The Neolithic Amazon

Artist's impression of a young woman hunting in the Andes 9,000 years ago. • UC DAVIS IET ACADEMIC TECHNOLOGY SERVICES

Prehistoric women only in charge of gathering and confined to the cave to take care of the children and the kitchen? This cliché conveyed by the scholars of the XIX ^th century had already been undermined for several decades in the United States, then more recently in Europe. The discovery, in the Peruvian Andes, of a female skeleton dated 9,000 years ago shakes up a little more received ideas. Because the young woman was buried with all her hunting paraphernalia:stone tools, including spearheads intended for tracking and butchering large mammals. She was therefore participating in an activity that was thought to be reserved for men. As it is often difficult to determine the sex of such an ancient skeleton, Randall Haas, an archaeologist from the University of California who made this discovery published in the American scientific journal Science Advances , studied with his team the proteins of dental enamel, the genes of which are carried by the X and Y chromosomes; they established that it was a young girl of about 18 years old.

An exceptional case?

They then identified 107 other burial sites from the same period on the North and South American continents, in which 27 individuals were buried with their hunting tools, and whose sex could be determined. Of these 27 individuals, a total of 11 females have been identified. For the authors of the study, these results show equal participation in hunting for both sexes.

Other anthropologists, without denying the interest of the discovery, continue to doubt an equal division of tasks, because they take as a model the study of the last societies of contemporary hunter-gatherers, among whom hunting was a very important activity. largely male. They consider the rare examples indicating the presence of female hunters as exceptions. But for prehistorians like Marylène Patou-Mathis (CNRS), nothing has ever been proven, and this distribution of tasks is above all based on the idea that men had of it. She deconstructs received ideas in a book that has just been released:Prehistoric man is also a woman (Allary Editions).