What Can a 9,000-Year-Old Woman Tell Us About Our Gender Biases?
By: Sonora Hills
Tags: Women, Culture, Gender, History, Feminism

What Can a 9,000-Year-Old Woman Tell Us About Our Gender Biases?

Reimagination of an early South American hunter

(Credit: Sonora Hills, 2020)

A taruca deer, grazing on shrubs in the grasslands of Peru, only has moments to live. Too late, it pauses to sniff the air. Humans, crouched with spear-throwers are only meters away. The taruca turns to run, but an 18-year-old hunter rises from the grass in front of it and sends a thin, stone-tipped spear deep into its chest. The hunter leaps forward to grab onto the antlers, holding down its head for another to deliver the final blow.

Nine thousand years later, the hunter’s grave is found. Time has destroyed everything but her crumbling skull and a pile of sharpened stone hunting tools. The hunter was a woman.

She wasn’t the only one, either — 30 to 50% of big-game hunters at this time were female. Did ancient humans not have today’s gender roles?

The 17–19 year old female hunter, buried with her tools. Skull is top left.

(Credit: Haas et al., Science Advances, 2020)

For many modern women, gender biases dictate their ideal behaviour, appearance, and jobs. Women are expected to raise children and care for their families. Even with so many women now in the workforce, studies show that we are biased towards thinking that women work easier, less-demanding jobs. For instance, we expect nurses to be female and doctors to be male. This isn’t based on technological advancements or level of society, either — modern hunter-gatherers have male hunters and female gatherers. If men and women worked side-by-side doing the same, difficult jobs 9,000 years ago, then what happened between then and now to give us such strong prejudices?

History shows us that we didn’t always have the same gender norms. In Ancient Greece, it was common for a woman to own her own land. Viking myths often told of Valkyries — fierce warrior women, but until recently, all warrior’s graves were thought to be male. That is until a DNA test showed that one of their middle-aged warriors was actually female. Buried with weapons, horses, and game boards which are associated with high-ranking warriors, she supports the theory that Viking warriors weren’t just men. Despite our current prejudices, women who are valued for “male attributes” continuously arise throughout most of history.

Grave of the female viking warrior. Illustration by Evald Hansen based on the original grave plan of Bj 581, by excavator Hjalmar Stolpe. (Credit: Wiley Online Library/The Authors American Journal of Physical Anthropology Published by Wiley Periodicals Inc./CC BY 4.0)

Religion may have played a part in the way society viewed women, as many older civilisations had goddesses praised for their intelligence and strength in battle. In contrast, Christianity, now one of the most popular religions in Europe and the US, sees the ideal woman as a pure and gentle mother. But why did this change in thinking become the western norm? We don’t often consider shifts in thinking or faith, as opposed to physical traits, to be a survival mechanism, but it is one example of how amazing and varied evolution can be.

But how does evolution work? Here is a quick explanation. Every organism on Earth, from bacteria to gorillas is fighting to survive. The more, healthy offspring, the better the chances that a species will survive. Therefore, any behaviour or physical trait that leads to more healthy babies ends up being passed on. Evolution can take millions of years, but we can see evolution over surprisingly short spans of time. Modern humans have only existed for about 300,000 years, but we can see ourselves evolving just over the past few hundred. Lactose tolerance, average height, and blonde hair are all traits that have increased since the medieval ages.

Physical traits aren’t the only things that can evolve — our behaviour can matter just as much for our survival. A risk-taker who loves skydiving and mountain climbing will statistically be less likely to live long enough to produce a lot of children compared to someone who prefers gardening. Going back to gender roles, the question is why did they evolve? What has changed between the hunters of the past and our lives today? There are three potential theories for why early hunters weren’t predominantly men. 1. Without modern technology and agriculture, everyone needed to pitch in to help survival. 2. Women were seen as intellectual and physical equals. And 3. Prehistoric weapons allowed women to hunt alongside men by evening out physical differences.

