Man the Hunter, Woman the Gatherer? Rethinking the Sexual Division of Labour in Human History

 

1. Introduction: a story everyone learned

Let’s reread the story we have been told for decades. On a cold plain, a group of men with spears closes in on a mammoth. Back at camp, women crouch by the fire with infants, sorting roots and berries.

This scene encodes a theory, not just an image. It claims that men and women in early human groups did different work, that the division was ancient and universal, and that it shaped the bodies and minds we have today. Each of those claims can be tested.

So, let’s test them. We ask three questions. Where did the idea of “man the hunter, woman the gatherer” come from? Did every foraging society actually divide work this way? And what do ethnography, archaeology and human biology now tell us?

Box 1 · Who are hunter-gatherers? Hunter-gatherers, or foragers, are people who get most of their food from wild plants and animals rather than from crops or livestock (Kelly, 2013). Homo sapiens has existed for roughly 300,000 years (Hublin et al., 2017). Farming began only about 12,000 years ago. For most of our species’ history, every human being was a forager.

 

Box 2 · The sexual division of labour A sexual division of labour is a pattern in which some tasks are done mainly by men and others mainly by women. It can be strict, with rules or taboos, or a statistical tendency, where one sex simply does more of a task. Anthropologists often say gendered division of labour, because the roles are set by social expectation as well as by biology.

 

Three windows on the past

No one observed Palaeolithic camps. Researchers reconstruct them through three kinds of evidence, each with its own limits.

The first is ethnography: first-hand accounts of foraging societies documented over the past two centuries. These are rich and detailed. Yet recent foragers are not “living fossils”. Most live in marginal environments, trade with farmers and states, and have their own long histories (Kelly, 2013).

The second is archaeology: tools, food remains, burials and skeletons. This record reaches deep into the past but is fragmentary. A spear point in a grave tells us what mourners placed there, not necessarily what the dead person did in life.

The third is human biology: anatomy, physiology and life history. It shows what bodies can do and what costs reproduction imposes. It cannot, on its own, tell us what any society chose to do.

The sections that follow combine all three. Section 2 traces how the hunter narrative was built. Section 3 follows the challenge that rose against it. Sections 4 to 6 weigh the ethnographic and archaeological evidence, including societies that confirm the pattern and those that complicate it. Section 7 examines a recent and unresolved debate. Section 8 reviews why a division of labour might arise at all, and Section 9 sets out what the evidence can and cannot support.

2. Origins: how the hunter took centre stage

The hunter narrative was not discovered in the field. It was assembled over a century, from Victorian theory, fossil interpretation and a famous conference in Chicago.

2.1 Victorian foundations

In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin (1871) argued that men’s competition for mates, along with their work in hunting and defence, had selected for greater strength and mental powers. Women’s traits, he proposed, were shaped mainly by motherhood. Historians of anthropology note that these arguments closely tracked Victorian ideas about the sexes (Fedigan, 1986).

Box 3 · Sexual selection Darwin distinguished natural selection, which favours traits that help survival, from sexual selection, which favours traits that help win mates. The peacock’s tail is the classic example. Darwin applied the idea to humans, using it to explain differences between men and women (Darwin, 1871).

 

Thinkers with very different politics shared the same starting point. The American ethnologist Lewis Henry Morgan (1877) ranked societies from “savagery” through “barbarism” to “civilisation”. Friedrich Engels (1884/1972), drawing on Morgan, described the first division of labour as one between man and woman. Men obtained food and tools; women kept the household. Engels located women’s subordination in the later rise of private property, not in that division itself.

By 1900, then, many evolutionary theorists treated a sexual division of labour as humanity’s original condition. It served more often as a premise than as a finding tested against comparative evidence.

2.2 The “killer ape”

In the 1950s, the anatomist Raymond Dart (1953) interpreted broken animal bones at South African cave sites as the weapons and meals of early hominins. He argued that predation and violence had driven the transition from ape to human. The playwright Robert Ardrey (1961) carried this “killer ape” image to a mass readership in African Genesis.

Later taphonomic work changed the picture. C. K. Brain (1981) showed that leopards, hyenas and other carnivores had accumulated many of these bones. Some early hominins at these sites had been prey rather than predators.

Box 4 · Taphonomy Taphonomy is the study of what happens to remains between death and discovery. Carnivores, water, trampling and decay all move and break bones. Taphonomists read tooth marks, cut marks and breakage patterns to work out who, or what, created a bone assemblage.

 

2.3 Chicago, 1966

In April 1966, Richard Lee and Irven DeVore convened the Man the Hunter symposium at the University of Chicago. The published volume (Lee & DeVore, 1968) became a landmark. Its editors noted that people had lived as hunter-gatherers for more than 99% of human history, which made foragers central to understanding human nature.

Two chapters gave the hunter narrative its classic form. Sherwood Washburn and C. S. Lancaster (1968) argued that human intellect, emotions and social life were evolutionary products of hunting. Hunting, in their account, produced the sexual division of labour, food sharing, the home base and the pair bond. William Laughlin (1968) described hunting as the integrating behaviour that organised human biology and culture.

The archaeologist Glynn Isaac (1978) later built a related “home base” model. In it, early hominins carried food back to a central place, where males shared meat and females shared plant foods.

2.4 A contradiction inside the book

The same volume held data that pointed another way. Lee’s (1968) study of the !Kung (Ju/’hoansi) of the Kalahari found that plant foods made up 60–80% of the diet by weight. Men’s and women’s work effort was roughly equal, yet women supplied two to three times as much food by weight. In Lee’s cross-cultural sample of 58 foraging societies, about half relied mainly on gathering, around a third on fishing and roughly a sixth on hunting.

Lee’s generalisation was itself contested. Also drawing on the Ethnographic Atlas, Carol Ember (1978) argued that Lee had reduced the share of North American cases, where hunting and fishing matter most, and so overstated gathering. In Ember’s sample, fishing was the most important activity in 38% of societies, gathering in 30% and hunting in 25%; men contributed more to subsistence than women in 83%. Cordain et al. (2000) later estimated that 73% of documented foraging societies obtained more than half their subsistence from animal foods. That figure describes what people ate, not who obtained it, so it is not a measure of men’s share of food production. Latitude explains much of the disagreement: gathering dominates in the tropics, while hunting and fishing dominate towards the poles (Lee, 1968; Kelly, 2013).

That debate already hinted at the central point of this article. “Hunters” and “gatherers” were never uniform categories, and the balance between them shifted with the environment.

Figure 1. Key works in the history of the “man the hunter, woman the gatherer” idea. The phases overlap: systematic testing began in the 1970s, alongside the feminist critique.

