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If you’re a regular reader of We Hunted the Mammoth, you probably know the story behind the site’s ironic name — it came from a rant by a Men’s Rights activist type demanding that women show more gratitude toward men because of all the selfless things men have allegedly done for women in history.
“Men gave you this modern world now you take it for granted,” he declared, “we hunted the mammoth to feed you … .”
You hunted the mammoth, eh? Not so fast. Turns out as many as half of all prehistoric mammoth-hunters were, you guessed it, cave women. According to science. Or at least to National Geographic, in a piece posted today:
Randall Haas, an archaeologist at University of California, Davis, recalls the moment in 2018 when his team of researchers gathered around the excavated burial of an individual lain to rest in the Andes Mountains of Peru some 9,000 years ago. Along with the bones of what appeared to be a human adult was an impressive—and extensive—kit of stone tools an ancient hunter would need to take down big game, from engaging the hunt to preparing the hide.
“He must have been a really great hunter, a really important person in society”—Haas says that’s what he and his team were thinking at the time.
Oh, but there’s a little plot twist: turns out he was a she.
[F]urther analysis revealed a surprise: the remains found alongside the toolkit were from a biological female. What’s more, this ancient female hunter was likely not an anomaly, according to a study published today in Science Advances. The Haas team’s find was followed by a review of previously studied burials of similar age throughout the Americas— and it revealed that between 30 and 50 percent of big game hunters could have been biologically female.
(Or at least Assigned Female at Birth; as NatGeo notes,we don’t know their gender identities.)
As NatGeo goes on to explain:
This new study is the latest twist in a decades-long debate about gender roles among early hunter-gather societies. The common assumption was that prehistoric men hunted while women gathered and reared their young. But for decades, some scholars have argued that these “traditional” roles—documented by anthropologists studying hunter-gatherer groups across the globe since the 19th century—don’t necessarily stretch into our deep past.
While the new study provides a strong argument that the individual in Peru was a female who hunted, plenty of other evidence has long been lying in plain sight, says Pamela Geller, an archaeologist at the University of Miami who is not part of the study team.
“The data is there,” Geller says. “It’s just a matter of how the researchers interpret it.”
So I guess the anonymous ranter who inadvertently provided this blog with a name has some apologies to make now that we know women hunted the mammoth too.
This is a good point. Trans and non-binary identities have existed before recorded history, yet archaeologists often don’t acknowledge this due to modern Western biases.
Most of our historic beliefs about gender roles are projections of modern patriarchal bias. Patriarchy seems to have mainly come into existence after sedentary civilizations, there’s no reason to assume it would have been around in prehistory.
This is extremely cool.
One of the main issues with the “man = hunter” narrative is not so much the way it divides labour but more so in the way it assigns value to only one side. Even if only men hunted (which now seems unlikely, looking at the evidence here), the work done by women was equally if not more essential. All of that “gathering” sustained people and kept them fed, and looking after kiddos is kind of essential too. But of course manosphere types don’t see that. It’s a shame that these ideas bleed over to regular people, too – the whole notion of hunting big animals as being something amazing that outshines everyone else’s contribution.
I hope USian mammotheers are hanging in there ?
It just makes sense that hunters would be anybody willing and able to hunt – “able” in this case meaning “able to go out and not get themselves or their friends killed. Hunting isn’t just about brute strength.
@Mish
I would lean towards more so. Most of the diet would have consisted of plants, and gatherers/women would have been the ones to develop agriculture.
Most prehistoric hunting seems to have occurred using pit traps, or driving prey over cliffs, both of which strategies are shockingly effective at causing extinction of the targeted prey animal. Neither strategy requires a ton of physical strength; carrying the harvested meat back to camp would require more, but the whole tribe and not just “the hunters” could pitch in on that one.
@ POM
Cut marks on mammoth bones (and other megafuana) suggest they only butchered the choicest parts of the carcass; basically living off fillet and abandoning the rest.
This is hardly indicative of hunting being an overly dangerous or arduous process.
I know people say about the difficulties in storing meat; but they certainly had the skills to do that. And they were certainly taking at least some meat back home for later use. Unless they had prehistoric equivalents of those ‘eat your own weight in steak’ deals.
That doesn’t explain the “it wasn’t moving, so I couldn’t see it” proliferation, most particularly, in my predominantly male workplace. Hmmmm….
None of this is exactly surprising (though it is satisfying to read).
Heck, I remember in my Anthropology classes (taken *many* moons ago) the instructors pointing out that in modern Hunter/Gatherer cultures while women gathered, they were also on the look out for fish, small game, etc.
It wasn’t like they spotted a tasty turtle or rabbit and thought, “Too bad I can’t bag that for the kids and me ’cause I’m female and Great Big Manly Male Hunter is off on a 3 day jaunt in the Bush. Guess it’s plantains again tonight, kids.”
No, they caught that rabbit, turtle, whatever, the only difference being they usually ate what they caught right then.
Sadly, I think most manospherian types (if they read it at all) will put this down to some sort of “appease the feminsts” and dismiss the info out of hand.
