How Ancient Dart Launchers Changed the Game for Early Female Hunters

[Judi Lynn]

A female archaeologist is challenging the idea of men as hunters and women as gatherers, one throw at a time.

BY ROXANNE HOORN
SEPTEMBER 5, 2023

THE SUBTLETIES OF WOMEN HAVE long baffled men. Take anthropologist William Webb. In the 1940s, he was briefly perplexed to find hunting tools in the ancient graves of women. Webb, then head of the department of archaeology and anthropology at the University of Kentucky, was investigating the Indian Knoll site, from the Late Archaic Period (5,000 to 3,000 years ago). He concluded that the hunting gear—in this case an atlatl, or spear-thrower—must have been placed there by husbands, or because they made pretty hair ornaments.

“It is hardly to be supposed that … women would have any practical use in life for an atlatl … such occurrences represent true burial offerings to the dead of artifacts primarily intended for the use of men,” Webb wrote in 1946.

Webb, a white cis-man, was operating off a long-held assumption of a male-dominated field: Men hunt, women gather.

“There’s a lot of assumptions about gender roles in archaeology that really aren’t supported,” says Metin Eren, an experimental archaeologist at Kent State University in Ohio. “The reason why we have assumptions about gender roles is because it was males over the 20th century that made those assumptions. It’s important to give preeminence to evidence and not assumption.”

According to recent evidence, including a new study in Science Reports, there’s no reason to think that ancient women didn’t use hunting gear to deadly effect. As early as 22,000 years ago, communities of hunters on every continent except Africa (though this may be due to lack of archaeological evidence on what would be a much older timeline) shifted from throwing spears like javelins to using the atlatl, a kind of handle that uses leverage to propel a spear farther and faster. For the current study, researchers got 108 people to throw spears various ways. When it came to throwing like a javelin, males outperformed females. But when an atlatl was involved, that difference all but disappeared. The findings support the “atlatl equalizer hypothesis,” posited by researchers John Whitacker and Kathy Kamp at Grinnell College in Iowa, which states that strategic leverage might have made hunting a practice for everyone in an ancient community.

More:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/early-women-hunt-too

[mopinko]

1. i'm sure there were always women who could defend themselves.

sooo much silliness out of these old white men.
even w/o hunting, there wd, of course, b women who defended their tribe from animals and other humans. and of course they wd take down something tasty that wandered by.
the boy’s hunting parties werent the only lethal weapons. how cd they b?

[TreasonousBastard]

2. Seems to me that early humans would use any advantage they...

could find to survive, and the female population had uses every bit as useful as female bears and wolves..

The society that had the smarts to invent the atlatl certainly had the smarts to figure out how, and who, to use it.

[CottonBear]

3. My son & I had the opportunity to use an atlatl to throw a wooden spear with a stone tip.

The atlatl is a very impressive tool.

[TheRickles]

4. The modern version would be the ball-throwers for playing long-distance fetch with your dog.

Very simple and very impressive. Even kids can throw balls a mile with it, so probably women could too.

[CottonBear]

5. Ball throwers are definitely modern day atlatls!

Using an atlatl to throw a spear with accuracy is not easy without practice & skill. We were able to launch the spear, but hitting the target was difficult. We only managed to hit the ground near the target.

I am quite sure Native American women hunters were much more skilled than me!

My impression of the atlatl technology is that it’s seemingly so simple, yet it’s so elegant and powerful.

[cally]

10. I volunteered at camp where kids made these and practiced

Throwing them. I tried to do both but did not have time to finish. All became surprising accurate with these and it is amazing how far they can go. They also use larger “dart heads” and hit with more force than arrows. Arrows go further.

[Irish_Dem]

6. It only makes sense that women would have to find a way to feed and defend their children.

She could not always rely on a male to do those jobs.

[Collimator]

7. Jean Auel discusses this idea in her Earth's Children book series.

In the second book of the collection, The Valley of Horses, published in 1982, one character invents the "spear-thrower" which basically extends the reach of any human's throwing arm. The implement in the story was based on both archeological finds and extant technology known to contemporary hunter/gatherer societies.

Auel also explored the idea of Neanderthal/Homo Sapiens hybrids, an idea that was not widely accepted in scholarly or scientific circles at the time. With the improvement in genetic sciences, that idea is being proved correct over and over again as Neanderthal genes are showing up in modern populations.*

With apologies to Dr. Eren, I feel like I spent my entire time as an anthropology student in the nineties deconstructing the obvious prejudices and blatant slants of early anthropologists--who were generally White, cis, male** and wealthy enough to devote their lives to an emerging discipline. Yeah, those guys were often full of it. But I really wish that my courses had allowed me the opportunity to learn more about--you know--anthropology. As a relatively liberal-thinking person, I already had a fairly firm grasp on what was wrong with my own culture. I chose anthropology as my major because I wanted to learn about other cultures.




* There was also a lot of sex in those books. They were sort of like pre-historical romance novels with parkas instead of corsets. . . and there was some science as well as conjecture.

** There was, of course, Margaret Mead, and during my student days, there were newly published works by a young, male anthropologist whose entire academic career was based on deconstructing Margaret Mead.

[Warpy]

8. It's long been known that women suppliued 80-90% of the calories

While a dart propelled by an atlatl might have been effective, it was more likely a child's hunting kit. Women would have used more efficient methods like nets and snares to trap protein for dinner.

There is indirect evidence for twined fabric (which requies no loom) and nets going back 40,000+ years through impressions on clay and carved figurines.

Here is an example, almost laughably large. Twined fabric can be quite fine, although not as fine as later woven fabric:

I can't find the net headdress reconstruction, it was fascinating, but YouTube has totally screwed up its alogrithm: Looking for netting gets me economic forecasts, for twining gets me studies on twins. I give up. Not only have they gotten so overly pious there are age restrictions on history and anthropology, they've decided we're all dunces who don't know what we're looking for. /rant

[Faux pas]

9. Kickin'