Saturday, July 01, 2023

Worldwide survey kills the myth of ‘Man the Hunter’. Really!

How do you kill a myth with a myth? This article also seems be more about feminist fantasies than reality! I have a dumm feeling this was agenda driven research!

It is curious how 391 foraging societies were reduced to 63 "forager groups"?

The question still remains how many of these women go out hunting, how often and what do they hunt? Do they hunt by themselves or in company etc. etc.?

"... A study published today in PLOS ONE has united these reports for a first-of-its-kind global view of women hunters. Reviewing accounts penned by scholars who study culture, known as ethnographers, as well as those by observers between the late 1800s and today, the researchers found that women hunted in nearly 80% of surveyed forager societies.
These data flatly reject a long-standing myth that men hunt, women gather, and that this division runs deep in human history. ...
To address the topic with worldwide data, Charles University biological anthropologist Cara Wall-Scheffler searched D-PLACE, a database of information about 1400 human cultural groups from the past few centuries. Working with biology students at Seattle Pacific University, she identified 391 foraging societies—groups that both gather wild plants and hunt wild animals—and read historic or recent reports about them.
The team searched the writings for mentions of hunting, Wall-Scheffler says. The resulting accounts, which spanned the late 1800s to 2010s, described 63 forager groups in the Americas, Africa, Eurasia, Australia, and Oceania. Women hunted in 50 of those 63 societies, the researchers report.  ...
What surprised her was the intentionality: Among the societies with women hunters, 87% did so deliberately rather than opportunistically happening upon prey by chance. “When they get up at the beginning of the day, they’re heading out” to hunt. ...
The team did discover differences between male and female strategies. For example, among the Agta, men almost always wielded bows and arrows, whereas some women preferred knives. Men were more likely to head out solo or in pairs, whereas women generally hunted in groups and with dogs. ..."

From the abstract:
"The sexual division of labor among human foraging populations has typically been recognized as involving males as hunters and females as gatherers. Recent archeological research has questioned this paradigm with evidence that females hunted (and went to war) throughout the Homo sapiens lineage, though many of these authors assert the pattern of women hunting may only have occurred in the past. The current project gleans data from across the ethnographic literature to investigate the prevalence of women hunting in foraging societies in more recent times. Evidence from the past one hundred years supports archaeological finds from the Holocene that women from a broad range of cultures intentionally hunt for subsistence. These results aim to shift the male-hunter female-gatherer paradigm to account for the significant role females have in hunting, thus dramatically shifting stereotypes of labor, as well as mobility."

Worldwide survey kills the myth of ‘Man the Hunter’ | Science | AAAS Women hunt in vast majority of foraging societies, upending old stereotypes

The Myth of Man the Hunter: Women’s contribution to the hunt across ethnographic contexts (open access)

An Awá woman holds hunting bows and arrows in Brazil’s Caru Indigenous Territory in 2017


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