https://archive.md/XDiNA
"The idea that men hunt while women stay at home is almost completely wrong, a
review of foraging societies around the world has found. In fact, women hunt in
80 per cent of the societies looked at, and in a third of these societies women
were found to hunt big game – animals heavier than 30 kilograms – as well as
smaller animals.
These findings are likely to be representative of all foraging societies past
and present, says Cara Wall-Scheffler at the University of Washington in
Seattle. “We have nearly 150 years of ethnographic studies sampled, we have
every continent and more than one culture from every continent, and so I feel
like we did get a pretty good swathe of what people do around the world,” she
says.
There was already growing evidence that women hunted in many cultures in the
past. For instance, of 27 individuals found buried with hunting weapons in the
Americas, nearly half were women, a 2020 study found. Yet researchers have been
reluctant to conclude that these women were hunters.
“There is a paradigm that men are the hunters and women are not the hunters,
and that paradigm colours how people interpret data,” says Wall-Scheffler. Her
team looked at a database called D-PLACE that has records on more than 1400
human societies worldwide made over the past 150 years. There was data on
hunting for 63 of the foraging societies recorded and, of these, 50 described
women hunting.
For 41 of these societies, there was information on whether women’s hunting was
intentional or opportunistic – that is, whether they were going out to hunt
rather than catching animals they stumbled upon while gathering plants, say. In
87 per cent of cases, it was intentional. “That number was higher than I
expected,” says Wall-Scheffler.
The team also looked at data on the size of animals hunted by women, which was
recorded for 45 societies. In 46 per cent of cases it was small game such as
lizards and rodents, 15 per cent medium game and 33 per cent large game. In 4
per cent of the societies women hunted game of all sizes."
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-malaria-belize-crime-mexico-city-bison-montana/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
