American archaeologists and anthropologists, supported by forensic scientists and physicists, have made a striking and theory-upsetting discovery in the Peruvian Andes. They uncovered the 9 000-year-old grave of a hunter – who was a woman. The burial site is located high in the Andes at a place called Wilamaya Patjxa.

Traditionally, it has been believed that in hunter-gatherer societies men were the hunters and women were the gatherers. This was certainly the case in hunter-gatherer societies that survived into modern historical times, and this situation was simply projected into the past by scholars, who assumed it had always been the case. This assumption has now been shown to be erroneous.

“An archaeological discovery and analysis of early burial practices overturns the long-held ‘man-the-hunter’ hypothesis,” affirmed study lead author and University of California, Davis (UC Davis) anthropology assistant professor Randy Haas. “Labour practices among recent hunter-gatherer societies are highly gendered, which might lead some to believe that sexist inequalities in things like pay or rank are somehow ‘natural’. But it’s now clear that sexual division of labour was fundamentally different – likely more equitable – in our species’ deep hunter- gatherer past.”

The grave was discovered and excavated in 2018. In addition to the body, it contained a hunting tool kit with projectile points and tools to process animal carcasses. Almost always, items buried with someone were those that he or she used while they lived. That the body was that of a woman was established by several different scientific methods. These included osteological analysis, dental protein analysis and a recently developed proteomic analysis technique. (Proteomics is the large-scale study or proteins, and the technique used in this study was developed by UC Davis adjunct associate professor Glendon Parker.) Isotopic analysis of the bones showed that the woman had been a meat-eater.

The discovery raised the question of whether this woman hunter had been an unusual individual or whether women hunters had been common nine millennia ago. So the (mainly male) research team reviewed published studies of burials from the late Pleistocene and early Holocene periods, across both North and South America. (The Pleistocene Epoch ran from some 2.6-million years ago to about 11 700 years ago, while the Holocene Epoch started 11 700 years ago and we are still living in it today.)

These studies covered the burials of 429 individuals, at 107 sites. Of these people, 27 had been buried with big-game hunting tools, and of those 27, no fewer than 11 had been women. The sample is sufficiently large to, in the scientific formulation of the research team, “warrant the conclusion that female participation in early big-game hunting was likely nontrivial”. On top of this, the Wilamaya Patjxa woman turned out to be the earliest hunter in the Americas whose grave has so far been discovered. Statistical analysis indicates that, 9 000 years ago in the Americas, in the cultures which created these graves, women made up between 30% and 50% of the hunters. This proportion is far higher than in almost any other more recent society, whether hunter-gatherer, farming, or urban.

The qualification “almost any other” also results from advances in the scientific analysis of long-dead people, especially osteological analysis, which allows the identification of the gender of a skeleton. Application of these advances to bodies excavated in what is now southern Ukraine and south-western Russia has established that women of the semi-nomadic Scythian culture not only routinely hunted, but also routinely fought as warriors in Scythian armies.

The Scythians came to dominate the steppes of south central Eurasia, from the Black Sea to China, and thrived during the period 900 BCE to 200 BCE, being displaced by a closely related culture, the Sarmatians, among whom, archaeological evidence shows, women also hunted and fought as warriors. Both the Scythians and Sarmatians fought as cavalry, with the women usually acting as mounted archers.

Before the advances in osteology, archaeologists used to automatically classify Scythian or Sarmatian bodies found in graves which contained weapons as men, because of modern gender stereotypes. The fact that there is now archaeological evidence of women hunters from North and South America and Eurasia, and from 9 000 years ago to less than 2 000 years ago, suggests that traditional gender role division is not traditional at all.

Which raises the next question: Why did things change so radically?