Worldwide survey kills the myth of ‘Man the Hunter’
For decades anthropologists have witnessed forager women—those who live in societies that both hunt and gather—around the world skillfully slay prey: In the 1980s, Agta women of the Philippines drew bows and arrows as tall as themselves and aimed at wild pigs and deer, and Matses Amazonians struck paca rodents with machetes. Observations from the 1990s described Aka great-grandmothers and girls as young as age 5 trapping duiker and porcupine in central Africa.
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.
“We’ve had scattered reports here and there about women’s hunting,” says Vivek Venkataraman, a University of Calgary evolutionary anthropologist who was not involved with the research. The new study is “a nice contribution in the sense that it pulls a lot of these things together.”
In the early to mid–20th century, influential anthropologists championed the view that hunting and meat consumption drove humanity’s most striking evolutionary changes, including bipedalism, big brains, and tool use. In what has been called the Man the Hunter narrative, ancestral males roamed far and wide in pursuit of prey while their female mates stayed near camp, gathering plants and caring for offspring. Male hunting and female gathering established sex-based labor, perhaps more than 1 million years ago, or so the story went.
The thinking was that only men could be hunters because of their supposedly superior strength, says Sang-Hee Lee, a biological anthropologist at the University of California, Riverside. Proponents claimed that women couldn’t hunt, she says, because “they have babies. They have periods. Their blood will attract other predators.” Women would be additionally impaired by their “more sedentary and less aggressive” nature, wrote anthropologist Brian Hayden in 1981.
An influential 1966 symposium at the University of Chicago reinforced this idea. Attended by 70 men and five women, the workshop presented available information about living primates, recent forager societies, and fossils and artifacts. Many participants concluded that male hunters supplied the meat critical to survival—and human evolution. But the data sources were biased to showcase meat and men. For example, hunting artifacts such as spearpoints and animal bones survive longer in the archaeological record than do foods like fruits, tuber, and honey, and the perishable tools needed to gather them. What’s more, the information about forager societies mostly came from ethnographies written by 18th to 20th century white Euro-American men who visited communities and followed the local men around, often paying less attention to whatever women were doing, Lee says.
Yet through the 1970s and ’80s, evidence mounted that women contribute substantially to human diets, not only through gathering, but also as hunters. Nevertheless, the myth of roving, hunting men and baby-tethered gatherers persisted in the popular imagination, thanks in part to museum dioramas and media. For example, in a 2019 study Lee co-authored, a Google image search of “prehistoric humans” produced 207 portrayals of men hunting, but only 16 of women.
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.
“I had a sneaking suspicion that women were going to be regular hunters,” Wall-Scheffler says. 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 reports also revealed considerable flexibility and personal preferences, both within and across cultures. Individuals wielded various weapons including spears, machetes, knives, and crossbows. Some relied on hunting dogs, nets, or traps. Women followed tracks to big game and beat the ground with sticks to flush out critters. Child care posed little problem: Mothers carried infants or left them at camp with other community members; older children often tagged along, hunting as well.
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.
Despite gender differences, the team found little evidence for rigid rules. “If somebody liked to hunt, they could just hunt,” Wall-Scheffler says.
This cross-cultural compilation is “a very precious and valuable contribution,” Lee says. “I hope it becomes a conversation starter” for the public and researchers.
Though few anthropologists still subscribe fully to the Man the Hunter narrative, its premises continue to influence interpretations. For instance, archaeologists routinely assume that skeletons found with weapons were men—even as genetic analyses have proved some cases to be women.
As an archaeologist who researches Paleolithic spear hunting, Annemieke Milks applauds the study for revisiting ethnographic reports specifically to suss out women hunters. “It means we have to rethink a lot about how we interpret the deeper past.” The work, she says, “completely overturns man the hunter, women the gatherer.”