Female bodies have an advantage in endurance ability that means Paleolithic women likely hunted game, not just gathered plants. The story is written in living and ancient human bodies.
If hunter-gatherers went beyond nose-to-tail eating to include the undigested plant matter in a prey animal’s stomach, assumptions about gendered division of labor start to fall apart.
When, how, where and why did complex hierarchical societies evolve? Understanding how we got to this point in time may help us address global challenges, like climate change.
Anthropologists believed that before the implementation of agriculture, men hunted and women gathered, but new evidence suggests that this might not have been the case.
Associate Professor of Anthropology; Curator of High Latitude and Western North American Archaeology, Museum of Anthropological Archaeology; Faculty Affiliate, Research Center for Group Dynamics, University of Michigan