3. The counter-narrative: woman the gatherer

If hunting built humanity, what were women doing for those two million years? From the 1970s, a new generation of anthropologists asked exactly that question.

3.1 Who was in the room?

Earlier researchers had already shown that women’s work was more varied than the hunter narrative implied. In Aboriginal Woman, Phyllis Kaberry (1939) documented the economic and ritual lives of Aboriginal women in the Kimberley region of Australia. She described them as active producers, not dependants.

Yet much ethnography had been written by men, who often had limited access to women’s daily activities. Margaret Conkey and Janet Spector (1984) argued that archaeology, too, had projected modern gender roles onto the past without testing them.

Box 5 · Androcentrism Androcentrism means centring men’s experiences and activities as the norm. In research, it can show up as questions asked only about men, or as data on women that go unrecorded. Recognising it does not settle what happened in the past; it marks where evidence may be missing.

 

3.2 Sally Slocum’s challenge

In an essay first presented in 1970, Sally Slocum (1975) proposed that the earliest human inventions were probably containers. These would carry gathered food and infants, not kill game. She argued that sharing between mothers and their offspring, rather than male hunting partnerships, formed the core of early human social life.

Elizabeth Fisher (1979) developed a similar argument. The first cultural device, she suggested, was likely a bag, sling or net for carrying.

3.3 Tanner and Zihlman’s model

Nancy Tanner and Adrienne Zihlman (1976) offered a full evolutionary alternative. In their model, early hominin females gathered plant foods with simple tools and shared them with their young. This put selective pressure on intelligence, tool use and cooperation. Zihlman (1978) extended the model to subsistence and social organisation among early hominins.

3.4 Woman the Gatherer, 1981

The title of Frances Dahlberg’s (1981) edited volume deliberately answered Man the Hunter. Its chapters documented women’s food production across foraging societies. One chapter, by Agnes Estioko-Griffin and P. Bion Griffin (1981), described Agta women in the Philippines who hunted deer and wild pig.

Patricia Draper (1975) had already shown that women’s status among the !Kung depended on context. In mobile bush camps, women’s gathering gave them autonomy and influence. In settled villages, the gap between men’s and women’s roles widened.

3.5 A critique of both models

Linda Fedigan (1986), reviewing these debates, made an even-handed point. Both “man the hunter” and “woman the gatherer” picked a single activity and made it the engine of human evolution. Neither model was tested against a large body of systematic data.

That testing came from two directions. Cross-cultural surveys measured who did what across hundreds of societies. Detailed field studies measured how much food each sex actually produced. The next section turns to those numbers.

4. Counting the world: what the cross-cultural record shows

Surveys of hundreds of societies give a consistent answer on one point. Where a division of labour is recorded, hunting is mostly done by men and plant gathering mostly by women. The surveys disagree far more on how much each sex contributes to the diet.

4.1 Coding the world’s societies

In the 1960s, George Peter Murdock began compiling the Ethnographic Atlas, a coded summary of the world’s documented societies (Murdock, 1967) that eventually grew to more than a thousand cases. Murdock and Caterina Provost (1973) then coded who performed 50 different tasks across 185 societies of all kinds, from foragers to farmers. They found that some tasks, such as hunting large land animals, were assigned to men almost everywhere. Others, such as gathering wild plant foods, leaned towards women.

Box 6 · The Ethnographic Atlas and D-PLACE The Ethnographic Atlas turns written ethnographies into standard codes. For each society, coders rated who did each task, from “males alone” to “females alone”. Today the codes are freely available through D-PLACE, a public database of more than 1,400 societies (Kirby et al., 2016). Codes summarise what ethnographers reported. They cannot record what ethnographers did not see or did not write down.

 

For this article, the Atlas codes were filtered to 236 societies that drew no more than 5% of their food from farming and no more than 5% from herding. This is close to, though not identical with, the common convention that foragers obtain at least 90% of their food from wild resources (Venkataraman et al., 2024). Figure 2 shows who hunted, fished and gathered in those societies.

Figure 2. Sex allocation of hunting, fishing and gathering in forager societies of the Ethnographic Atlas. Societies where a task was absent or unrecorded are excluded from that bar. Selection rules and sensitivity checks are given in the Appendix. Source: computed for this article from D-PLACE.

Three cautions apply. First, 203 of the 236 societies are in the Americas, most of them in North America, and 206 lie above 30° latitude. Second, each code is a single summary label. A society where women sometimes hunt small game can still be coded “males alone” if men did nearly all of it. Third, the Atlas was compiled from older ethnographies that often under-recorded women’s work, a bias acknowledged even by defenders of the conventional view (Venkataraman et al., 2024).

4.2 Who brings home the calories?

Richard Lee’s (1968) !Kung data suggested that women’s gathering fed most foragers. Hillard Kaplan and colleagues (2000) tested this by compiling every forager study they could find in which food production by each sex had been weighed or estimated.

Figure 3. Men’s share of the calories and protein produced by adults in nine foraging societies. The !Kung figures are from Lee’s 1964 sample. Source: Kaplan et al. (2000), Table 2.

Kaplan et al. (2000) also questioned Lee’s !Kung figures. Lee’s sample covered 28 days in a single month of 1964. A longer study by John Yellen, covering all months, recorded twice as much meat per day.

The compilation has its own limits. Several entries rest on assumptions: for the Onge of the Andaman Islands, for example, the authors assumed men obtained all pigs, turtles, fish and honey, and women all crabs, shellfish and plants. Men’s share of protein was even higher than their share of calories in most cases. Among the !Kung and Gwi of the Kalahari, women supplied more calories than men.

Box 7 · Calories versus protein Plant foods such as tubers and nuts are often reliable sources of energy (calories). Meat supplies dense protein and fat. A society’s diet can depend on women for most calories and on men for most protein, as Kaplan et al.’s (2000) Gwi figures show. “Who feeds the group?” therefore has more than one answer.

 

4.3 Environment shapes the pattern

Why do the societies differ so much? Latitude is a large part of the answer. Lewis Binford (2001) compiled subsistence data for 339 foraging societies, with each group’s dependence on gathering, hunting and fishing as a percentage.

Figure 4. Average dependence on gathering, hunting and fishing by latitude band. Bands above 60° are combined because only five societies lie above 70°. Each society counts equally in the averages (see Appendix). Source: Binford (2001), via D-PLACE; band averages computed for this article.

In Binford’s data, “fishing” covers all aquatic foods, including shellfish, which women often collect. Near the poles, therefore, women’s labour does not vanish; it shifts to fishing, processing hides, making clothing and preserving food.

Frank Marlowe (2007) found a related pattern. The division of labour was weaker in less seasonal, more productive habitats, where men did more gathering. Robert Kelly (2013) likewise stresses that foraging economies vary along a spectrum rather than falling into one type.