One idea is that the development of better tools and technology meant that fewer people were needed in demanding roles. Instead of fighting for her family’s survival, our hunter could have spent time resting. Studies show that when women are less stressed they give birth to larger, healthier babies. Before the invention of bows, maybe all hands were needed to bring down a large deer. Looking at other areas in history, women would often help with harder chores, but only when there weren’t enough men to do them, such as during war times. WW1 and WW2 saw a huge surge in working women, with WW2 often credited for creating the ‘career women’ that began moving into the workforce during the 60s.

Another possibility is that 9,000 years ago, women were treated as intellectual and physical equals and therefore shared all roles, including the difficult ones. Instead of being expected to rear children, women may have been able to choose which tasks they enjoyed most. Looking at modern, non-patriarchal societies helps to see whether this theory could be true.

Most of the world currently has a patriarchal system, with men are still seen as superior to women, but there are several matriarchal societies. While the workings of the societies differ, they all look up to women and leave the majority of decisions to them. The Minangkabau people of Indonesia are currently the largest matriarchal society, with a population of over four million. It is considered ideal for married sisters to live in their mother’s house, with husbands only occasionally visiting. Land ownership is passed down through the women who are also in charge of distributing and cultivating it.

However, there is one big issue with the theory that a matriarchal society was the reason why both genders of early humans hunted. Modern matriarchal societies still primarily associate women with bearing and raising children, not hard physical labour.

Finally, the reason why ancient women shared physically demanding jobs, may lie in their choice of hunting tool. When we think of early humans, we often imagine that their primary tool must have been the bow and arrow. However, bows weren’t used regularly until the ancient Egyptians adopted archery, 5,000 years ago. Our hunter used a long, carved piece of wood fashioned to throw spears, called an atlatl. The atlatl acted as an extra arm joint, giving the user more power and accuracy behind their throws. Today we use a similar, plastic tool to help throw tennis balls for dogs. Distance is also an important factor, as the atlatl is only effective at close range. As men often have longer, stronger arms, it’s plausible that using an atlatl would have allowed our hunter to keep up with her male counterparts. Her smaller size may also have aided her in getting close enough to wound the deer. If gender didn’t matter for successful hunting, then why wouldn’t women help? The invention of archery may have created a greater gender gap, stopping women from hunting, as large bows often require a lot of strength to shoot. This idea is supported by the fact that modern technology often removes physical barriers — it usually doesn’t take brute strength to operate machinery on a building site, feasibly allowing women into a job that has been dominated by men for hundreds of years.

Illustration of the atlatl in use by Sebastião da Silva Vieira

(Credit: Foods of the natives of the New World. Barueri, São Paulo. Sá. 2014, 403 p.)

The atlatl, however, has been mostly abandoned by hunter-gatherer tribes. Only a few Yupik Eskimos in Alaska use the atlatl, which they call nuqaq, to hunt seals. If the nuqaq were commonly used by both men and women, then this would support our theory. However, despite the occasional woman taking part during family hunting, seal hunting with the nuqaq is a tradition passed down through men.

In many ways, it seems like there isn’t just one reason why modern hunter gatherers have male hunters and female gatherers — it may have been a mixture of these theories and others. But it’s also important to question why we’re so surprised that our hunter was a woman.

Gender biases dictate many of our assumptions. In the last few years, these assumptions have been increasingly scrutinised in the field of archaeology. It isn’t uncommon for archaeologists to question findings when they don’t align with modern gender roles: did I make a mistake? Was this woman an outlier? Are they actually male? The problem is when findings are dismissed or ignored. If we constantly assume that our view of gender has been static since the beginning of human evolution, then we can’t learn about our history.

Modern gender assumptions are not ‘natural’ or ‘set in stone’, they’re simply a product of time. Our recent ancestors may have benefitted from them, but our hunter’s ancestors clearly didn’t. It’s important to recognise that our thoughts and beliefs evolve over time, just like our bodies do — what will archaeologists think about us in another 9,000 years?