What an Ancient Hunter Does and Does Not Tell Us about “Gender”

A recent anthropological study both provides a fascinating insight into how one group of people lived 9000 years ago – and a depressing example of how degenerate science reporting has become. Worse, the statements from the study’s authors themselves, which make spurious and long-reaching claims based on the slimmest evidence, are a textbook example of how wokeness is degrading science.

A new study says a woman’s place might never have been at home to begin with. Scientists said they had discovered the 9000-year-old remains of a young woman in the Peruvian Andes alongside a well-stocked big game hunting toolkit.

As I constantly warn readers, whenever a media report claims “science says” or “a study says”, the reader should immediately assume that it doesn’t. At least, until proven otherwise.

In this case, the assumption that the study indeed does not say what the lede claims it does is borne out in the second sentence.

They’re talking about one site, at one particular time, in a very localised part of the world. Fascinating as the study is, to claim that it says anything about the world or humanity in general is just nonsense.

Based on a further analysis of 27 individuals at burial sites with similar tools, a team led by Randall Haas at the University of California, Davis, concluded that 30-50 per cent of hunters in the Americas during this period may have been women.

That might seem to indicate a broader pattern in support of the female-hunter hypothesis, but a closer reading of the study reveals that the sample seems perilously close to being cherry-picked. Of 429 individuals at 107 sites in the Americas, just 27 were reliably sexed and who were buried alongside big game hunting tools. Of the 27, 11 were female. At least two of those were infants and thus could not possibly have been active hunters.

That doesn’t stop the researchers or the media from making overblown claims. Reports across the internet made such breathless claims as “Ancient burial of fierce female hunter”, and, especially ridiculous: “Hunter-gatherers were way more advanced on equality than modern humans”.

This is garbage reporting.

The paper, published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday night, contradicts the prevalent notion that in hunter-gatherer societies, the hunters were mainly men and the gatherers were mainly women.

“I think it tells us that for at least some portion of human prehistory, that assumption was inaccurate,” Dr Haas said.

He added that the results “highlight the disparities in ­labour practice today, in terms of things like gender pay gaps, titles, and rank. The results really underscore that there may be nothing ‘natural’ about those ­disparities.”

On the contrary, observations of living hunter-gatherer societies shows that labour division is indeed very highly gendered. The evidence from living hunter-gatherers like the Australian Aborigines shows that such societies were extremely conservative, especially in their toolkit, which may have changed little for tens of thousands of years.

The tool found buried alongside the teenage female in the Americas was an “atlatl” tool, a spear-thrower similar to an Aboriginal woomera. Such tools are relatively easier to learn to use, compared to the bow and arrow, also present in the Americas at the time and require less muscle power than a spear thrown on its own. It is quite possible, therefore, that the tool was used by girls at least until adolescence. After that time, though, their efforts would be consumed by childbearing and rearing, which lend themselves to the “gathering” gendered division of labour observed in more recent hunter-gatherers.

Even if the finding is robust that 30-50% of hunters in American tribal societies thousands of years ago were female, that hardly supports the sweeping conclusion that “modern gender constructs often do not reflect past ones”.

But it’s not properly “woke” to admit things like that.

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