The Truth About Prehistoric Gender Roles: Women Hunted, Too
- Greta
- May 9
- 3 min read
Updated: May 14
It’s powerful to stumble upon a piece of history that challenges what we thought we knew. That’s exactly how I felt reading the headline “9,000-Year-Old Burial In Peru Reveals That Women Were Big-Game Hunters, Too”. Women weren’t just gathering roots and berries in prehistory. They were chasing down and hunting massive animals, wielding spears, and bringing home the meat. Hell. Yes.
The Discovery That Changes Everything
In 2018, a team of archaeologists led by Randall Haas from the University of California, Davis, uncovered a 9,000-year-old burial site high in the Andes Mountains of Peru, at a site called Wilamaya Patjxa. Among the six individuals unearthed was a young woman, around 17 to 19 years old, buried with a full hunting toolkit: stone projectile points, blades, and tools used for processing animal carcasses (Haas et al., 2020). These weren’t symbolic items, these were serious tools meant for serious hunting.
And this wasn't just a one-off. Haas’ team analyzed 429 other burials from across North and South America and found that 27 individuals buried with similar hunting tools were female, nearly half of the known hunter burials (Science Magazine, 2020). This suggests that female big-game hunting wasn’t an anomaly. It was a pattern.
Why This Changes the Narrative
This discovery isn’t just a cool archaeological find—it’s a wrecking ball to a long-standing myth. For centuries, the popular image of early human society has been painted with a rigid division of labor: men hunted, women gathered. This binary didn’t just distort our understanding of the past, it helped justify gender roles that persist to this day.
But when we dig deeper (literally and figuratively), we see how flawed and sexist that assumption is. If women were hunting large game 9,000 years ago, what else have we gotten wrong?
This is about more than fairness in our understanding of history. It’s about power. The narratives we tell about our past shape how we treat each other in the present. When women are erased from roles of strength, skill, and survival, we continue to build a world where those qualities are seen as inherently male.
The Bias in Archaeology
Part of what makes this discovery so impactful is how it reveals the blind spots in archaeology itself. As archaeologist Bonnie Pitblado put it to Science Magazine, “Lab and field-work can be influenced by assumptions, and many scientists assume that if a person is buried with hunting tools, they must be male” (St. Fleur, 2020).
So this isn’t new evidence—it’s old evidence finally being interpreted with a less biased lens. The data was always there. We just weren’t reading it right.
Which makes you wonder: how many other female hunters, warriors, and leaders have been misidentified over the years? How many women have been “statistically corrected” out of our textbooks?
Rewriting the Story
What I love most about this discovery is the image it paints: a teenage girl, thousands of years ago, confidently gripping her hunting tools and heading out on the hunt. She was skilled, respected, and maybe even feared. And she wasn’t some exception to the rule. She was the rule.
This forces us to rethink early societies altogether. Maybe they were less rigid and more cooperative. When survival was on the line, there was no room for strict gender roles. It’s only in recent history (post-agriculture and post-industrialization) that gender became so codified.
The blueprint for a more equitable world has been buried beneath our feet all along. Ironically, the future might lie in the past.
A Moment of Joy and a Call to Action
When I read that headline, I felt a surge of joy—and not just for what it means historically. I felt joy for every girl who was told she wasn’t strong enough, fast enough, or brave enough.
But this isn’t just a feel-good moment—it’s a call to action. We need more inclusive research. We need to question old assumptions. We need better from our storytellers—whether they’re scientists, journalists, or textbook publishers.
Because history isn’t just about what happened. It’s about who gets remembered.
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