Saturday - For a long time women have been seen as the fairer sex who didn’t take part in blood thirsty pursuits like hunting, but now research is challenging this belief.

Hunter gatherer communities like the San of the Kalahari were thought to divide their labour along gender lines, where men did the hunting and women would harvest fruit and vegetables.

Now researchers have analysed data and have found that in dozens of hunter gatherer communities across the world, women and men hunt together in at least 79 percent of these societies.

Women are also not confined to the usual male hunting norms, the researchers have found.

The archaeological evidence has long been there, where the remains of women in many societies were buried alongside big game hunting tools. But even with these discoveries, researchers suggested that women as hunters was a phenomena of the past and that in more recent societies, food collecting has been divided into men heading out to hunt and women gathering.

To investigate if this was true, Abigail Anderson, of Seattle Pacific University, US, and her colleagues examined data over the last century on 63 foraging societies around the world, including communities in North and South America, Africa, Australia, Asia, and the Oceanic region.

They presented their findings in the journal PLOS ONE.

In most of these societies women were found to hunt regardless of their status as mothers.

And they weren’t confined to what they hunted. They targeted animals of all sizes including big game. This was also noted amongst the San.

“The San women show evidence for a wide range of hunting,” Cara Wall-Scheffler, who also worked on the study, told the Saturday Star.

“Intentional, organised, and consisting of very long travel distances.”

It was also found that women are actively involved in teaching hunting techniques and used a greater variety of weapon choice and hunting strategies than men.

“The people who discuss this generally feel that women aren’t confined by specific hunting norms, but are allowed to choose the way they want to hunt. Some cultures have taboos that associate women with some tools instead of others. As a result, women get to choose what they like to work with, as long as it’s not the one taboo tool, and we see a greater diversity of strategies,” Wall-Scheffler explained.

Wall-Scheffler believes that the myth of the non-hunting woman came about because of Western perceptions.

“I think it was most likely shaped by Western ideas that men ‘need’ to provide and women ‘need’ to not take risks in order to take care of babies. That is, I do not think these ideas were shaped by the cultures being studied but by their interpreters.”

These stereotypes have had an effect in influencing previous archaeological studies where researchers have been reluctant in interpreting objects buried with women as being hunting tools.

It is because of this that the researchers are calling on a re-evaluation of such evidence and to examine the role of women as hunters in future research.

The Saturday Star