Similarly, it has long been held that in prehistoric societies, men hunted while women gathered food and cared for the children. But recent research is uncovering a lost history of women hunters and questioning the evidence behind that long-held assumption. In fact, scholars have been unraveling a century-old tapestry that reinforced gender-based labor roles and discovering evidence that stitches together a different shared history since the 1970s.
Historically, there are examples of women hunting in hunter-gatherer societies, although, according to the anthropological record, it's typically only small game that they bring home while gathering. In some ethnographic studies of hunter-gatherer societies, women also participate in communal hunts, like bottlenecking a river to trap migrating animals or whacking seals with clubs when they come up for air through holes in the sea ice.
