Gender Roles in Hunter-Gatherer Societies Were More Fluid than We Were Taught

Bias and a lack of advanced technology led to the assumption that specific gender roles are natural, when evidence shows they were anything but.

Hiya!

Researchers, scientists, and archeologists are on a roll lately. New technology and changing social norms are inspiring (and requiring) experts to reevaluate our assumptions and correct past mistakes. One area such transitions are occurring relates to gender. For decades, longer even, our gender bias has created a blindspot for researchers and scientists. As a result, ancient remains found with burial goods, including weapons for hunting or warfare, are mostly assumed to be men. The bias being that only men hunted.

But thanks to technological advancements and changing social norms regarding gender roles, many experts are taking it upon themselves to correct past mistakes. In some cases, that means reanalyzing ancient remains attributed to males to see if they are actually female. While other experts tackle the daunting task of evaluating the role of gender in entire hunter-gatherer societies. So far, only one team of researchers has accomplished such a feat, and it’s a doozy.

The Way Things Were

The further back in time we go, the harder it is to study. So finding direct evidence left over from our hunter-gather days, which ended around 9,000 to 10,000 years ago, is limited, to say the least. Around that time, most human societies were spread across the globe and began slowly developing agriculture and transitioning to settlements rather than living on the move.

But not all human societies made this transition. Some groups chose to keep the hunting and foraging lifestyle, and can still be found today mostly in remote areas of low-and-middle-income countries. Studying these communities can provide experts with a glimpse into humanity's past, as their way of life differs greatly from our modern lifestyle. I suppose, in some ways, these communities represent the true originalists.

Over the decades, anthropologists and other experts have gained these communities’ trust and are allowed to live alongside them — after which they produced detailed observational reports, which led to a general consensus among scientists that men were primarily hunters and women mainly foraged with few exceptions.

But Robert Kelly, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming and the author of multiple books and articles on hunter-gatherer societies, argues that long-held assumptions regarding gender divisions around hunting were based on summaries of the reports, and experts’ subjective impressions about them, combined with their personal fieldwork. No one, according to Kelly, had conducted a systematic “tally” about what the observational reports themselves (not their summaries) say about female hunters.

Until now, that is.