Woman and the atlatl

[ArabeIIaScott]

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/early-women-hunt-too

'Webb, a white cis-man, was operating off a long-held assumption of a male-dominated field: Men hunt, women gather.'

Has iritated me enormously anew.

What does it mean, in the context of thousands of years of evolution? A man who is matching up to the narrow stereotypes of a particular time, culture, place?

'Yes, Janet, I do identify with the highly specific and largely arbitrary cultural norms of my time and locale, thanks; are you innately predisposed to tiaras and bakesales, AFAB womb-carrier?'

Anyway, leaving that aside, some quite interesting points about spear-throwing and hunting in this rather poorly-written article.

'In 2020, Haas, his colleagues, and members of the Mulla Fasiri community in southern Peru uncovered a 9,000-year-old grave in the Andes that proved to be the oldest known burial of a female that included big-game hunting gear, neatly placed around her body with the scattered bones of large mammals. After examining the remains of another 429 people from across 107 sites across the Western Hemisphere, the team estimated that 30 to 50 percent of ancient big-game hunters in the communities they studied were female.'

Edit: Title s/b 'women'. Obvs.

There have been several articles about female hunters in New Scientist in recent years eg. one from this June
"The idea that men hunt while women stay at home is almost completely wrong, a review of foraging societies around the world has found. In fact, women hunt in 80 per cent of the societies looked at, and in a third of these societies women were found to hunt big game – animals heavier than 30 kilograms – as well as smaller animals."
Original paper - https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0287101
It is very difficult to change people's preconceptions, to get them to look again at the original, maybe decades or older research, and its interpretation.

People did what they were good at regardless of sex. Why on earth would they not? "Oh look we're starving to death here, haven't had a decent meal in weeks. Yes we've got the best hunter for miles around but we can't use her, she's a WOMAN. We're just going to have to carry on being hungry and get weaker and weaker...."

A few years ago we went to a prehistoric site in south west France, (I'm a prehistory nut). There were reconstructions of prehistoric life, including hunting tools. I had a go with an atalatl (and I'm a small elderly woman), it didn't take a lot of strength to throw, and I 'killed' a deer for supper. So the idea that women didn't go hunting is bonkers, given that they were a lot stronger then than us modern weaklings.

That's brilliant, Ada. I'm quite tempted to have a shot at an atalatl myself.

Thanks!

Sadly NS has gone down the genderbollocks route hard.

I think saying that men were traditionally the hunters, is quite different from saying women NEVER hunted (is anyone saying this?). It makes sense that men hunted and women gathered.. you see it in chimps too. Men's bodies are designed for it, women's designed for something else...

with no contaception and possibly lack of understanding of conception, women likely would have had lots of babies.

have any of you lived off grid? I've had a baby whilst living on land in a van with no electricity and no running water, little indoor shelter. very quickly the roles become 'traditional'. It's clear who is going to chop the wood when my abdominals are weak post birth. It's clear who is going to be out doing the heavy work whilst I nurture the babies. It's also true that foraging is possible with the baby on your back and little children can be a part of it (my kids love coming foraging)

this is anecdotal, i have no idea if it is something thats common, but I have 20-20 vision (recently measured) yet the babies father can see things far off and spot birds before i see them. I literally don't see them. Yet he cant find fucking ANYTHING, something can be right in front of his eyes amongst lots of things, but he cant distinguish it from the rest. I can walk in a forest and see herbs popping out in my peripheral vision. we laugh thats my foraging vision and his hunting vision.

There are always gonna have been the ''gender non-conforming women'', the women bot attracted to men who didn't procreate, the women who instintctually hunted. Similiarly im sure there were men who foraged....