Study indicates women had significant role as big game hunters in the Americas

Women may have played a bigger role than previously thought in the hunting side of early societies on the American continents, based on findings from an archeological site in Peru. 

A team of scientists recently discovered the approximately 9,000-year-old remains of a young woman at the Wilamaya Patjxa site who was buried with a “well-stocked big game hunting toolkit,” according to a post on the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) website. After closer looks at 27 other sites in the Americas, study authors concluded that it is likely between 30% and 50% of the region’s Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene big game hunters were women.

"The findings have changed my understanding of the most basic organizational structure in hunter-gatherer societies and thus our species' evolutionary history," Randall Haas, an assistant professor in the department of anthropology at the University of California, Davis, and the lead author of the study, was quoted as saying in the post.. "Sexual division of subsistence labor appears to have been much more attenuated or even absent among hunter-gatherers in the past."