A woman buried with spearpoints and other hunting tools roughly 9,000 years ago in Peru’s Andes Mountains has reemerged to claim the title of the oldest known female big-game hunter in the Americas. Her discovery led researchers to conclude that, among ancient Americans, nearly as many females as males hunted large animals — a finding that is challenging long-standing ideas about ancient gender roles.
Modern and recent hunter-gatherer societies emphasize males hunting. But in mobile groups that inhabited the Americas thousands of years ago, up to half of big-game hunters were women, archaeologist Randall Haas of the University of California, Davis and colleagues report November 4 in Science Advances.
