The Myth of Man the Hunter: Women’s contribution to the hunt across ethnographic contexts | PLOS ONE
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Roles Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing
Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Methodology, Project administration, Writing – review & editing
Affiliations Department of Biology, Seattle Pacific University, Seattle, Washington, United States of America, Department of Anthropology, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States of America
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.
Citation: Anderson A, Chilczuk S, Nelson K, Ruther R, Wall-Scheffler C (2023) The Myth of Man the Hunter: Women’s contribution to the hunt across ethnographic contexts. PLoS ONE 18(6): e0287101. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0287101
