The team cannot know the individual’s gender identity
National Geographic informs us of the discovery of a 9 thousand year old burial of a hunter of large game in the Andes who turned out to be a woman:
…the remains found alongside the toolkit were from a biological female. What’s more, this ancient female hunter was likely not an anomaly, according to a study published today in Science Advances. The Haas team’s find was followed by a review of previously studied burials of similar age throughout the Americas—and it revealed that between 30 and 50 percent of big game hunters could have been biologically female.
This new study is the latest twist in a decades-long debate about gender roles among early hunter-gather societies. The common assumption was that prehistoric men hunted while women gathered and reared their young. But for decades, some scholars have argued that these “traditional” roles—documented by anthropologists studying hunter-gatherer groups across the globe since the 19th century—don’t necessarily stretch into our deep past.
That seems surprising for at least two reasons: one, you’d think the male advantage in speed and strength would make a difference, and two, you’d think women’s childbearing ability would be too valuable to risk. It’s interesting.
In initial discussions about the toolkit, the researchers presumed the owner was male, perhaps a prominent figure of society, or even a chief of the group. “I’m as guilty as anyone,” says Haas, who has been working in the region since 2008. “I thought yeah, that makes sense with my understanding of the world.” Back in the lab, however, close inspection of the bones suggested the physiology of a biological woman. To confirm, they analyzed a protein that forms tooth enamel and is linked to sex.
So far so good, but then suddenly the wheels fall off.
Importantly, the team cannot know the individual’s gender identity, but rather only biological sex (which like gender doesn’t always exist on a binary). In other words, they can’t say whether the individual lived their life 9,000 years ago in a way that would identify them within their society as a woman.
Are they sure? Can’t they tell if she wore makeup? Played with dolls as a child? Kept losing her car keys?
The 2018 discovery does pose a challenge to gender binaries commonly assumed for our early ancestors: Men acted as hunters, women acted as gatherers. This assumption comes from studies of modern hunter-gatherers, where men more frequently are responsible for the hunt while women bear the most responsibility for caring for children, says Arizona State University’s Kim Hill, who specializes in human evolutionary anthropology and was not part of the study team. “You can’t just stop in the middle of stalking a deer in order to nurse a crying baby,” Hill says via email.
Plus children are a resource and you’d want to protect the resource from dangerous work like hunting.
It’s interesting, apart from the small eruption of New Gender Thought.
The only problem I see for gender binaries is that women may not always act like they did in the 1950s. Our current understandings of gender may not stretch into the deep past as they almost got right until they shifted gears. There is no reason to think that the person who once owned that skeleton “identified as” anything.
Agreed. In fact, I’d say that people 9000 years ago probably had too much else to think about to bother with such things as gender identity – each did what they were capable of doing to best assist the tribe or family unit to survive. The very idea that a man might claim to be a woman likely wouldn’t occur to them, but a woman could easily prove herself the equal of a man in hunting without actually claiming to be a man, and I’d guess that having proved as much she’d be accepted as a hunter.
With regards to risking valuable childbearing women, it’s always possible that the female hunters were mature women who couldn’t have children so were free to take part in dangerous work. I’m sure that even so long ago people understood that if a female had not produced a child despite having been physically mature for several years then the chances were that she wasn’t going to become pregnant at all, and if she was strong enough and fit enough to hunt then she would be wasted on the tamer jobs such as gathering or childcare duties.
It would also depend on how the society organized child-rearing, as well as a whole host of other cultural factors that we know nothing about. For instance, a lot of forager cultures the women hunt, generally smaller game that doesn’t require a multi-day trip to find and kill, so women hunting is not completely foreign to forager cultures. Also, women are generally active in prey drives (as are older children). It’s already a blurry line.
Then comes the clincher:
No car keys found with the remains..! Therefore, got to be a woman..!!!
Elementary, my dear Watson.
Honestly, I’ve always figured that small, hunter-gatherer tribes tend to have all their members trained in the basics of everything the tribe might need. Sure, men were probably, on average, better at hunting and other upper-body strength activities, but that’s generally a bell-curve. If two tribes met in conflict, the tribe that had women as warriors as well as men would win over the single-sex warrior-caste tribe.
