A woman hunter in the early Andes

Abstract

Archaeology The ethnographic record of modern hunter-gatherers indicates that men were the primary, almost exclusive, hunters of big game. However, to what extent this pattern existed in prehistory has been challenged on both empirical and theoretical grounds. To examine this question, Haas et al. studied the artifacts recovered from a burial of a young woman at a site on the Andean Altiplano dated to more than 8000 years ago. Found with her was a tool kit used in animal processing and numerous projectile points, strongly indicating that she hunted. Additional examples of female hunters at late Pleistocene and early Holocene sites in the Americas were also identified, findings that support a model of relatively undifferentiated subsistence labor among early populations in the Americas. Sci. Adv. 10.1126/sciadv.abd0310 (2020).