AAAS: "Worldwide survey kills the myth of 'Man the Hunter'." Anthropologists have reported women in societies which both hunt + gather who 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.' In the 1990s 'Aka great-grandmothers and girls as young as age 5 [were observed] trapping duiker and porcupinein central Africa.' Last month a study was 'published in PLOS ONE has united these reports for a first-of-its-kind global view of women hunters, which documented 'that women hunted in nearly 80% of surveyed forager societies.' "In the early to mid–20th century, influential anthropologists championed the view that hunting and meat consumption drove humanity’s most striking evolutionary changes, including bipedalism, big brains, and tool use." This Man the Hunter narrative stressed that ancestral males roamed widely in prusuit of prey, while women stayed near a central location, gathering plants + caring for children. This idea of male hunting + female gathering created gender-bound roles, perhaps beginning over a million yrs ago, or so the hypothesis ran. An example: 'Women would be additionally impaired by their “more sedentary and less aggressive” nature, wrote anthropologist Brian Hayden in 1981.' Information about forager societies mostly came from ethnographies written by 18th to 20th century white Euro-American men who visited communities and followed the local men around, often paying less attention to whatever women were doing. 'Charles University biological anthropologist Cara Wall-Scheffler searched D-PLACE, a database of information about 1400 human cultural groups from the past few centuries.' 63 forager groups were identified from the late 1800s to the 2010s in the Americas, Africa, Eurasia, Australia, and Oceania. And women hunted in 50 of those 63 societies. These results should provoke a lot of conversations. [Photo is of an Awá woman holds hunting bows and arrows in Brazil’s Caru Indigenous Territory in 2017 SCOTT WALLACE/GETTY IMAGES].   #anthropogy    #ethnography    #genderbias