And the reverse would hold true, as well–most men would likely know how to skin, cook and prepare food, fashion whatever the tribe uses for garments, and so on. Otherwise, losing a few women would leave the tribe unable to survive a bad season.
Again, the ‘best’ people at different tasks would be generally assigned to do that job in quiet times, but in times of need, it’s all hands on deck.
It’s only when you add agriculture to the mix that you get a larger population, providing both the ability AND the need for specialization. You need farmers, potters, soldiers and so on. Specialization requires training; training takes time, and more importantly, training generally can trump ‘knack’, or raw talent. (FREX, a highly trained soldier can usually beat a brute who has just picked up a spear.) So you start training early–and the best way to do that is to have some sort of fast-sorting mechanism.
This, then, is the point where sex-based differences become significant. The whole upper-body strength thing means you train boys to fight. The fact that they will spend at least some period of time home and pregnant/nursing means you teach girls how to do other chores around the home–cleaning, cooking, and so forth.
(The other fast-sorting used comes along later, when you start encountering civilizations of other ethnicities, who can be easily recognized by superficial traits–so my hypothesis has sexism predating racism, but not by a whole lot.)
And of course, since this all happens just a wee bit before we develop this idea of writing for the purposes of keeping records, well, historians just look at all the societies with the written word and figure, “Hey, this must be how it’s always been, right?” and then the anthropologists and archeologists make their deductions based on that premise. If I’m right, it’s a wonderfully tragic depiction of GIGO.
And because humans have a lot of heuristic tricks to help us be a functional herd animal, we go from “Men make good warriors” to “Good men are warriors” and “Women make better homemakers” to “Good women are homemakers”. That is to say, we take a generalization of aptitude and turn it into a moral imperative. And those, in turn, remain solid (and often are reflexively shored up) even after technology has long disrupted those old bell-curves; pointing a gun to pull a trigger only requires significant upper-body strength if you’re using a shotgun, and the ability of contraception to control pregnancy means that there’s no reason to assume all women are going to be mothers (and, from there, home-makers).
Acolyte of Sagan #2
Heh…I was watching one of those anthropological documentaries on YouTube. They were filming some tribe in the Amazon. Granted, these are present-day people, but this tribe is really, really isolated: naked in the jungle; virtually no signs of outside influence.
And yet they have a day once a year where the men and women swap roles. There was some footage of the men adorning themselves as women with tufts of plant material. The documentary didn’t dwell on it, but it struck me that the guys did not look entirely comfortable doing this.
I think gender identity has been bred deep into our brains.
Freemage @#4:
It is pretty common for women in pre-industrial societies to have a large average number of kids per woman, if only to keep pace with natural infant mortality.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9502234/ (My emphasis.)
As well, I think it was the primatologist Sherwood Washburn who pointed out that of all mammalian babies, the human baby at birth is the most helpless of them all. This was because the female birth canal was as large as it could possibly be for giving birth to a large-headed baby without adverse complications. That in turn meant that the baby had to be born ‘prematurely’ in terms of the mammalian average gestation period, otherwise human females would be giving birth to kids at about three-year-old size. (A baby ungulate has to be able to keep up with the herd within about an hour of its birth, otherwise it falls prey to a carnivore.)
Washburn advanced the theory that explained the helplessness (again as I recall) in terms of the development of the base-camp, and consequent support for mothers from extended family. Bipedalism is also an advantage here, as the human baby is, unlike a baby chimp, short on clinging power and of maternal hair or fur to cling onto. The mother’s hands and arms are progressively freed up for nursing as bipedalism progresses and quadripedalism recedes, so the whole procedure becomes a positive-feedback loop.
I won’t mention any savannah/AAT implications, because controversial.
@Freemage #4
Women in agricultural societies would spend long, literally grinding days hand querning cereals. Their skeletons show the kind of distortions you’d get from sitting at a quern all day. No person who could get away with it would want to grind cereals all day so naturally it was made a woman’s job.
Re women warriors – Roman soldiers were astonished to find that Germanic tribes had the women fighting alongside the men.
