A 9,000-year-old burial site in the Andean Highlands of Peru forced archaeologists to reconsider what they thought they knew about prehistoric women. The body was buried with a full big-game hunting toolkit—six projectile points, a knife, and hide-scraping tools. Everyone assumed the hunter was male. Analysis of the dental enamel showed it was a young woman, roughly 17 to 19 years old, buried with her weapons just as male hunters were.
The idea that prehistoric women stayed by the campfire while men did the hunting has dominated popular imagination since 1966. That year, two anthropologists organized a conference called “Man the Hunter. ” The name shaped decades of assumptions. The simple story was that men were the providers and women were the dependents.
The evidence tells a different story. After the Peru discovery, a review of 107 burial sites across the Americas from the same period found that out of 27 individuals buried with hunting tools, 11 were female. The team’s statistical models suggested that between 30 and 50 percent of big-game hunters in early populations may have been women. A 2023 study published in PLOS One went further, analyzing 63 foraging societies from the ethnographic record.
Women actively participated in hunting in 79 percent of them, using their own toolkits and techniques. For women who focused on gathering rather than hunting, the work was not the soft option either. Hadza women in Tanzania, one of the last groups still living as foragers, walk an average of 7. 6 kilometers a day.
They carry infants while digging tubers from hard soil with sharpened sticks, climbing trees for fruit, and hauling water. In many tropical and arid environments, the food gathered by women provided 60 to 80 percent of the group’s total calories. Men might bring home a zebra once every few weeks if they were lucky. Women brought home dinner every night.
The physical toll of this life left traces on the skeleton. A 2017 study from the University of Cambridge examined the arm bones of women from the early Neolithic period. These women’s upper arm bones were roughly 30 percent stronger than those of modern non-athletic women, and 11 to 16 percent stronger than those of competitive female rowers who train six days a week. The strength came not from exercise but from a daily routine of grinding grain with stone tools, digging, hauling, and processing food by hand for an entire lifetime.
Childbirth was among the most dangerous challenges a prehistoric woman faced. First babies typically arrived between the ages of 17 and 20, not by choice but because the body finally became ready. Young women in foraging societies often experienced years of irregular cycles after puberty, a condition called adolescent subfecundity, caused by constant physical exertion and inconsistent nutrition. The body delayed pregnancy until it could handle the burden.
Without hospitals, anesthesia, or sterile instruments, researchers estimate the natural maternal mortality rate was roughly 500 per 100,000 births. In modern developed countries, the rate is under 10. Birth took place on the ground in a shelter made of sticks, attended by older women who had survived the experience themselves. Midwifery is likely one of the oldest professions in human history, not as a career choice but because without it, both mothers and groups died.
Women nursed their babies because there was no alternative. If a mother could not produce milk, another woman in the group stepped in. If nobody could, the infant did not survive. A woman could expect to go through this an average of six to eight times across her life, with every pregnancy carrying real risk.
The widely repeated claim that prehistoric people died at around 30 is misleading. Average life expectancy at birth for hunter-gatherers was roughly 30 to 35 years, but that number is dragged down by extremely high infant mortality. When a third of children die before age five, the statistical average crashes. In 2007, anthropologists Michael Gurven and Hillard Kaplan analyzed mortality data across multiple hunter-gatherer populations.
They found that the most common age at which adults actually died was between 68 and 78. A woman who survived childhood and childbirth had a genuine chance of reaching her seventies. Age brought status rather than decline. Anthropologist Kristen Hawkes, who spent years studying the Hadza, developed what she called the grandmother hypothesis.
Human females are among the very few species on Earth that live for decades after they stop reproducing. Chimpanzee females almost never outlive their fertility. Human women regularly do, by 20 to 30 years. Hawkes found that postmenopausal women were among the most productive foragers in the group.
They knew where tubers were buried, which plants were medicine, and which would kill. By feeding their grandchildren, they allowed their daughters to have babies more frequently, passing more of their genes into the next generation. Their knowledge served as the group’s only library, pharmacy, and survival manual. Herbal medicine practices go back at least 60,000 years.
Women were the original pharmacists, identifying which plants reduced fever, stopped bleeding, or eased the pain of childbirth. This knowledge was passed orally from mother to daughter across generations. A single mistake with a plant meant death. A correct identification could save a life.
Entire systems of knowledge ran on memory and trust without a single written word. Modern observers often assume that such a hard life meant prehistoric women were miserable and oppressed. Anthropologists studying modern hunter-gatherer societies have found something different. These societies are remarkably egalitarian, with no rigid class structures, inherited wealth, or landlords.
Women had autonomy over their own reproductive lives in ways that would not return to many cultures for thousands of years. Marriage was often a social alliance rather than a transaction, and a partnership that did not work could end without lawyers or courts. The concept of a woman as property was largely alien to these groups. The arrival of agriculture around 10,000 years ago made life worse for women, not better.
Skeletal evidence shows early farming women were shorter than their hunter-gatherer ancestors, a sign of poorer childhood nutrition. Their teeth were full of cavities from a diet built around starchy grains. Infectious diseases spiked as people packed into permanent settlements alongside livestock. Once land could be owned, inherited, and accumulated, women became part of the inventory.
Bride price replaced partnership. Property law replaced mutual respect. This does not mean life before agriculture was paradise. Hunger was more frequent, and more children were buried.
But no one owned the women who lived then. The cage came later, along with farming.
