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The story
A paper published in 2023 in the academic journal PLOS ONE by researchers including those from Seattle Pacific University examined hunter-gatherer societies around the world using records spanning the past 100 years, finding that women participated in hunting in roughly 80% of them. Among the Agta people of the Philippines and the Aka people of Central Africa, women reportedly used a variety of tools — bows and arrows, clubs, crossbows — and some even went out hunting while carrying infants. The findings challenge the conventional image of ‘men hunt, women gather,’ and on 5ch, comments explaining the division of labor by differences in physique and muscle strength clashed with others citing examples like lionesses, with the debate never reaching a consensus.
(Omitted)
A 2023 paper published in the academic journal PLOS ONE by researchers affiliated with Seattle Pacific University and others, titled “The Myth of Man the Hunter: Women’s contribution to the hunt across ethnographic contexts,” investigated the actual extent of women’s hunting activity in hunter-gatherer societies worldwide.
The gendered division of labor in human hunter-gatherer life has generally been understood as men serving as hunters and women as gatherers.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
while women mainly did housework and childcare in the cave, with hunting just a supporting role, right?
I mean, physique and muscle strength are different after all
>Women's hunting wasn't just a matter of incidentally catching small animals while gathering plants — in many societies, women deliberately set out to hunt specific prey from the start. Records show they actively took down not just small animals but medium and large ones too.
>Among the Philippines' Agta people, men consistently used bows and arrows, while women used knives and bows and arrows alone or in combination, according to individual preference. Similarly, women of the Aka people in Central Africa made use of a variety of tools including nets, spears, machetes, and crossbows.
Back then,
life was just so unstable that women had to hunt too or they couldn't survive… that's all this is, lol
The article's whole point is that it wasn't an exception
If men hunted and women gathered, that would make sense, but
if there wasn't really a difference in roles, then what explains the difference in abilities?
I don't think anyone but the postwar generation even says that anymore
I was taught that the Japanese were a hunter-gatherer people
Just look at most other land mammals and it's obvious, right?
It's the females, not the males, who get food and raise the young
The idea that males hunted and provided for the family is probably just a fantasy based on values from the medieval era onward
So does that mean they were subjugated by men and had it rough?
In most land mammals, males are stronger than females because males fight each other
But it's mostly the females who bring back food
Males just loaf around except when fighting other males
Like with carnivores, you'd expect both sexes to end up strong
I heard that's because it's still in the middle of evolving
Apes in general have bigger males
and this is a holdover from that
Guarding the territory is the male's job — hunting is done by lower-ranking members
By the way, males other than the boss do hunt normally too
It's the boss male who fights when some other lion or animal invades the territory
When an outside male shows up targeting his harem, he'll go fight even if he can't win
That's the male's role
if you think about what makes a male 'strong' when he doesn't hunt,
for humans, it's probably still being tall and good-looking
What does 'hunting' even represent for humans
Probably making money, I'd guess
The idea that there's only one male lion per pride is also an old stereotype — prides have multiple males, and they do hunt big game that females can't take down due to body size
Though I guess there are also males who just mooch off females who are good at hunting
Between that and childcare, gathering and preparing meals for the settlement would've been all they could handle
I've heard that in prehistoric times, working 4 hours a day was considered a lot
They ate hard-to-digest food, so they'd spend around 20 hours just lying around digesting it
You can tell from watching other animals hunt too — I think the sense of time back then was totally different from now
Looking at family trees from the Meiji era, families generally had around 6 or 7 kids (including those who died young)
This was a farming family, by the way
If they kept giving birth every single year, they wouldn't be able to work and there wouldn't be enough food, so there was probably some kind of culture of spacing it out
Women were a major part of the labor force in farm work, after all
I always pictured hunting as a group thing, with the whole village together
When the prey is small, it doesn't pay off to go in a group
Background and Points of Debate
The research comes from a paper titled “The Myth of Man the Hunter,” published in 2023 in the academic journal PLOS ONE, which surveyed hunter-gatherer societies around the world using records spanning the past 100 years. Cases have been reported — among the Agta people of the Philippines and the Aka people of Central Africa, for instance — of women participating in hunts using a range of tools including bows and arrows, clubs, and crossbows. Opinions in the thread split over whether to view these findings as “just generalizing from exceptions” or as evidence that “it was never actually an exception to begin with.” Comments explaining the division of labor by physical differences between men and women ran alongside comments citing examples from other animals, such as lions, to argue that “it’s not unusual for the hunting to be done by females.” It was also noted that, in the case of lions, males are responsible for defending territory and mates, with some pointing out that this makes simple comparisons tricky.
*This article is composed as an excerpt and summary from the 5ch (News Speed+) thread “How True Is ‘Men Hunt, Women Gather,’ Really? Women Hunted Too in About 80% of Societies, Even While Carrying Infants — A 100-Year Survey of Hunter-Gatherer Societies.”
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