4.4 Two benchmark societies

The Ju/’hoansi (!Kung) of the Kalahari are the classic case for women’s provisioning. Women gathered mongongo nuts, roots and fruits, and men hunted with bows and poisoned arrows (Lee, 1968, 1979).

The Hadza of Tanzania show a similar split. Women dig tubers, collect berries and process baobab; men hunt with bows and poisoned arrows and collect honey (Hawkes et al., 1997; Marlowe, 2010). Hadza grandmothers are notably productive foragers, a finding at the root of the “grandmother hypothesis” of human longevity (Hawkes et al., 1997).

Both societies show a clear division of labour. Neither shows women confined to camp or men as the sole providers.

5. Societies that blur the line

The averages hide striking cases. In some societies women hunt regularly; in others they shape hunts in ways that coding schemes do not count. In still others, the division is sharp. This section visits each kind.

5.1 The Agta of the Philippines

Among the Agta of northeastern Luzon, Agnes Estioko-Griffin and P. Bion Griffin (1981) documented women hunting deer and wild pig. Women hunted with dogs and machetes, and sometimes with bows, often in groups. Goodman et al. (1985) examined whether hunting conflicted with motherhood among the Agta and concluded that the two were compatible.

The Agta became the standard counterexample to the hunter narrative. They show that women’s hunting is possible within a foraging economy. They do not, on their own, show how common it is.

5.2 The Aka of Central Africa: hunting with nets

Among one group of Aka foragers in the Central African Republic, Andrew Noss and Barry Hewlett (2001) found that women net-hunted more frequently than men. They identified the conditions that made this possible. Game was abundant and women’s returns were high. Animals were caught together, in group hunts. Women had access to the nets. Male control over women’s activities was minimal, and girls learned hunting skills while growing up.

Box 8 · Net hunting In a communal net hunt, families string nets end to end through the forest. Other participants then drive small antelopes and other animals towards the nets by beating the undergrowth and shouting. The method rewards numbers and coordination rather than individual strength or long-range pursuit, which is one reason women and children can take part.

 

Figure 5. Reconstruction of a communal net hunt, seen from above. People are drawn without sex markers because roles differ between groups and hunts. Schematic drawn for this article after Noss & Hewlett (2001) and Anderson et al. (2023).

The picture is not uniform even among the Aka. In another Aka group, Kitanishi (1995) recorded women joining hunts on about 20% of observation days, compared with 65% for men. In the Ituri Forest, Bailey and Aunger (1989) found that women’s work differed between net-hunting Sua communities and bow-hunting Efe communities.

5.3 The Martu of Western Australia: fire and lizards

In Australia’s Western Desert, Martu women hunt sand monitor lizards (goannas) and other small game. Rebecca Bliege Bird and Douglas Bird (2008) found that women favoured prey with reliable daily returns. Men more often pursued larger, less predictable prey such as kangaroo and bustard.

Box 9 · Hunting with fire Martu hunters burn patches of spinifex grass. Burning clears the ground and exposes the tracks and burrows of lizards, which hunters then dig out (Bliege Bird & Bird, 2008). The technique turns hunting into a search-and-dig task.

 

5.4 The Matses of the Peruvian Amazon

Steven Romanoff (1983) reported that Matses women regularly took part in hunts, helping to find and kill game. The Matses also farm, so they are better described as horticulturalists who hunt than as foragers (Venkataraman et al., 2024). Their case still shows that women’s participation in hunting can be routine rather than exceptional.

5.5 Northern hunters and “invisible” hunting work

Some contributions fall outside the label “hunting”. Among the Ojibwa of the Great Lakes region, Ruth Landes (1938) described women who trapped and snared small game, and a few who hunted large animals. Landes presented these hunters as exceptions, whom other women regarded as extraordinary (Landes, 1938, p. 136). Among the Chipewyan of subarctic Canada, Brumbach and Jarvenpa (1997) found that women’s hunting changed over the life cycle.

In the Kalahari, Biesele and Barclay (2001) described Ju/’hoan women whose tracking skills contributed to their husbands’ hunting success. Their observations came from fieldwork in 1995, and the authors left open whether such husband-and-wife cooperation was recent or long-standing. Among the Iñupiat of Alaska, Barbara Bodenhorn (1990) recorded that a successful whaler could credit his wife with the catch. In Iñupiat thought, the animal gives itself to the household, not to the man alone.

5.6 Societies with a sharp division

Other societies fit the classic pattern closely. Among the Aché of Paraguay, men spent an average of 110 minutes a day in active pursuit of game, compared with about three minutes for women (Hill et al., 1985; Hurtado et al., 1985). Aché women often captured burrowing animals but usually called men when they found more mobile prey (Gurven & Hill, 2009).

In South Asia, the Andaman Islanders offer a well-documented case. Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1922) described men hunting pigs and turtles, while women gathered roots and fruits, collected shellfish and fished with hand nets.

Even where men dominate hunting, women often hunt “otherwise”. Reyes-García et al. (2020) found that Tsimane’ women in Bolivia and Baka women in Cameroon took part in subsistence hunting, but with different techniques and in different social settings from men.

 

5.7 Forms of participation at a glance

Table 1

Women’s contributions to hunting in ten societies, grouped by type of contribution.

Society	Region	Type of contribution	What the sources describe	Source
Agta	Philippines	Direct hunting	Women hunted deer and wild pig with dogs, machetes and sometimes bows, often in groups	Estioko-Griffin & Griffin (1981)
Martu	Western Australia	Direct hunting	Women hunt lizards and other small game by burning and digging	Bliege Bird & Bird (2008)
Ojibwa	Great Lakes, North America	Direct hunting, exceptional	Women trapped and snared small game; a few hunted large animals and were seen as exceptional	Landes (1938)
Aka (one group)	Central African Republic	Collaborative hunting	Women took part in communal net hunts more often than men	Noss & Hewlett (2001)
Matses	Peruvian Amazon (a farming society)	Collaborative hunting	Women joined hunts, helping to find and kill game	Romanoff (1983)
Ju/’hoansi	Kalahari	Tracking and logistics	Women’s tracking aided their husbands’ hunts; men did the hunting	Lee (1979); Biesele & Barclay (2001)
Iñupiat	Alaska	Household-level contribution	Wives credited with a household’s whaling success	Bodenhorn (1990)
Hadza	Tanzania	Little or no hunting by women	Men hunt; women dig tubers and collect berries	Marlowe (2010)
Aché	Paraguay	Little or no hunting by women	Women spent about 3 minutes a day in pursuit; they took burrowing animals	Hurtado et al. (1985)
Andaman Islanders	Andaman Islands	Little or no hunting by women	Men hunted pigs and turtles; women gathered, collected shellfish and fished with nets	Radcliffe-Brown (1922)

 

The table groups societies by the kind of contribution women made rather than ranking them, because the sources do not measure frequency in a common way. No single row represents “the” foraging way of life.

