"Somehow wielding weapons is considered men's work everywhere in the world, though."
Because until very recently, it was assumed that men would have wielded weapons/fought/hunted the mighty mammoth, because that was what men were for. Except, in hunter gatherer societies AFAIK, women do wield weapons in that they use bows to hunt small game (a bow is certainly a weapon, or can be used as such), women use digging sticks to dig up tubers (hard work, and a considerable resource). Big pointy sticks are certainly a weapon! They use knives and rocks and heavy stuff to cut and process plants and nuts. They can certainly use knives to butcher flesh. And so on and so on. And all of those things (bows, big pointy sticks, knives, rocks) are certainly capable of being used as fairly efficient weapons.
I bet that even if early women were restricted to small game and gathering because of having to carry and care for babies and small children, I bet that if a predator had threatened them and their kids, they would certainly have had the tools to use as weapons (bows, rocks, big pointy sticks), and the motivation to use them to defend them and theirs!
I guess my point really is that women must have done all these things, because they'd have not got far in terms of protecting the young and finding enough food for everyone if they'd had to rely on males to do all the defending! Neither of us, males or females, has natural weapons any more, and we both have the same brains and the same smarts and the same clever hands. It was only with the rise of patriarchy that they took the tools and weapons out of female hands and said, you can't do this, that's a man thing. So now when scientists look back, until recently they just didn't assume women did any of that stuff. When they looked at contemporary societies they either didn't ask the right questions, or ignored what they actually saw, because they assumed they knew the answer.
Hence a whole range of museum displays where you only ever seem to see males producing stone tools, or throwing spears. And a fairly recent New Scientist illustration they should have been thoroughly ashamed of where the only ancient female appeared to be messing with her hair, whilst the men did everything else.
I don't believe it. Females certainly, even if tasks were divided by sex, would have needed to use various stone scrapers, knives etc. Given how often stone tools need retouching, would it have been efficient or feasible if she'd have to wait for man the tool-maker to come and sharpen her favourite kitchen knife when he got back from the hunt? Or would she have just done it herself?
And then I found this contemporary account:
Woman the Toolmaker: Hideworking and Stone Tool Use in Konso, Ethiopia (Archaeological Methods & Practice) Hardcover – 12 Apr 2016
Which says:
"Woman the Toolmaker portrays the remarkable lives of a group of Konso hide workers from southern Ethiopia who may be the last people in the world to make and use flaked stone tools on a regular basis. Unlike the “Man the Toolmaker” stereotype, virtually all of the Konso hide workers are women who as young girls learn flintknapping skills from their mothers or other female relatives. The complete life cycle of making and using flaked stone artifacts is documented in this ethnoarchaeological portrait of Konso women scraping hides to produce soft leather products for bedding, bags, drums, and even ritual clothing. The hide workers use quartz, quartz crystal, chalcedony, and chert collected from dry river beds, eroding hillsides, and abandoned hideworker households to manufacture scrapers from cores by the direct percussion and bipolar techniques. Using a gum-like resin obtained from local trees, the scrapers are secured in the open haft of a wooden handle. "
And a recent paper that references this says:
" Archaeologists continue to describe Stone Age women as home bound and their lithic technologies as unskilled, expedient, and of low quality. However, today a group of Konso women make, use, and discard flaked stone tools to process hides, offering us an alternative to the man-the-toolmaker model and redefining Western “naturalized” gender roles.........In our Western-centric reconstructions of the past, women bear children while men hunt, butcher, explore, lead rituals, and produce technology—including stone tools."
This was in 2010, written by a female anthropologist. It shows women doing the whole thing, from quarrying the raw material, heat-treating it (seen as cooking hence suitably female), producing and using the tools. O, and seems early reports of women using stone tools were there, just that since at the time the victorian gents were thinking of stone as primitive and low-tech (compared, say, to metal), so suitably female as well at that time. Chaps use iron, only feeble ladies have to use primitive stone. Then when we realised that stone tools weren't that simple, suddenly it became MAN the stone tool maker and skilled flint-knapper again...............