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Grave of 9,000-Year-old Skilled Huntress Found in the Peruvian Andes, Changing the Stereotype of "Man the Hunter"
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Grave of 9,000-Year-old Skilled Huntress Found in the Peruvian Andes, Changing the Stereotype of "Man the Hunter"

The 9,000-year-old grave of a skilled female hunter was discovered in the Andes of Peru, showing female hunters were common in ancient times.

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When a grave containing the remains of a 9,000-year-old human alongside an extensive hunter’s tool kit was discovered, archaeologists reckoned they had found a great chief—a revered hunter.

However, bio-archaeologist Jim Watson of the University of Arizona informed the discoverers who were working high in the Peruvian Andes mountains that, based on the dimensions of the bones, the “big” man as they had been calling it, was actually a woman.

After the remains were indeed proven to be female, it caused the team, a mixture of anthropologists and archaeologists from the Universities of California and Arizona, to reexamine other reports of burials hypothesized as belonging to male hunters and found that an additional 10 had been incorrectly recorded as male.

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Beginning with an influential 1966 Chicago symposium, researchers believed that “man the hunter” was separated in his paleolithic duties from women, who spent their time gathering.

Archaeological evidence of female hunters has been scant, and anthropological examinations of hunter-gatherer groups today, like the Hadza of Tanzania or the San in Namibia, show that indeed men hunt big game and women gather plant-based food.