6. Evidence from the ground: archaeology and the body

Ethnography covers roughly the last two centuries. To reach further back, researchers turn to graves, tools and skeletons. This evidence is older but harder to read.

6.1 Reading the dead

A grave records a funeral, not a biography. Mourners may bury a person with tools they used, tools they owned, gifts, or objects with symbolic meaning. Anderson et al. (2023) argued that archaeologists have readily read weapons in male graves as hunting gear, while treating the same objects in female graves more cautiously.

Box 10 · How do archaeologists tell a skeleton’s sex? Traditional methods read the shape of the pelvis and skull, which differ on average between females and males. Newer methods read molecules. Ancient DNA can identify sex chromosomes. Peptide analysis of tooth enamel detects forms of the protein amelogenin that are coded on the X and Y chromosomes. Molecular methods work even when bones are fragmentary or the individual died young.

 

6.2 A female burial with a hunting toolkit at Wilamaya Patjxa

In 2018, archaeologists working with the local Aymara community excavated burials at Wilamaya Patjxa, a high-altitude site in the Peruvian Andes (Haas et al., 2020). One burial, known as WMP6, dated to about 9,000 years ago. It held a person aged 17 to 19, buried with a toolkit of stone projectile points and tools for butchering and processing animals.

The skeleton’s bones suggested a female, and analysis of proteins in the tooth enamel confirmed it. Stable isotopes in the bones indicated a diet that included meat. Large mammal bones were also found in the burial fill.

Figure 6. The WMP6 toolkit grouped by function. One large cobble served as both choper and smoothing stone, so the categories total 25 for 24 artefacts. The burial layout is simplified. Counts and functions from Haas et al. (2020).

Haas et al. (2020) then asked whether WMP6 was an exception. They reviewed 429 burials from 107 sites across the Americas dating to the late Pleistocene and early Holocene. Of these, 27 sexed individuals were buried with big-game hunting tools: 11 female and 16 male. On that basis, they estimated that females made up between 30% and 50% of big-game hunters in these early populations. That estimate assumes that people buried with hunting tools hunted in life, and that these 27 burials represent the wider population.

Other specialists welcomed the find but urged caution. The archaeologist Patricia Lambert noted that it is uncertain whether the burial sample reflects how often women actually hunted (Bower, 2020). The anthropologist Kim Hill questioned whether WMP6 hunted in life at all, since tools may be placed in graves for symbolic reasons (Wei-Haas, 2020). Haas et al. (2020) themselves acknowledged that big-game hunting is strongly male-biased among recent foragers. Their claim concerns the early Americas, not foragers in general. They also reported that only WMP6 met their strictest criteria for date, sex and tool association. At the later Indian Knoll site in Kentucky, spear-throwers accompanied 17 female and 63 male burials, which they read as a sign that hunting later became male-biased.

6.3 Bones that record work

Repeated activity leaves marks on the skeleton, especially where muscles attach. Sébastien Villotte and colleagues (2010) studied these attachment sites in Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Europeans. Males more often showed right-sided changes at the elbow consistent with repeated throwing, which the authors linked to the use of projectile weapons.

Box 11 · Activity markers Entheses are the places where tendons and ligaments attach to bone. Heavy, repeated use can roughen or damage them. Bioarchaeologists compare these marks between groups to infer differences in habitual activity. The method is indirect: similar marks can arise from different activities, and age and body size also affect them.

 

Bones also show that women’s work was physically demanding. Alison Macintosh and colleagues (2017) found that the arm bones of women from early farming communities in Central Europe were stronger than those of modern female rowing champions. That study concerns farmers, not foragers, but it shows how invisible women’s heavy labour can be in conventional narratives.

6.4 When did the division begin?

Steven Kuhn and Mary Stiner (2006) compared Neanderthal and early modern human sites in Eurasia. Neanderthal diets centred on large game, with few signs of small animals or plant processing. Kuhn and Stiner proposed that Neanderthal women and juveniles probably took part in large-game hunting. A more elaborate division of labour, they argued, appeared with Upper Palaeolithic modern humans, whose diets were broader.

Sarah Lacy and Cara Ocobock (2024) reviewed tools, diet, art, skeletons and burials. They concluded that there is little archaeological evidence for a strict sexual division of labour in the Palaeolithic. A companion paper argued that female physiology is well suited to endurance activities such as long-distance hunting (Ocobock & Lacy, 2024a). Martin et al. (2024) disputed this, arguing that the paper offers no testable hypotheses and overlooks the energetic costs of reproduction; Ocobock and Lacy (2024b) have replied.

These papers concern capacity and the absence of evidence for strict roles. They do not establish how much hunting women did in any particular past society. Vivek Venkataraman, lead author of a critique discussed in Section 7, has said that the timing is unknown. The division seen in recent foragers may date back tens of thousands of years, or as far as two million (Dolan, 2024).

7. The 2023–2024 debate: how often did women hunt?

In June 2023, a short paper in PLOS ONE reported that women hunted in 79% of foraging societies. It drew wide media attention. Within a year, fifteen hunter-gatherer specialists published a detailed rebuttal. The exchange shows how much the answer depends on what is counted, and how.

7.1 The claim

Abigail Anderson and colleagues (2023) began with 391 foraging societies listed in D-PLACE. They searched the ethnographic sources for each and found explicit information on hunting for 63. Of those 63, 50 had records of women hunting.

The authors went further. Of 41 societies with information on intent, 36 (87%) described women’s hunting as intentional rather than opportunistic. Of 45 with information on prey size, women hunted large game in 15 (33%), though the study did not define large game by weight; the critics later applied a common zooarchaeological cut-off of 45 kg (Venkataraman et al., 2024). The authors concluded that the male-hunter, female-gatherer paradigm should be revised.

7.2 The critique

Vivek Venkataraman and fourteen co-authors (2024), many of them long-term fieldworkers among foragers, re-examined the data. They reported four main problems:

•       Sample selection. Societies entered the sample only if sources discussed hunting explicitly. Of the 63, 22 came from outside D-PLACE without explanation, and 18 of those 22 were coded as having women hunters. Some farming societies, such as the Matses and the Iroquois, were also counted as foragers.

•       Coding. They reported numerous coding errors. Re-reading the original sources, they judged that 8 of the 50 societies coded as having women hunters showed no evidence of it, or evidence against it, and that in a further 8 women hunted only rarely. Some fishing had also been coded as hunting.

•       Binary measurement. A society counted as one where women hunt whether women did so daily or once in a recorded lifetime.

