For Laughs, I was reading Sciencedaily for information about how humans created global warming and climate change when I found this. After much research, some people with a big fat grant came to some interesting conclusions.
Because prehistoric graves of women had some stone tools associated with hunting – women must have been the big game hunters of the clans.
This article gives some “compelling” evidence.
“For centuries, historians and scientists mostly agreed that when early human groups sought food, men hunted and women gathered. However, a 9,000-year-old female hunter burial in the Andes Mountains of South America reveals a different story, according to new research conducted at the University of California, Davis.”
It only took one female burial to come to the conclusion that females made up much of the big game hunters. Oh, but there is more:
“Statistical analysis shows that somewhere between 30 to 50 percent of hunters in these populations were female, the study said. This level of participation stands in stark contrast to recent hunter-gatherers and even farming and capitalist societies, where hunting is a decidedly male activity with low levels of female participation, certainly under 30 percent, Haas explained.”
Those damned Capitalist Societies were keeping women down! You knew it was coming.
But not mentioned in this gender studies inspired mess of re-writing of human development is that infants were also buried with the same “projectile points.” The term projectile point is misleading because most stone tools have multiple uses through their life and are properly called “edged tools.”
Some other “science” web site mentions the curious infant burials with stone tools.
Obviously, the big game quarry in the Andes 10,000 years ago were quite small compared with North America. The headline “Women Big Game Hunters Exterminated the Mammoth!” is a stretch. But you know the writers of this article would love to make readers and impressionable, unquestioning, college students believe women were the really big- big game hunters. Still a wild 100 lb. deer is a handful if you are hunting with primitive tools.
That is why I suggest a better way to tell if these female skeletons were indeed big game hunters.
Check for broken bones.
It is that simple. Rush a wounded animal with a sharp stone-tipped spear and you are going to get hurt, sooner or later.
Ever tackle a domesticated sheep for sheering and hoof trimming? Or load a domesticated pig into a truck for a short trip to the butchers?
It must have been a fun camping trip to the Andes for our archeology experts.
Where do I get a grant like that?
