New research ends myth of hunting man, foraging woman

According to what is known as the “Man the Hunter” narrative, males in hunter-gatherer societies roamed far away to go behind prey while females stayed back near camp, gathering plant food and taking care of children. The narrative claims that male hunting and female gathering was established form of sex-based labour more than 1 million years ago. While many pieces of evidence have already debunked this narrative, a new study has comprehensively put the theory to rest.

The study published in the journal PLOS One found that women hunted in nearly 80 per cent of surveyed forager societies. To address the Man the Hunter myth, researchers searched D-PLACE, which is a database of about 1,400 human cultural groups from the past few centuries.

They identified 391 foraging societies, which both gathered wild plants and hunted wild animals. They then went through reports about them from as far back as two centuries ago. After looking for references or mentions of hunting, the team found accounts of 63 forager groups in many parts of the world, spanning from the late 1800s to 2010s. Women hunted in 50 of those 63 societies.

Apart from the breaking of the myth, the research also found that in 87 per cent of the societies with women hunters, 87 per cent hunted deliberately rather than finding the prey by chance. The researchers also found a lot of flexibility and personal preferences while hunting across many cultures.

While the study did find that both women and men hunted, there were some small differences between their hunting styles in different tribes. For example, amongst the Agta people of the Philippines, men heavily relied on a strategy where they used bows and arrows while women were more likely to have personal preferences and show variation. Some women hunted only with knives while others used bows and arrows, or a combination of both.