This study shows that women hunt just as much as men.

The story that men are hunters and women are gatherers is gone. A new study has once again confirmed that this is a gender bias. A group of anthropologists from Seattle Pacific and the University of Washington surveyed dozens of communities around the world. Result: women hunt in at least 79% of them.

The study focused on hunter-gatherer societies that exist or existed until relatively recently. For example, Apaches, Iroquois and other Native Americans. Overall, a study published in Plos One reflects the practice 63 societies from North and South America, Africa, Australia, Asia and the oceanic region. There have been no hunter-gatherer groups in Europe for a long time.

A team led by Abigail Anderson of Seattle Pacific University made an additional cut to distinguish between intentional hunting and unplanned hunting. They wanted to eliminate those cases where a woman killed an animal while doing other work.

Then they discovered that women hunt or intentionally hunt in 85% of these societies. Among them are Agta women from the province of Luzon in the Philippines and from the Matse community in the Peruvian Amazon.

Other refutations of the myth of “male hunters and female gatherers”

Abigail Anderson’s group study also found that women are actively involved in training in hunting techniques. Not only that, the report explains that females tend to use a greater variety of weapons and hunting strategies than males.

The myth of “male hunters and female gatherers” is not just anecdotal. The authors of the study explain that these stereotypes have conditioned previous archaeological research. To such an extent that some researchers refused to recognize objects buried near women as hunting tools.

Another remarkable discovery that disarms this myth was published in 2020 in the journal Scientific achievements. Archaeological discoveries in the Peruvian Andes have shown that women were also hunters in prehistoric societies.

The remains of a young woman who lived in the area 9,000 years ago were found along with other tools. It turns out that these items were a variegated set of tools for hunting a large animal. After other comparative analyzes, the University of California team concluded that among Between 30 and 50% of hunters in America during this period may have been women.