Man the Hunter
Are our stereotypes about hunter-gatherer societies outdated? Seems not.
Introduction
In recent years, a number of articles and research papers have been published which purport to upend our understanding of gender roles throughout history. In that vein, one study claims to have discovered a female Viking warrior (Hedenstierna-Jonson et al., 2017) leading to public suggestions about female warriors being common. On the topic of today’s article, multiple studies seek to challenge our beliefs about gendered division of labor in hunter-gatherer societies (Anderson et al., 2023; Haas et al., 2020; Ocobock & Lacy, 2023). These studies invariably get tons of media attention — there’s clearly a strong desire to challenge what is seen as outdated views about gender roles in history.
A popular trend is to include a healthy amount of strawmen: “The data collected regarding female hunting directly contradicts the traditional paradigm according to which women practice exclusively gathering, and men exclusively hunt,” say Anderson et al. Yet a cursory glance reveals that even the seminal “Man the Hunter” (1968) contains a far more nuanced understanding of division of labor in hunter-gatherer societies than they portray.1 It is more accurate to say that the consensus view (then and now) is that hunting — especially big game hunting — is predominantly a male activity in traditional hunter-gatherer societies.
How common is female hunting really?
Instead of critiquing the studies mentioned above, as has been done adequately elsewhere2, I will look at the data regarding women’s hunting in hunter-gatherer societies.
Koster et al. (2020) synthesize multiple datasets and provide the most comprehensive individual-level foraging data available. This data set contains 23,747 observations from 1821 individual hunters at 40 disparate sites across the globe and is open to analyze.
Stark sex differences appear in the raw data3: (1) 76 times more hunting observations involving male hunters compared to female hunters (23,472 vs 309 records); (2) 12 times as many male hunters as female hunters (1403 male vs 114 female hunters); (3) on average per hunting trip, male hunters collected 6.7 times as much meat as a female hunters (9.5 vs 1.4 kg); and (4) in total, owing to more hunting trips and greater yields per trip, male hunters collected 371 times as much meat as female hunters (255 vs 0.7 metric ton), i.e., 99.7% of hunted meat mass was collected by men. If we restrict our analysis to game of at least medium size ( ≥ 15 kg), then 100% of 1,866 game harvests were collected by males.
Estimates of female hunting prevalence on a societal level also exist:
In an analysis of 179 hunter-gatherer societies, Gurven & Hill (2009) find that in 92.7% (166/179) do men alone hunt, and just in 7.3% (13/179) of hunter-gatherer societies do women also engage in hunting.
In a more recent review, Hoffman et al. (2023) give three different estimates depending on various assumptions and the set of societies analyzed: 15.5% (26/186), 6.6% (64/965), and 16.4% (64/391).
Reasonable estimates thus suggest that only 6% to 16% of hunter-gatherer societies show signs of female hunting with any regularity, whereas men hunt regularly in all. Even in societies where women hunt, they hunt to a much lesser extent than do men, and for large game the number is much lower still (Hoffman et al., 2023). This would suggest that men are responsible for well over 90% of hunted calories (and ≥ 98% is not implausible).
Why women hunt less
Why do women hunt to a much lesser extent than men? One might intuitively be drawn to explanations referencing men's physical advantages over women — perhaps in strength, speed and/or throwing ability. And while I won't argue that plays zero role, the more important difference lies not in what women cannot do, but what men cannot do: pregnancy and breastfeeding, for instance.
In small-scale societies, full weaning typically doesn't happen until the age of two or three. As the average woman would have multiple children, many years of a typical woman's life is spent in close proximity to children. Hunting trips far away from camp, sometimes lasting for several days before returning to camp, is simply not feasible when you have to take care of a small, helpless child. The child will interfere with the hunt, not to mention potentially putting it in danger.
Every society in human history has had to contend with the challenge that children need considerable attention, and feeding the youngest has been a domain only women could fulfill. As women are required for some of these activities, roles expand to other related childcare activities, even those activities that men physically could do. To understand sexual division of labor in small-scale societies, this is what must be acknowledged first and foremost.
So when does female hunting occur? In their review, Hoffman et al. (2023) provide a good description of what women’s hunting behavior typically is like when it occurs:
When women hunted, they did so in a fundamentally different manner than men, focusing on smaller game and hunting in large groups near camp, often with the aid of dogs.
Conclusion
The notion that hunting — particularly large game hunting — is predominantly a male activity in hunter-gatherer society is overwhelmingly supported by the evidence. While the strawman that women never engage in hunting isn’t true, the sex differences are even starker than I expected prior to analyzing it. Women hunt regularly in well below 20% of modern hunter-gatherer societies, and they directly capture well below 10% of the hunted meat mass.
Multiple quotes from the 1968 book directly contradict Anderson et al.’s misrepresentation of the consensus view. They explicitly mention that women do engage in hunting. For example, “Hunting of small animals by women is not a rare phenomenon”, “[Australian aboriginal] women collect plant foods, seeds, eggs, and occasionally hunt rabbits”, or “females and juveniles may be involved in hunting small creatures.” In the book, Watanabe’s article contains several paragraphs detailing in which contexts female hunting is more common or more unusual.
Even when the authors make more general statements about division of labor, they usually contain qualifiers such as “primarily”, “normally”, or “predominantly” in contradiction with Anderson et al.’s “exclusively.” For example: “Both sexes are fully involved in extracting daily food supplies [in traditional Australian aboriginal society]. Hunting activities are predominantly men's work”, and “men being primarily hunters and women carriers of wood and water, seed collectors, camp keepers, and child tenders” (emphasis added in both cases).
For a critique of Anderson et al.’s 2023 paper, see Venkataraman et al. (2024), Venkataraman (2023), Darmangeat (2023), or Alexander (2023). Hoffman et al. (2023) describe some methodological shortcomings of the Haas et al. (2020) paper.
Very well written. I enjoy and appreciate your work.