•       Non-independence. Related neighbouring groups were counted as separate cases, which can inflate totals.

Figure 7. Estimates of how often women hunt, from different samples and thresholds. The first two bars in each group use the same 63 societies, coded by the original authors and by their critics.

Box 12 · Galton’s problem In 1889, the statistician Francis Galton pointed out a flaw in cross-cultural comparison (see Tylor, 1889). Neighbouring or related societies often share customs because they borrowed them or inherited them from a common ancestor. Counting them as independent cases can make a pattern look more widespread than it is. Cross-cultural researchers now use sampling designs and statistical controls to address it.

 

The critics also made a conceptual point. They argued that a narrow focus on hunting “diminishes” contributions that take other forms, and warned against projecting Western ideas about which work is valuable onto foraging societies (Venkataraman et al., 2024).

7.3 What both sides accept

The two sides agree on more than the headlines suggested. Both reject the idea that women never hunt. The critics explicitly credit Anderson et al. (2023) with correcting that misconception.

The critics’ own recount also cuts both ways. Within the same 63 societies, they found women hunting sometimes or frequently in 35 (56%), but regularly hunting big game in only 9 (14%), against 17 in the original coding. They stress that these figures describe a biased sample, not foragers in general. In a separate synthesis of 40 small-scale societies, only three, the Baka, Tsimane and Martu, showed evidence of women’s hunting (Koster et al., 2020, as cited in Venkataraman et al., 2024).

Venkataraman has distinguished two meanings of “Man the Hunter” (Dolan, 2024). The first, that male hunting drove human evolution, he describes as outdated. The second, that men do most of the hunting in foraging societies, he describes as well supported. Much public confusion, in his view, comes from treating the two as one claim.

In 2024, Anderson et al. published a correction to their paper. It added methodological detail and a data table with page references to the sources used (Anderson et al., 2024).

7.4 Other estimates

Earlier and later studies give different numbers because they ask different questions. Michael Gurven and Kim Hill (2009) estimated that women hunted in 13 of 179 foraging societies, or 7.3% (as cited in Hoffman et al., 2023).

Jordie Hoffman, Kyle Farquharson and Venkataraman (2023) searched the Human Relations Area Files for conditions linked to women’s hunting. They found support for two predictions. Women hunted more where low-risk game lived near camp, where dogs were used, or where hunting was done in groups. They also hunted more where they played essential roles in tracking, locating or logistics. Cultural restrictions on women’s use of weapons appeared in about half the cases; even there, women often used other tools or filled other roles.

Table 2

The two positions in the 2023–2024 debate compared.

Question	Anderson et al. (2023)	Venkataraman et al. (2024)
Unit counted	Societies with any record of women hunting	Frequency and context of women’s hunting
Sample	63 of 391 societies with explicit hunting data	Argued the selection favoured atypical cases
Headline result	Women hunt in 79% of societies	Gendered divisions of labour are real in every known forager society
Big game	Women hunted large game in 33% of societies with data	On recount, regular big-game hunting by women in 9 of 63 (14%)
Shared ground	Women do hunt in many societies	Women sometimes hunt; the “never” view is wrong

 

The debate has not produced a single agreed percentage. Its lasting contribution may be methodological: future studies will need to measure how much hunting women do, not only whether they ever do.

8. Why divide labour at all?

If women can hunt, why do men do most of the hunting in most recorded foraging societies? Researchers have proposed several explanations. They are not mutually exclusive, and each fits some societies better than others.

Figure 8. The main explanations for the sexual division of labour. They are complementary rather than competing; their relative weight differs between societies.

8.1 Compatibility with childcare

Judith Brown (1970) argued that women’s work in many societies is shaped by its compatibility with caring for young children. Compatible tasks can be interrupted and resumed, do not demand intense concentration, do not put children in danger, and do not require long trips from home. Gathering often fits these conditions; long-distance pursuit of large game often does not.

The Agta and Aka cases test this idea. Where hunting takes place close to camp, in groups, or with nets and dogs, it becomes more compatible with childcare, and women hunt more (Goodman et al., 1985; Noss & Hewlett, 2001). Anderson et al. (2023) also recorded women hunting with children present in 18 of 36 societies with intentional hunting.

8.2 Bodies and physiology

On average, men have greater upper-body strength, while pregnancy and breastfeeding impose large energetic costs on women. Wendy Wood and Alice Eagly (2002) proposed a biosocial model. In it, these physical differences interact with ecology and social organisation to produce a division of labour, rather than fixing it directly.

Ocobock and Lacy (2024a) emphasised a different side of physiology. They argued that oestrogen-related fat metabolism and other traits may give females advantages in endurance. Critics respond that endurance alone says little about who hunted, given the energetic demands of pregnancy and nursing and the years of practice that skilled hunting requires (Martin et al., 2024). Whatever their emphasis, these models treat biology as setting trade-offs, not fixed rules.

8.3 Provisioning and complementary skills

Kaplan et al. (2000) proposed that human foraging relies on skill-intensive foods that take years to master. In their view, men specialise in hunting, which pays off late in life, and women in extracting plant foods, while sharing supports children through a long dependency. Gurven and Hill (2009) defended the view that men hunt mainly to provision their families.

8.4 Risk, reliability and status

Another group of researchers focuses on risk. Large-game hunting often fails on any given day but yields big rewards when it succeeds. Kristen Hawkes (1991) proposed that men pursue such prey partly to “show off”, gaining social status and mating opportunities from widely shared meat.

Among the Martu, Bliege Bird and Bird (2008) found that women prefer reliable returns that feed children every day, while men more often accept high-variance strategies. On this view, the division follows from different priorities, not different abilities.

Box 13 · Costly signalling Costly signalling theory holds that some behaviours persist because they are hard to fake. A hunter who repeatedly brings down large, dangerous prey displays skill and health to the whole community. The meat itself may be shared widely, while the hunter gains reputation (Hawkes, 1991).

 

8.5 Culture, ideology and taboo

Some divisions are maintained by rules rather than by costs. Robert Brightman (1996) reviewed taboos that prohibit women from touching weapons or handling certain game. He argued that cultural ideology plays a major role in sustaining the sexual division of foraging labour. Noss and Hewlett (2001) likewise found that minimal male control over women’s activities was one condition for frequent female hunting among the Aka.

8.6 A view from our closest relatives

Chimpanzees do not form pair bonds or regularly provision their young. Yet among wild chimpanzees, males hunt much more often than females. Gilby et al. (2017) found no evidence that clinging infants prevented females from hunting. They suggested that some sex difference in hunting may predate the human division of labour itself.

Taken together, these models suggest that the division of labour arises from several pressures at once. Their relative weight shifts with environment, technology and social rules, which is why the pattern varies so widely.

