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DeathMonkey [soylentnews.org] writes:

Women hunt in vast majority of foraging societies, upending old stereotypes

For decades anthropologists have witnessed forager women—those who live in societies that both hunt and gather—around the world skillfully slay prey: In the 1980s, Agta women of the Philippines drew bows and arrows as tall as themselves and aimed at wild pigs and deer, and Matses Amazonians struck paca rodents with machetes. Observations from the 1990s described Aka great-grandmothers and girls as young as age 5 trapping duiker and porcupine in central Africa.

A study published today in PLOS ONE has united these reports for a first-of-its-kind global view of women hunters. Reviewing accounts penned by scholars who study culture, known as ethnographers, as well as those by observers between the late 1800s and today, the researchers found that women hunted in nearly 80% of surveyed forager societies.

These data flatly reject a long-standing myth that men hunt, women gather, and that this division runs deep in human history.

Worldwide survey kills the myth of ‘Man the Hunter’ [science.org]

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