Woman Questions The Gender Norms We've Been Following Forever After Finding Out 30-50% Of Ancient Hunters Were Women, Goes Viral

What you think you know about ancient human history might be wrong. A significant number of hunters in prehistoric times may actually have been female. The theory that men and only men used to hunt has been put into question for decades. However, it’s only been relatively recently that the updated information about prehistoric gender roles and the division of labor has begun spreading among the public.

TikTok video creator @allie_202_ went viral on the internet after sharing this discovery with her viewers. Like most other people, Allie was shocked to discover that some prehistoric women used to hunt, too. She noted how our biases affect our perception, even in an area of study that should be objective, like archeology. Scroll down for Allie’s full video and thoughts, as well as to read how the internet reacted to her discovery.

Bored Panda reached out to Allie with a few questions about the viral video, and she was kind enough to answer them. Outside of TikTok, Allie has a variety of interests, including reading, singing, and ultimate frisbee. She is also the co-founder of Aggie House at UC Davis, a student-run housing shelter for students who are experiencing homelessness and domestic violence. Allie told us that when she learned that many ancient hunters were women, her first reaction was genuine shock.

"When I said I was 'today years old' in the TikTok I meant it—a couple of hours earlier I was sitting in a sociology class when the professor casually shared an interview about the discovery. She breezed right by it in class, and so I went home and started researching everything I could, and that led to the TikTok. I was mostly stunned that I had never heard about the discovery because it was released in 2020! I would’ve assumed I’d have heard of it by now." Read on for the rest of the interview.

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'So tell me why I was today years old when I found out that 30 to 50% of hunters may have been female this whole time?'

'Flashback to 2020, a researcher from my university realized that the body they had just dug up with a bunch of hunting tools around it was the body of a female and they were like, "That is surprising. We should look into it." They checked out data from 400 other burial sites and found that of the 27 hunters that had been dug up, 11 of them were female. That is a third of all the hunters, y'all. Obviously to the general public, this was like massive news.'

'At the same time, people were going on TV saying, "Hold your horses, feminist-oriented archaeologists have known this for a really long time, y'all just weren't listening."'

'Here's the deal. When it comes to archaeology and ancient history, in general, we're always playing a little bit of a guessing game. Like, I'm not gonna sit here and pretend to know for sure whether females were hunters or not. What I will say with sociological certainty is that when we are evaluating science, we are always imprinting our own biases onto the data that we see, in that if archaeologists expect that only men were hunters, they're going to look for evidence that supports that and it's possible that females were hunters all this time, but that information could have just gone right over their heads.'

Allie shared her thoughts with Bored Panda on why she believes the video went viral and resonated with so many people around the globe. "I think the video went viral for a couple of reasons. First, there’s the obvious shock factor," she said.

"But second, women’s frustrations with being constantly overlooked come to a head with discoveries like these. If it is the case that women were frequent ancient hunters, then this has been an absolutely massive oversight by (almost) the entire fields of archaeology and ancient history for generations, and that can’t be taken lightly," Allie shared her thoughts with us.

"It’s both frustrating and liberating to hear that something of this magnitude may have gone wrong simply because of gender bias."

Allie revealed to Bored Panda that she has always "been obsessed with social activism." Before TikTok, she actually never had any social media accounts.

"I do consider it a bit of a fluke that I have the platform I do today. But the app really does create the perfect environment for activist creators—it is a quick way to disperse really important content to an entire generation of international users," she told us.

"The positive response from folks who follow me absolutely keeps me going."

Most people still cling to the belief that all women used to be gatherers and only men hunted in prehistoric times. The general belief was that it would be difficult to hunt while taking care of children. However, this appears to be an oversimplified view of the past. It’s easy to understand and to put in a school history book, but it’s not the whole picture. The reality likely was far more nuanced.

Archeologist Randall Haas, from the University of California, and his team of researchers were excavating 9,000-year-old buried remains in the Andes Mountains of Peru back in 2018 when they came across a stunning discovery.

The person had been buried with a hunter’s stone tools. "He must have been a really great hunter, a really important person in society," Haas told National Geographic that, at the time, he and his colleagues assumed that the hunter was male.

They were flabbergasted when a closer inspection of the bones revealed that they most likely belonged to a woman. This wasn’t a unique case, either.

After this discovery, a review of previously studied burials throughout the Americas revealed that 30 to 50% of big game hunters could have been women.

Pamela Geller, an archeologist at the University of Miami, had this to say to National Geographic: “With few exceptions, the researchers who study hunting and gathering groups—regardless of which continent they work on—presume that a sexual division of labor was universal and rigid.”

She continued: “And because it is commonsensical, they then have a hard time explaining why female-bodied individuals also bear the skeletal markers of hunting or have hunting tool kits as grave goods.”

The reality probably was that big game hunting required as many skilled, fit, capable adults to participate as possible. Regardless of gender. Archeologist Kathleen Sterling, from Binghamton University, noted that after a child is weaned, the mother would be able to help during big hunts. Moreover, they would be able to assist on hunts even while their children were still being breastfed, so long as some other members of the community would be willing to help nurse them.

In short, the idea is that prehistoric communities were far more flexible and adaptable than we all might have learned back in grade school. In a relatively low-tech period of history, pretty much everyone had to be willing to lend a helping hand where needed. It’s difficult to imagine the hyper-specialization of skills in a small community. Hence, a greater focus on egalitarianism than many would have assumed.

The University of Calgary points out that “ancient female hunters are an expectation, not a surprise.” That’s not to say that all prehistoric communities had female hunters, though. “Women are perfectly capable of hunting, yet in most hunter-gatherer societies they don’t do it very often.”