9. Synthesis: what the evidence supports

The evidence reviewed here rejects the strict version of “man the hunter, woman the gatherer” but confirms a real, flexible division of labour. The table sets out common claims and how the evidence bears on each.

 

Table 3

Common claims about the division of labour, weighed against the evidence.

Claim	Verdict	Main evidence
In every foraging society, men only hunted and women only gathered	Not supported	Women hunt among the Agta, Aka, Martu and others; men collect honey and plant foods (Estioko-Griffin & Griffin, 1981; Noss & Hewlett, 2001; Bliege Bird & Bird, 2008)
All documented foraging societies show some sexual division of labour	Supported	Ethnographic Atlas forager codes (Figure 2); specialist review (Venkataraman et al., 2024)
Men do most large-game hunting among recent foragers	Supported	Ethnographic Atlas codes (Figure 2); Gurven & Hill (2009); Venkataraman et al. (2024)
Women hunt in a majority of foraging societies	Unresolved	79% in one sample (Anderson et al., 2023); 56% at least sometimes on the critics’ recount of that sample, and 3 of 40 in another synthesis (Venkataraman et al., 2024)
Women’s gathering supplies most food in most foraging societies	Partly supported	True in many low-latitude societies (Lee, 1968); not at high latitudes or in several tropical cases (Kaplan et al., 2000; Binford, 2001)
Male hunting alone drove human evolution	Not supported	Single-cause models lack support (Fedigan, 1986); recent syntheses stress complementary contributions by both sexes (Kaplan et al., 2000; Venkataraman et al., 2024)
Women were unable to hunt (a popular belief)	Not supported	Ethnographic cases (Section 5); called categorically false by Venkataraman et al. (2024)
A strict division of labour existed throughout the Palaeolithic	Unresolved	Evidence points in different directions (Kuhn & Stiner, 2006; Villotte et al., 2010; Haas et al., 2020; Lacy & Ocobock, 2024)
The division varies with ecology, technology and social rules	Supported	Marlowe (2007); Noss & Hewlett (2001); Hoffman et al. (2023); Binford (2001)

 

9.1 Three lessons

First, the categories need care. “Hunting” can mean stalking big game with a spear, beating bushes towards a net, tracking, or digging a lizard from its burrow. “Gathering” can include shellfish, insects and small animals. Claims about who hunts depend heavily on these definitions.

Second, the unit of measurement matters. “Women hunt in this society” and “women do much of the hunting in this society” are different claims. Most of the recent disagreement turns on that difference.

Third, recent foragers are a guide, not a mirror. Their lives were shaped by particular environments, technologies and histories, including contact with farmers, states and colonial economies (Kelly, 2013). The deep past may have differed, as the early American burials suggest (Haas et al., 2020).

10. Conclusion: redrawing the diorama

Return to the textbook scene from the introduction. What would an image faithful to the evidence look like?

It would not be one scene but many. In the Kalahari, women would return with mongongo nuts and roots while men tracked game with poisoned arrows. In a Central African forest, women and men would stretch nets between the trees and drive antelopes towards them together. In the Western Desert, women would burn spinifex and dig out goannas. On an Arctic coast, men would hunt seals while women processed skins into the clothing that made the hunt possible (Issenman, 1997). On an Andean plateau nine thousand years ago, a young woman would be buried with a big-game hunting toolkit.

Among the societies documented by ethnographers, one pattern holds. Men and women usually did different work, and men usually did most of the hunting of large animals. Whether the same held in the deep past remains open. Around that pattern, the variation is wide. It follows the environment, the available technology, the demands of childcare, and the rules each society set for itself.

The history of the idea matters too. “Man the hunter” was built from Victorian assumptions and a handful of fossil interpretations before systematic data existed. Its critics corrected real blind spots. The most recent research has moved beyond both slogans, towards measuring what people actually did, how often, and why.

Several questions remain open. When did the division of labour seen in recent foragers emerge? How often did women hunt in the deep past? How should researchers weigh the many forms of work, from processing hides to tracking, that fall outside the word “hunting”? New methods, from protein-based sex estimation to systematic re-coding of ethnographic archives, are now being applied to these questions.

For readers who use the past to think about the present, the evidence offers a modest lesson. Human societies have organised work in many ways. No single foraging arrangement serves as a universal template.

References

Anderson, A., Chilczuk, S., Nelson, K., Ruther, R., & Wall-Scheffler, C. (2023). The myth of man the hunter: Women’s contribution to the hunt across ethnographic contexts. PLOS ONE, 18(6), e0287101. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0287101

Anderson, A., Chilczuk, S., Nelson, K., Ruther, R., & Wall-Scheffler, C. (2024). Correction: The myth of man the hunter: Women’s contribution to the hunt across ethnographic contexts. PLOS ONE, 19(8), e0309543. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0309543

Ardrey, R. (1961). African genesis: A personal investigation into the animal origins and nature of man. Atheneum.

Bailey, R. C., & Aunger, R. (1989). Net hunters vs. archers: Variation in women’s subsistence strategies in the Ituri Forest. Human Ecology, 17(3), 273–297.

Biesele, M., & Barclay, S. (2001). Ju/’hoan women’s tracking knowledge and its contribution to their husbands’ hunting success. African Study Monographs, Supplementary Issue 26, 67–84.

Binford, L. R. (2001). Constructing frames of reference: An analytical method for archaeological theory building using hunter-gatherer and environmental data sets. University of California Press.

Bliege Bird, R., & Bird, D. W. (2008). Why women hunt: Risk and contemporary foraging in a Western Desert Aboriginal community. Current Anthropology, 49(4), 655–693.

Bodenhorn, B. (1990). “I’m not the great hunter, my wife is”: Iñupiat and anthropological models of gender. Études/Inuit/Studies, 14(1–2), 55–74.

Bower, B. (2020, November 4). Female big-game hunters may have been surprisingly common in the ancient Americas. Science News. https://www.sciencenews.org/?p=3093228

Brain, C. K. (1981). The hunters or the hunted? An introduction to African cave taphonomy. University of Chicago Press.

Brightman, R. (1996). The sexual division of foraging labor: Biology, taboo, and gender politics. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 38(4), 687–729.

Brown, J. K. (1970). A note on the division of labor by sex. American Anthropologist, 72(5), 1073–1078.

Brumbach, H. J., & Jarvenpa, R. (1997). Woman the hunter: Ethnoarchaeological lessons from Chipewyan life-cycle dynamics. In C. Claassen & R. A. Joyce (Eds.), Women in prehistory: North America and Mesoamerica (pp. 17–32). University of Pennsylvania Press.

Conkey, M. W., & Spector, J. D. (1984). Archaeology and the study of gender. Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory, 7, 1–38.