I’m reading “Invisible Women” and there’s a similar story in there about a Viking burial. The remains were female, but the grave contained weapons and horses which meant the person buried there was a warrior. Modern ideas of gender roles trumped the evidence, and the warrior was referred to as male for decades despite having an apparently female pelvis. Eventually DNA testing proved the sex of the remains, but people still theorized that it was some mix-up of bones, rather than accept the evidence.
A blast from the past:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2014/12/guest-post-foul-weather-feminism/
Clearly she identified as a caterpillar.
This is insane.
Could they tell which sports team she rooted for? Or who was her internet provider? How about which brand of toothpaste she preferred?
Gender identity is the most idiotic of recent inventions. It’s hilarious how hard they try to retrospectively stuff women and men into different boxes, just so they can make a lovely woke deal out of letting one into the other box. It’s nothing but desperate, anachronistic misogyny.
As said above, maybe they had the stunning idea that whoever was the best fighter should fight, whoever was the best hunter should hunt, etc., and didn’t make such a big deal about the dangly bits that they needed “gender roles” and “gender identities.”
The statement:
reminded me immediately of objections to allowing women to serve in combat roles in the US armed forces. I can’t remember who said it, but I vaguely recall a high-ranking military officer saying something on the order of “What if she has to stop and have a baby in a trench?”
Evolutionary Psychology: explaining that ‘natural’ human behavior in the remote past is illustrated by Fred and Wilma Flintstone.
Papito #11
Officers spend a lot of time worrying about force availability: what fraction of your troops are available to fight at any given moment.
Back when women were first entering the U.S. military, I recall some officer saying that the number of female soldiers who were unavailable due to pregnancy was about equal to the number of male soldiers who were unavailable due to sports injuries. That might sound like a frivolous comparison, but when the shooting starts, it doesn’t matter why a soldier is unavailable. All that matters is whether they are available.
KB player @#7
A bit off-topic but most archaeological studies show that the shift from a hunting-gathering to an agricultural lifestyle brings about a significant deterioration in health. The distortions you describe, but also smaller body and brain size and indications of malnutrition.
To bring things back on topic, if we postulate a healthier h-g population we can assume lower mortality rates, including child mortality rates which would free women to take on more jobs.
Arnaud #14, “…would free women to take on more jobs.” Why do we presume women are not free, compared to men, in a hunter-gatherer society? I understand that the current predominant theory is that society only stopped being matrilineal and egalitarian with the advent of agriculture.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/14/early-men-women-equal-scientists
I think it would take more evidence than I’ve seen to demonstrate that females in hunter-gatherer societies were relegated to strict gender roles, as it’s not clear how there would be any survival advantage in that. Quite the contrary:
Gotta dispute this. I don’t know that there is solid evidence, only because women are trained that way. There is no reason based on strength, intelligence, or ability, why men can’t be as good at homemaking as women. And there are a number of tasks that require upper body strength, more than I realized until I had four shoulder surgeries, both shoulders now work poorly, and I can no longer do those tasks.
KB Player, the evidence suggests that childbearing was lower in h-g societies and increased with agriculture. A h-g society is often on the move, and only so many children can be carried; a child cannot walk long distances until they reach a certain age. In addition, agriculture appeared to remove some of the lactation restrictions that spaced out pregnancies. Which is why the human population increased at that point.
Papito brought up this (not to agree with it; I’m not misunderstanding his comment):
Yeah, and there are a lot of reasons to believe that wasn’t necessary. There is evidence to suggest that child rearing was a village project, not the one man/one woman model we have now where man provides and woman cleans, cooks, and rears. Many of the individuals in the tribe would be related, so even in an evolutionary psychology just-so-story scenario that would work: there was as benefit genetically to ensuring the health of your sister’s children, your mother’s children, your cousin’s children.
This one man/one woman Fred and Wilma model is another modern day thing that is being read backwards into the past. Since behavior doesn’t fossilize, we are left with limited things to go on, and people just sort of write the stories that fit their own preconceptions. As we learn to read the signs better (and get more women into the field), we are starting to question some of those assumptions.
