SEATTLE, WASHINGTON—A new review of the studies of more than 60 hunter-gatherer groups and the burials of hunters from North America, Africa, Australia, and Asia, indicates that women hunted more often than previously thought, according to a Live Science report. Cara Wall-Scheffler of Seattle Pacific University said that women hunters were observed in 79 percent of the hunter-gatherer communities in the study. “The women would go out with many different tools—they had a very diverse tool kit all around the world—and if they saw an animal, they would kill it,” Wall-Scheffler said. Seventy percent of these encounters occurred during hunting expeditions, she explained, and not during encounters with animals while the women were foraging for plants or engaged in other activities. About half of the time, the women were seeking large animals such as deer and moose, Wall-Scheffler added. “We analyzed the big-game burials from North and South America [in which people were buried with tools or animal bones], and prehistorically showed that women and men were 50/50 big-game hunters,” Wall-Scheffler said. Rigid divisions of labor would not make sense when considering the survival of the community, she concluded. Read the original scholarly article about this research in PLOS ONE. To read about a woman buried with a hunting toolkit in Paleolithic Peru, go to "Lady Killer."