Cordain, L., Miller, J. B., Eaton, S. B., Mann, N., Holt, S. H. A., & Speth, J. D. (2000). Plant-animal subsistence ratios and macronutrient energy estimations in worldwide hunter-gatherer diets. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 71(3), 682–692.

Dahlberg, F. (Ed.). (1981). Woman the gatherer. Yale University Press.

Dart, R. A. (1953). The predatory transition from ape to man. International Anthropological and Linguistic Review, 1(4), 201–218.

Darwin, C. (1871). The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex. John Murray.

Dolan, E. W. (2024, May 14). Scientists say media storm around “Myth of Man the Hunter” study was unjustified and misleading. PsyPost. https://www.psypost.org/scientists-say-media-storm-around-myth-of-man-the-hunter-study-was-unjustified-and-misleading/

Draper, P. (1975). !Kung women: Contrasts in sexual egalitarianism in foraging and sedentary contexts. In R. R. Reiter (Ed.), Toward an anthropology of women (pp. 77–109). Monthly Review Press.

Ember, C. R. (1978). Myths about hunter-gatherers. Ethnology, 17(4), 439–448.

Engels, F. (1972). The origin of the family, private property and the state (E. B. Leacock, Ed.). International Publishers. (Original work published 1884)

Estioko-Griffin, A., & Griffin, P. B. (1981). Woman the hunter: The Agta. In F. Dahlberg (Ed.), Woman the gatherer (pp. 121–151). Yale University Press.

Fedigan, L. M. (1986). The changing role of women in models of human evolution. Annual Review of Anthropology, 15, 25–66.

Fisher, E. (1979). Woman’s creation: Sexual evolution and the shaping of society. Anchor Press/Doubleday.

Gilby, I. C., Machanda, Z. P., O’Malley, R. C., Murray, C. M., Lonsdorf, E. V., Walker, K., Mjungu, D. C., Otali, E., Muller, M. N., Emery Thompson, M., Pusey, A. E., & Wrangham, R. W. (2017). Predation by female chimpanzees: Toward an understanding of sex differences in meat acquisition in the last common ancestor of Pan and Homo. Journal of Human Evolution, 110, 82–94. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2017.06.015

Goodman, M. J., Griffin, P. B., Estioko-Griffin, A. A., & Grove, J. S. (1985). The compatibility of hunting and mothering among the Agta hunter-gatherers of the Philippines. Sex Roles, 12(11–12), 1199–1209.

Gurven, M., & Hill, K. (2009). Why do men hunt? A reevaluation of “man the hunter” and the sexual division of labor. Current Anthropology, 50(1), 51–74. https://doi.org/10.1086/595620

Haas, R., Watson, J., Buonasera, T., Southon, J., Chen, J. C., Noe, S., Smith, K., Viviano Llave, C., Eerkens, J., & Parker, G. (2020). Female hunters of the early Americas. Science Advances, 6(45), eabd0310. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abd0310

Hawkes, K. (1991). Showing off: Tests of an hypothesis about men’s foraging goals. Ethology and Sociobiology, 12(1), 29–54.

Hawkes, K., O’Connell, J. F., & Blurton Jones, N. G. (1997). Hadza women’s time allocation, offspring provisioning, and the evolution of long postmenopausal life spans. Current Anthropology, 38(4), 551–577.

Hill, K., Kaplan, H., Hawkes, K., & Hurtado, A. M. (1985). Men’s time allocation to subsistence work among the Ache of eastern Paraguay. Human Ecology, 13(1), 29–47.

Hoffman, J., Farquharson, K., & Venkataraman, V. V. (2023). The ecological and social context of women’s hunting in small-scale societies. Hunter Gatherer Research. https://doi.org/10.3828/hgr.2023.8

Hublin, J.-J., Ben-Ncer, A., Bailey, S. E., Freidline, S. E., Neubauer, S., Skinner, M. M., Bergmann, I., Le Cabec, A., Benazzi, S., Harvati, K., & Gunz, P. (2017). New fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and the pan-African origin of Homo sapiens. Nature, 546(7657), 289–292.

Hurtado, A. M., Hawkes, K., Hill, K., & Kaplan, H. (1985). Female subsistence strategies among Ache hunter-gatherers of eastern Paraguay. Human Ecology, 13(1), 1–28.

Isaac, G. (1978). The food-sharing behavior of protohuman hominids. Scientific American, 238(4), 90–108.

Issenman, B. K. (1997). Sinews of survival: The living legacy of Inuit clothing. UBC Press.

Kaberry, P. M. (1939). Aboriginal woman: Sacred and profane. Routledge.

Kaplan, H., Hill, K., Lancaster, J., & Hurtado, A. M. (2000). A theory of human life history evolution: Diet, intelligence, and longevity. Evolutionary Anthropology, 9(4), 156–185.

Kelly, R. L. (2013). The lifeways of hunter-gatherers: The foraging spectrum (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.

Kirby, K. R., Gray, R. D., Greenhill, S. J., Jordan, F. M., Gomes-Ng, S., Bibiko, H.-J., Blasi, D. E., Botero, C. A., Bowern, C., Ember, C. R., Leehr, D., Low, B. S., McCarter, J., Divale, W., & Gavin, M. C. (2016). D-PLACE: A global database of cultural, linguistic and environmental diversity. PLOS ONE, 11(7), e0158391. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0158391

Kitanishi, K. (1995). Seasonal changes in the subsistence activities and food intake of the Aka hunter-gatherers in northeastern Congo. African Study Monographs, 16(2), 73–118.

Kuhn, S. L., & Stiner, M. C. (2006). What’s a mother to do? The division of labor among Neandertals and modern humans in Eurasia. Current Anthropology, 47(6), 953–981.

Lacy, S., & Ocobock, C. (2024). Woman the hunter: The archaeological evidence. American Anthropologist, 126(1), 19–31. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13914

Landes, R. (1938). The Ojibwa woman. Columbia University Press.

Laughlin, W. S. (1968). Hunting: An integrating biobehavior system and its evolutionary importance. In R. B. Lee & I. DeVore (Eds.), Man the hunter (pp. 304–320). Aldine.

Lee, R. B. (1968). What hunters do for a living, or, how to make out on scarce resources. In R. B. Lee & I. DeVore (Eds.), Man the hunter (pp. 30–48). Aldine.

Lee, R. B. (1979). The !Kung San: Men, women, and work in a foraging society. Cambridge University Press.

Lee, R. B., & DeVore, I. (Eds.). (1968). Man the hunter. Aldine.

Macintosh, A. A., Pinhasi, R., & Stock, J. T. (2017). Prehistoric women’s manual labor exceeded that of athletes through the first 5500 years of farming in Central Europe. Science Advances, 3(11), eaao3893.