@Victorious Parasol –
Yeah, that’s what I’ve heard too! One of the tough parts about living in a pre-agricultural society would be spending so much time and energy finding stuff to eat.
@ObSidJag –
That made me laugh. 😛 I’ve read a bit about Inuit cultures, which had fairly gender-segregated roles, but women would definitely hunt things.
E.g. if I’m remembering right, the book Sanaaq by Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk describes the main character fishing, gathering crabs, etc.
That’s one book that I read at the library and want to buy. The author started off writing it as an Inuktitut vocabulary-teaching tool, so the first chapters are kind of short and episodic, but I still found them fascinating (and the later chapters develop the characters more).
…Plus even vocabulary-teaching stuff can be made creatively. E.g. I like the video series Nicos Weg for German vocab. Not that this has anything to with mammoths, though 🙂
@Naglfar
Absolutely. And as @ObSidJag has pointed out, gatherers would probably have caught/trapped small game too.
The development of agriculture was a total game-changer, but you won’t see that in any manospherian accounts 🙂
Well, the blog name is still accurate. “We” indeed hunted the mammoth, where “we” refers to every able bodied person in the given tribe, but credit has been too long assigned to only one portion of that group, suck it haters.
I found an interesting academic paper studying the gender diversity of pre-Roman European tribal people where they started doing genetic testing in a burial area that had been excavated and catalogued some decades earlier, and of course, to their shock, they found that one of the apparent buried married couples, one arrayed in traditional male dress with weapons and a masculine burial position, and the other in extremely feminine dress and jewelry and burial position, were actually both XY, genetically, so it seems safe to assume she was a beloved and well respected trans woman in her community and certainly dearly loved by the man she was buried with. Another buried person who had been assumed male by clothing, artifacts, jewelry style and weapons, but tested XX, and the researchers initially tried to hand wave it as having been a woman with many male admirers who gifted her their personal weapons and jewelry on her death, which seems pretty suss (and also seemed suspicious to the author of the paper who was documenting this…. erasure). If I recall correctly, nearly 7% of the burial site occupants did not genetically test as the same sex as they had been initially gendered by the archaeologists, and were catalogued as decades ago. Funny how biases work.
@ mish
Indeed; and not necessarily for the better. The subsequent permanent settlements gave rise to over exploitation of land, increase in diseases, and now status was dependant on how much you owned (cattle, land, access to resources) rather than, as was the case in hunter gathering, how good you were at something desirable. Tracking, plant knowledge, telling interesting stories whilst you were sat waiting for the mammoths to show up etc.
On the other hand, I do like Weetabix. So I guess it’s swings and roundabouts.
(There’s some really fascinating theories about Gobekli Tepe and the transition from H-Ging to farming)
@Naglfar
That reminds me of an ad that keeps popping up on YouTube for some farm AI thing. It goes “imagine this and that scenario in the past. The first seed. The first farmer.” And zooms up on the seed and the farmer, who is, of course, a caveman. Every time I see it I’m like… no, no, no, you can’t have it both ways! Remember men did the hunting while the women stayed and piddled with plants, so that’s a woman that’s the first farmer!
There’s just this giant unspoken “men were the ones that did everything good in the progress of civilization” that pisses me off.
One important thing about thoses talks of “importances” is that human became predators instead of staying vegetarian because they absolutely needed to, for a mix of climate change (already !) and bigger energitic need.
Hunters, fishers, gatherers, and later farmers were all absolutely necessary part of the human race. Only *way* later were humans able to drop some of thoses.
@AlanRobertshaw
Yeah! That sounds like a pretty good life to me. Leaving out the mammoth bit and it’s a normal day for me!
And I love, love, love this article so much and how it doesn’t debunk the blog name but smacks down the manospherians!
Big Titty Demon:
I think the mammoth thing is meant to be a general metaphor for exactly that, anyway.
It’s like, white man is the default human for most conceptual purposes – for example when discussing prehistoric humans at the dawn of time. Women and non-white people only exist in certain contexts that suit the relevant stereotypes, and then the women are usually white and the non-white people are usually male. Non-white women hardly exist anywhere at all.
See also : greek heroes and Jesus depicted as typical caucasian. The difference between a roman emperor and a viking in popular culture is pretty much its clothing.
The idea of Alan that earlier gatherer tribe was much more about knowledge and much less about capital and status do seem a very, very, very big wishful thinking. If anything, the ability to overthrown social status accumulation by physical possession look like an improvement over the older power structure.
Because there’s the big thing : just like exam test your ability to take exams and no actual skill, social status isn’t based on your ability to hunt/gather/whatever, but on your ability to make people like you.
Ohlmann:
BTW we may think of North/West European people as “typical Caucasian” but anthropologically speaking there probably never was such a thing, or if there was it probably referred to the Caucasus region.
Citation?
I was just rereading Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel”, which is largely about the development of “civilization”. He claims that small primitive societies tend to be socioeconomically rather egalitarian, especially outside the gender divide.
