They've discovered the remains of a young woman in the Andes, from some 9000 years ago. Surprisingly, she was buried with hunting tools:
This woman, and others like her, suggest that we may have to change our view of the division of labour among our ancestors.
Rather than the women taking care of the gathering and the men doing the hunting, the find adds to evidence that in some hunter-gatherer societies there may have been a more equitable division of roles….
Archaeologists still generally assume that women and men would have had clearly defined roles in the past. This belief is strong enough that on occasion ambiguously sexed remains have been assumed to be male because of the grave goods buried alongside them.
There is a countervailing view that in tribes that relied on big-game hunting it would have made sense to use all the man or womanpower they had. “Communal hunting would have encouraged contributions from females, males, and children whether in driving or dispatching large animals,” the researchers write in Science Advances. “Moreover, the primary hunting technology of the time — the atlatl or spearthrower — would have encouraged broad participation in big-game hunting.”
But there may be another interpretation. From the National Geographic:
Importantly, the team cannot know the individual’s gender identity, but rather only biological sex (which like gender doesn’t always exist on a binary). In other words, they can’t say whether the individual lived their life 9,000 years ago in a way that would identify them within their society as a woman.
Of course! It must be….an early trans man!
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