Marlowe, F. W. (2007). Hunting and gathering: The human sexual division of foraging labor. Cross-Cultural Research, 41(2), 170–195. https://doi.org/10.1177/1069397106297529

Marlowe, F. W. (2010). The Hadza: Hunter-gatherers of Tanzania. University of California Press.

Martin, M., Núñez de la Mora, A., Valeggia, C., & Veile, A. (2024). Can women hunt? Yes. Did women contribute much to human evolution through endurance hunting? Probably not. American Anthropologist, 126(2). https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13970

Morgan, L. H. (1877). Ancient society. Henry Holt.

Murdock, G. P. (1967). Ethnographic atlas: A summary. Ethnology, 6(2), 109–236.

Murdock, G. P., & Provost, C. (1973). Factors in the division of labor by sex: A cross-cultural analysis. Ethnology, 12(2), 203–225.

Noss, A. J., & Hewlett, B. S. (2001). The contexts of female hunting in Central Africa. American Anthropologist, 103(4), 1024–1040.

Ocobock, C., & Lacy, S. (2024a). Woman the hunter: The physiological evidence. American Anthropologist, 126(1), 7–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13915

Ocobock, C., & Lacy, S. (2024b). Response to “Can women hunt? Yes. Did women contribute much to human evolution through endurance hunting? Probably not.” American Anthropologist, 126(2), 370–373.

Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1922). The Andaman Islanders. Cambridge University Press.

Reyes-García, V., Díaz-Reviriego, I., Duda, R., Fernández-Llamazares, Á., & Gallois, S. (2020). “Hunting otherwise”: Women’s hunting in two contemporary forager-horticulturalist societies. Human Nature, 31, 203–221. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-020-09375-4

Romanoff, S. (1983). Women as hunters among the Matses of the Peruvian Amazon. Human Ecology, 11(3), 339–343.

Slocum, S. (1975). Woman the gatherer: Male bias in anthropology. In R. R. Reiter (Ed.), Toward an anthropology of women (pp. 36–50). Monthly Review Press.

Tanner, N., & Zihlman, A. (1976). Women in evolution. Part I: Innovation and selection in human origins. Signs, 1(3), 585–608.

Tylor, E. B. (1889). On a method of investigating the development of institutions; applied to laws of marriage and descent. Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 18, 245–272.

Venkataraman, V. V., Hoffman, J., Farquharson, K., Davis, H. E., Hagen, E. H., Hames, R. B., Hewlett, B. S., Glowacki, L., Jang, H., Kelly, R., Kramer, K., Lew-Levy, S., Starkweather, K., Syme, K., & Stibbard-Hawkes, D. N. E. (2024). Female foragers sometimes hunt, yet gendered divisions of labor are real: A comment on Anderson et al. (2023) The Myth of Man the Hunter. Evolution and Human Behavior, 45(4), 106586. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2024.04.014

Villotte, S., Churchill, S. E., Dutour, O. J., & Henry-Gambier, D. (2010). Subsistence activities and the sexual division of labor in the European Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic: Evidence from upper limb enthesopathies. Journal of Human Evolution, 59(1), 35–43.

Washburn, S. L., & Lancaster, C. S. (1968). The evolution of hunting. In R. B. Lee & I. DeVore (Eds.), Man the hunter (pp. 293–303). Aldine.

Wei-Haas, M. (2020, November 4). Prehistoric female hunter discovery upends gender role assumptions. National Geographic. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/prehistoric-female-hunter-discovery-upends-gender-role-assumptions

Wood, W., & Eagly, A. H. (2002). A cross-cultural analysis of the behavior of women and men: Implications for the origins of sex differences. Psychological Bulletin, 128(5), 699–727.

Zihlman, A. L. (1978). Women in evolution, Part II: Subsistence and social organization among early hominids. Signs, 4(1), 4–20.

Data sources for original figures

Figures 2 and 4 were computed for this article from the D-PLACE CLDF dataset (Kirby et al., 2016); selection rules, sensitivity checks and supplementary files are described in the Appendix. Repository: github.com/D-PLACE/dplace-cldf, accessed 22 October 2026. Figure 2 uses Ethnographic Atlas variables EA004, EA005 and EA050–EA052 (Murdock, 1967); Figure 4 uses Binford (2001) variables B001–B003. Figures 1, 5, 6 and 8 are schematic drawings made for this article from the sources cited in their captions.

Appendix: data, methods and sensitivity checks

Figures 2 and 4 were computed from the D-PLACE CLDF dataset (Kirby et al., 2016), commit d82fbb6, accessed 22 October 2026. Two supplementary files accompany the article. File S1 lists every society used, with its codes (S1a for Figure 2, S1b for Figure 4). File S2 is a Python script that rebuilds both figures and the checks below from the public data.

A.1 Figure 2

The sample includes every Ethnographic Atlas society coded 0–5% for dependence on agriculture (EA005) and 0–5% for animal husbandry (EA004), giving 236 societies. For each task (hunting, EA051; fishing, EA052; gathering, EA050), societies coded as “absent”, “present, sex unspecified” or missing are excluded, so each bar has its own denominator: 232 for hunting, 167 for fishing and 197 for gathering. The Atlas codes for equal and for differentiated-but-equal participation are merged as “roughly equal”.

A.2 Figure 4

The sample includes all 339 societies with values for Binford’s (2001) dependence on gathering (B001), hunting (B002) and fishing (B003). Societies are grouped by absolute latitude, so northern and southern bands are combined. Each band value is an unweighted mean: every society counts equally, whatever its population. Because Binford’s percentages were rounded at source, a society’s three values sum to between 98% and 110%.

A.3 Sensitivity checks

Table A1

Figure 2 under alternative selection rules. Numbers in brackets are the societies coded for that task.

Check	Societies	Hunting male-led	Fishing male-led	Gathering female-led
Baseline: farming and herding each 5% or less	236	100% (232)	91% (167)	94% (197)
Relaxed: farming and herding each 15% or less	268	100% (259)	90% (186)	92% (222)
Baseline, excluding the Americas	33	100% (33)	75% (24)	93% (30)

 

The pattern in Figure 2 does not depend on the 5% threshold. Outside the Americas the sample shrinks to 33 societies; hunting and gathering keep the same pattern, while fishing is somewhat less male-dominated.

For Figure 4, using medians instead of means leaves the gradient intact: median dependence on gathering falls from 65% within 10° of the equator to 1% above 60°. Excluding the Americas leaves 103 societies and the same direction of change, from 73% to 4%. Only eight of those societies lie above 40° latitude, however, so the high-latitude values in Figure 4 rest mainly on societies in the Americas.