Apparently, in practice, everyone relies on the skills and good graces of everyone else, rather than just the skilled few. If some skill or knowledge is truly rare, it’s probably not even found in a society of 100 people. Manipulation or scamming is difficult when you’re limited to dealing with your extended family members who are also your lifelong close neighbors. And obviously there isn’t much surplus wealth to accumulate.
@epitome of incomrepehensibility
Hunter gatherers had it easy compared to early agricultural people. They spent less time working on acquiring food, and the work they did was largely much less physically destructive on their bodies. Not being tied to a small parcel of land meant that they were less vulnerable to some kinds of local and seasonal risks, or domination by a lord. Women wouldn’t have had so many children in the same period of time, which is much better for their health and longevity. This also implies that childhood mortality was lower. I suspect that also there was less childhood malnutrition too, which would have caused lifelong health issues in agricultural societies trying to recover from bad years.
Life has been pretty rubbish for subsistence farmers for millenia.
The flip side would have been your friends and family either abandoning you or hitting you over the head with a rock when you became too old, ill or otherwise infirm to keep up with the band…
@Alan Robertshaw
Moreover it became a zero-sum game: when all wealth and influence is ultimately derived from land ownership, and all the land is owned (and the ownership is enforced with pointy things) then the only way you can become richer is for someone else to become poorer. The new inequalities also meant that once you were rich and powerful enough it was easy for you to force your poorer neighbours into agreements that benefitted you far more, up to and including lifelong and inheritable slavery in the form of debt bondage with debts that the rich party could ensure were never paid off.
(note that this is precisely the sort of society that libertarians, anarcho-capitalists and other small-government-unrestrained-capitalism-type people want everyone to live in, whether they admit it or not)
@Lumipuna : there’s a confusion here. What I mean is that the skills that create the pecking order in a stone age society *still* aren’t hunting skill, but manipulation and social skills, and that’s still as problematic as material wealth. Especially since, you know, social status is inheritable, and it’s alway been easier to amass wealth than to amass status.
Citation for “Manipulation or scamming is difficult when you’re limited to dealing with your extended family members” ? It’s rather the opposite in my experience. It’s not total strangers nor small acquaintance that tend to manipulate and scam. It’s close family and friends who do that.
To say it otherwise, the importance in a lion pride isn’t by any mean based on how good a hunter or huntress anyone is. It’s based on their social skill and interactions. I don’t find being looked down because I am poor worse than being looked down because I don’t care about politics. The earliest human community were closer to a pride of lion than to modern society, but it mean mostly that it sucked in entirely different way.
One of my favorite names is the Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump park in Alberta. For thousands of years natives, both men and women, hunted buffalo in the area by driving them over a conveniently-located local cliff. Then one day, some young man decided he wanted to watch the plummeting buffalo from underneath….
Ohlmann:
Oh, undoubtedly people living in small tight-knit communities can be bullied, abused or neglected based on social dynamics. However this doesn’t seem to result in strong, formal inheritable hierarchies like you see in the later, larger agricultural societies. Also, I doubt this dynamics got any easier in the agricultural era.
As for manipulation and scamming, I’m not so sure about my ideas, or my wording. Diamond claims small tribes tend to not have individuals who live off others’ work (or if they do, it’s due to disability, not status).
I very much agree that “primitive” life sucked in certain ways. Aside from the lack of modern medicine, my impression is that tribal cultures were quite conformist and restrictive of individual freedom. This didn’t get really any better in later farming villages, until people started moving to cities.
@Ohlmann
Maintaining social status without the prop of wealth is difficult, though. Charisma and the ability to manipulate are not exactly heritable attributes, and if they are the foundation of status then unless you’ve inherited your parent’s silver tongue then as soon as they pass away your status has all but vanished.
Conversely, in a society where status is conveyed by possessions then once you have inherited the possessions then the status is yours and will remain that way unless you are sufficiently unlucky or incompetent as to lose your wealth.
When your entire society consists of fewer than 100 people then the effects of being caught scamming can be catastrophic. There’s nowhere to go. Joining another band of people may be impossible. People in modern society simply do not face that kind of risk.
You can’t eat charisma, and it won’t keep the rain off. Someone who charms and bullies and manipulates their way to the top still has to keep the favor of the providers in a group where there isn’t enough excess capacity to support an idle kleptocrat and there isn’t substantial heritable wealth and power. The position at the top has to be earned, and much like a pride of lions or pack or wolves the strength and force of personality that might take someone to the top won’t last forever and you can’t hand it on to your friends and family.
Sure, primate dominance dynamics apply in both cases, but it wasn’t until the advent of agrarian society you could have a world where you could be born into poverty and be effectively guaranteed that you would never escape it, nor could your children, or theirs.
And then a caveman walked out of a time portal and said “Who the fuck’s WE asshole?”
Even without these finds that’s dumb thing to say.
@an autistic giraffe
The alt right is obsessed with taking credit as a group for things because they have no individual achievements to be proud of. As a result, they turn to group identities such as race or nationality. I guess they don’t realize that most early humans probably had darker skin. And, as Seth mentions, probably had more progressive views on gender and LGBTQ+.