As for our gender roles being hard wired, as Steven suggests, I would say that means a substantial number of women have something seriously wrong with their brains if that is true. Nurturing and child rearing is a learned thing, not born. My mother spent many hours trying to instill nurturing into me; difficult for her, because in spite of being a stay-home mother, she didn’t have a nurturing bone in her body. Few of the women that I know are naturally nurturing; few of the men I know are naturally warriors. I think if you took a representative cross-section of the population of the planet, you would see that pattern. These are learned roles, not hard wired.
I’m operating from memory here, Cavalli-Sforza’s “Great Human Migrations”, but he points out that in central African foragers cultures, women actively limit the number of children they have to 5. With infant mortality in pre-industrial technology, this is actually just over replacement value. I would hazard that forager cultures that are nomadic, infants are too much of a risk to pop them out continuously. Also iirc, the earliest agrarian settlements show that settling down lengthened women’s lifespans,
Firstly, women have always fought, even in settled agricultural societies. I’ve recently listened to a few discussions over the burial mentioned above, such as this one, which muddies the waters a bit on drawing the conclusion that warrior grave goods necessarily denote the grave’s occupant was a warrior herself, but that also muddies the waters on concluding that a man must have been a warrior if he was buried with weapons and armour.
Secondly, we cannot know to any degree of certainty how hunter-gatherers lived culturally before the agricultural revolution. Comparison to extant hunter-gatherers and potentially-otherwise-uncontacted tribes in the Amazon can offer clues, but these only go so far. For one thing, agriculturalists worldwide did to hunter-gatherers what North Americans did to the Indians — that is, overran them and muscled them out of any agriculturally-valuable land, destroyed the flora and fauna that the hunter-gatherers depended on, and hollowed-out and discarded the cultures of those who did not simply die. The few peoples we have left are a paltry reflection of what must have come before. (Not to mention that many modern-day “hunter-gatherers” are nomadic herders, which is a quasi-agricultural way of life.)
However, we have some (not much, but some) material artefacts, and we have fossil and ecological evidence of how many of these groups must have lived materially, namely where the vast majority of their calories must have come from. This varies from region to region, and season to season, naturally, but “hunter gatherers” likely would have spent almost all of their time gathering and comparatively little time hunting. It is simply inconceivable that the vast majority of hunter-gatherers were not all employed doing essentially the same tasks for almost all of the year.
As well, the nature of human “hunting”, when it did occur, was likely quite different than we might think, given the modern-day hobby we call hunting with which most of us are at least passingly familiar. It tended to involve a lot of walking, for days on end, while the prey eventually died from exhaustion or wounds inflicted by spears or bows (or a combination of the two). There are many reasons to think that this would have at least partly been a communal exercise; e.g., a band of hunters separates a large game animal from the herd and maybe manages to injure it, and the whole community proceeds to stalk the beast until it collapses, whereupon they can feast and (if it’s cold enough) preserve what meat they do not immediately consume, then harvest the bones and organs and skins from the carcass to make use of in other ways. Then the community would move on to the next spot of shelter, or the next gathering ground, or for the next large game animal to repeat the cycle.
The “traditional view” outlined in the NG article gives the impression that hunter-gatherers were more-or-less settled peoples, wherein the menfolk went out to hunt and the womenfolk went out to gather and they would all return to their more-or-less settled locales. The men would presumably butcher the carcasses down to all of their useful parts and then haul their catch back to the central locale, while the women would gather a few nuts and carry them (not very far) back to that same locale. This impression is, to put it mildly, highly unlikely. It is much more likely that the whole community moved as one, gathered, hunted, butchered, and consumed in place (or en route), and moved on. The sex ratio of these activities almost certainly varied quite a bit, as did the peoples’ conceptions of themselves; we simply cannot know that.
But framing this as “we can’t know how this person would have identified” is ahistorical and irresponsible in ways that I could easily double this wordcount ranting about, so I think I’ll stop.
One of the few things that remains preserved from neolithic humans is DNA. Mitochondrial DNA provides evidence that majority patrilocality only came about with agriculture, and that neolithic hunter-gatherer societies were predominantly either bilocal or matrilocal.
http://www.interscientific.net/biorxiv2016.html
That says something about women’s roles in society:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/primate-diaries/case-of-the-missing-polygamists/