![]() Those finds have raised questions about whether women often fought alongside men in these cultures, or whether these particular women were special or unusual. But archaeologists have also found evidence of women as warriors in ancient cultures, from the Vikings to ancient Mongolian nomads. Because those stories are so unusual, they actually end up shedding light on social norms about who is “supposed” to fight, sail, or hunt. Most periods of history are dotted with stories of women who sneaked into the military, onto ships’ crews, or into other male-dominated professions. It’s hard to explain that in any other way: this young woman was probably a hunter. And her toolkit looks a lot like the sort of thing previous researchers had theorized that Paleolithic hunters might have carried. This young woman had an actual knife in her pack, however, so it doesn’t seem very likely that she’d have carried six projectile points for the same purpose. If the objects people are buried with are the objects they used in life, then that raises some questions.Īt other sites where ancient women have been buried with projectile points, archaeologists have been quick to come up with other explanations, such as the idea that women had used the points as knives. The hunter from Wilamaya Patjxa is a young woman with the tools of an activity usually associated with men. The proteins in the ancient hunter’s tooth enamel had a distinctly female signature, with no trace of the Y chromosome version. As a result, people who are genetically female have slightly different amelogenins than people who are genetically male. The genes that produce these proteins are located on the X and Y chromosomes, and each version is slightly different. Tooth enamel contains proteins called amelogenins, which play a role in forming the enamel in the first place. Instead, Haas and his colleagues analyzed samples of her tooth enamel. But for the young woman of Wilamaya Patjxa, most of those bones hadn’t survived millennia of burial. To help identify a dead person’s sex, archaeologists usually look at the shape of the pelvis, the jawbone, the eye sockets (orbits), and other skeletal clues. All that remains are a few fragments of skull, her teeth, the ends of her thigh bones (femurs), and a few pieces of the bones of her lower legs. Most of the young woman’s bones have also succumbed to time. Those tools lay neatly stacked together beside the woman’s legs, and Haas and his colleagues say it looks as if they’d been packed in a bag that had long since disintegrated, leaving the tools behind. The points seem to have been bundled along with a stone knife, sharp stone flakes, scraping tools, and ocher for tanning hides. ![]() And when one young woman died 9,000 years ago in what is now southern Peru, her people buried her with at least six stone spear tips of a type used in hunting large prey like deer and vicuña (a relative of the alpaca). “The objects that accompany in death tend to be those that accompanied them in life,” Haas and his colleagues wrote. And that, in turn, reminds us that gender roles haven’t always been the same in every culture. Their results may suggest that female hunters weren’t as rare as we thought. The find prompted University of California Davis archaeologist Randall Haas and his colleagues to take a closer look at other Pleistocene and early Holocene hunters from around the Americas. At Wilamaya Patjxa, an archaeological site in southern Peru, archaeologists unearthed the skeleton of a young woman whose people buried her with a hunters’ toolkit, including projectile points. ![]()
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