Haven't signed into your Scholastic account before?
Teachers, not yet a subscriber?
Subscribers receive access to the website and print magazine.
You are being redirecting to Scholastic's authentication page...
Announcements & Tutorials
Explore Primary Sources
How Students and Families Can Log In
1 min.
Setting Up Student View
Sharing Articles with Your Students
2 min.
Interactive Activities
4 min.
Sharing Videos with Students
Using Upfront with Educational Apps
5 min.
Join Our Facebook Group!
Exploring the Archives
Powerful Differentiation Tools
3 min.
World and U.S. Almanac & Atlas
Subscriber Only Resources
Access this article and hundreds more like it with a subscription to The New York TImes Upfront magazine.
Article Options
Presentation View
Women on the Hunt
Shutterstock.com
Anthropologists have long assumed that early human men hunted while women did the gathering. After all, the reasoning went, men were naturally more aggressive, whereas the slower pace of gathering was ideal for women, who were mainly focused on caretaking. But that narrative is beginning to change. A few years ago, archaeologists unearthed a hunting kit among bone fragments of a female hunter. That led them to review the findings from other burials; they ultimately found that big game hunting between 14,000 and 8,000 years ago was actually gender neutral. Now a new literature review on modern foraging tribes backs that up, finding that women hunted in more than 80 percent of the groups studied. All of these discoveries add to a body of evidence that has been building for years. “It’s a natural thing to have assumptions,” says researcher Sophia Chilczuk, who worked on the review, “but it’s our responsibility to challenge those assumptions, to better understand our world.”