendered divisions of labor are real.”

At this point the evidence is overwhelming that some women of the past hunted. It is unquestionably true that some of them were even big game persistence hunters. But even in context of a long-held stereotype, I’m not sure that should really come as a surprise. When has any stereotype ever been universally true? There have always been women who bucked the traditional gender roles for a variety of personal reasons. That doesn’t mean the majority of women weren’t living those traditional gender roles.

The reporting that says men and women hunted equally strikes me as subject to some of the same criticisms that have been leveled at the 19^th century archaeologists and anthropologists. We modern people are just as influenced by our own culture as those early scientists were by theirs. We live in a culture where women have been told that we can do anything a man can do, and we don’t have to be limited by traditional stereotypes. (I support that message, by the way.) Therefore, our temptation is to overinterpret the evidence in the direction of women hunting. Just like previous generations overinterpreted the evidence in the direction of women not hunting.

It also seems to me that some (but not all) of the reporting on the subject has an underlying bias behind it. If women gathered and men hunted, then hunting must be better. And that’s why we need to prove that women are fully capable of doing it. Because we’re just as good, right?

I don’t have any doubt that women are fully capable of hunting, but I also don’t think that hunting is better. In fact, in some times and places hunting was demonstrably worse than gathering. It was a high-risk endeavor, with frequent failures. Gathering often provided far more of the group’s total caloric intake.

Hunting is undoubtedly a skilled task, but so is gathering if you’re going to do it at any scale. If you doubt me, just ask yourself how long you would survive on nothing but the wild plants in your area. If you’re like most 21^st century people, the answer is not very long at all. The women who did this were highly trained with specialized knowledge and skills. There’s nothing trivial or lesser about it. In fact, the argument I made in episode 15.1 was that it was precisely because gathering conferred economic power that the women’s position in society was stronger in hunter-gatherer societies than it was in any of the major, large-scale agriculture societies that left us historical records. Those are all very patriarchal.

There are very few hunter-gatherer societies that still exist in the world, but there are a few. The Hadza of Tanzania do indeed gender segregate between hunters and gatherers. A 2020 cross-cultural study of skill at hunting among several foraging groups was unable to find enough female hunters to say anything at all about how sex makes a difference. Among the San people of South Africa, women are usually the gatherers and men are usually the hunters, but they do sometimes help each other out. Which sounds to me like pretty normal civilized human behavior. Regardless of how we divide up the labor, we should help each other out when help is needed, and I’m willing to bet that was how it was done in a lot of societies in the past. In contrast, I have been unable to find any society, past or present, in which women did most or all of the hunting, while the men did most or all the gathering. If you know of one, please send me an email.

Obviously, the practices of current groups do not constitute conclusive proof about the past. But since conclusive proof does not exist, we have to work with what we’ve got.

When applied worldwide and throughout the timeline, the idea that men hunted and women gathered is a statement about a trend. It’s not a fundamental truth about the universe which can never be broken. And trends can have a very, very big impact on the development of society.

If I could draw a comparison with a more recent gender trend, I’d compare it with the idea in the 1950s and 60s that men had careers and women were homemakers. That was the cultural expectation. But it does not mean that there weren’t millions of women for whom that was not their lived reality. They worked outside the home for pay, either because they were single, or because their husbands didn’t earn enough, or because they just wanted to. However, we can’t use that basic fact to simply discard the stereotype entirely. Partly because a lot of women really were homemakers (my own grandmothers among them). But also because the cultural expectation had an enormous impact even on the women who were not living it: it affected which jobs women could get, how prepared they were for those job, how much they were paid when they got the jobs, how they were treated when they were on the jobs, how much they were expected to do at home even though they were at work all day, and how they educated their own daughters for the life they thought those girls would grow up to have. The cultural expectation was very, very real and important, even for women who were not homemakers.

This is why I’m pretty comfortable sticking with the idea that in general, with many exceptions, women of the past were more likely to be gatherers than full-time hunters. That is certainly true in the hunter-gatherer groups that still exist, and I haven’t seen any solid reasons for why it would be different in the past. I do think it’s a cultural expectation that probably influenced the way women were viewed in those societies, and even more importantly, how they viewed themselves. But we will never be able to get exact statistics on societies that no longer exist and did not leave written records that survived into the present.

So at the end of the day, historically-speaking, we really don’t know how much women hunted and the debate will go on.