prehistoric women

Prehistoric Gender Roles

            The first human species evolved about 7 million years ago, according to genetic and fossil evidence, and our birthplace was Africa.  What was it like for our ancient ancestors living in prehistoric times?  It is difficult to reconstruct their lives, because we have little evidence to look at.  Many skeletons have been found, but most of them are missing some bones.  Stone tools have helped shed some light on their activities.  In addition, there has been the very rare perfectly preserved specimen to learn from.  Even with the scarcity of evidence, archeologists, anthropologists, and ethnographers have been able to piece together a picture of the likely daily lives of the first humans. However, prehistory is generally known as the birth of man, and women of ancient times are not given much importance in archeological and anthropologic records.

It is difficult to discern exactly what roles each gender played in prehistoric societies.  For example, “due to the many other randomizing factors that blur patterning in the archaeological record, occasional arrowheads made by females cannot be distinguished from those made, used, or abandoned by males” (Hayden, n. d., p. 34)  So the record ends up showing that men made the tools and weapons.  Women may also have occasionally gone hunting, but again, not often enough to matter to researchers.  The popular idea is that “as human evolution progressed, more and more time was needed to look after infants, so females no longer had time to hunt”  (Ehrenberg, 1989, p. 16).  So, does this mean that women sat at home all day tending to babies and waiting for the men to come home?  The answer is no, because fossil evidence suggests that women had other duties, too.

Women in Prehistoric Art

The first and most famous early image of a human woman is the Venus of Willendorf, found in 1908 in Austria, and dating back around 26,000 years.

 

She was carved from limestone using flint tools.   She has now acquired an identity that “focused suitably, from a patriarchal point of view, on the fascinating reality of the female body” (Witcombe, 2000). Her most prominent features are her breasts and her hips. The whole point of this piece was to depict the fertility of women.

Archeologists have found carved ivory figurines dating back 28,000 years, most of which favored images of women with huge breasts and hips (Flannery &Marcus, 2012).  Men were attracted to women with those womanly attributes because that marked them as good breeders.  Men looked at the function of a woman’s body: breasts contain milk to feed babies, and wide hips indicate good childbearing.  It is not surprising that ancient man focused on the most obvious and functionally relevant areas of a woman’s body when committing it to art.

Division of Labor

One widely supported theory is that the first humans probably lived in troops of thirty or so individuals and foraged together over a large territory, with mature females making up most of the group and males fighting each other for mating opportunities (Leakey, 1994).  They were most likely not monogamous, but worked together to survive.  They lived the hunter-gatherer lifestyle: the men hunted and the women gathered.  These roles developed as a result of the advent of big-game hunting.  Since it was very dangerous to hunt large animals armed only with spears and rocks, men took on the task.  It would also have been difficult for women to hunt while carrying a baby in a sling.  These prehistoric communities could weather the loss of a man, but the loss of a woman of childbearing age could have been disastrous to the population (Ehrenberg, 1989).  Thus, women focused on the safer tasks. 

Sticking to their defined roles, “the men on hunting expeditions would gather berries or plants for their own meals, but they did not participate in the plant-gathering expeditions; they might go along, but they would be hunting or fishing” (Pringle, 1998).  The men’s hunting trips were not always successful, so women may have provided more food for the group than men by foraging for roots and berries and storing them.  This scenario points to the conclusion that women were extremely important to prehistoric societies.

Another school of thought is that prehistoric women may have had a more active role in hunting.  By observing women in the few remaining hunter-gatherer societies and by examining historical accounts of tribal groups with no preconceived ideas about man the mighty hunter, anthropologists have realized that perhaps women did more than gather plants and care for babies.  “Women and children set snares, laid spring traps, sighted game and participated in animal drives and surrounds—forms of hunting that endangered neither young mothers nor their offspring” (Pringle, 1998).  This theory seems very plausible, and certainly there is no contradictory evidence.

In societies such as the proto-Eskimos of the Canadian Arctic 4,000 years ago, plant food was scarce, so men hunted caribou, harpooned seals, and caught fish.  Since men hunted and killed the animals, it was the women’s duty to “process the carcasses into meat, hides, bones, and useful organs” (Flannery & Marcus, 2012, p. 22).  Some men were more skilled at hunting than others, so some women had more carcasses to take care of.  This division of labor was so strictly enforced that the skilled hunters sometimes had two wives so that all the work could get done, rather than helping the women themselves.

Neanderthals were hunter-gatherers in the traditional sense, but they also had separate duties while in camp.  Men spent their time crafting wooden spears and stone tools, while women worked with animal skins and collected firewood (Fagan, 2010).  Women most likely also wove baskets or created animal-hide bags to carry plants in.  They each carried out tasks related to their main occupations, whether it be hunting or gathering.  Some fossil evidence suggests that perhaps male and female Neanderthals worked together to drive large animals off cliffs and butcher them at the bottom (Fagan, 2010).  It would have taken several people to scare a group of large animals enough to make them run off a cliff, so perhaps entire families or communities were involved.  The reward would have been an abundance of fresh meat to share.

The hunter-gatherer way of life survived until the twentieth century in Australia because the continent was so isolated from the other, more fertile, continents.  From the beginning of Australia’s human occupation, groups of one or two families camped together.  On a typical day, the women would be out gathering grass seeds or digging for lizards and honey ants; the men might go out to hunt kangaroo or emu, or stay in camp and sleep (Cook, 2003).  This was their way of life until other humans discovered the land by boat.

Women Inventors

Women have been credited with the discovery of multiple uses for fibers, dating back 30,000 years, and spurring what is now known as the String Revolution.  Evidence suggests that women figured out how to use fibers to make string, which led to the creation of snares, fish lines, tethers and leashes, carrying nets, packages, net hunting, and weaving textiles on looms (Adovasio, Soffer, & Page, 2007).  This is a relatively new discovery, because until recently, the ancient stone tools that were found were considered the most important artifacts.  Fiber is more perishable than stone, so there are not as many examples to examine.  However, now that the discovery has been made, and evidence identified, we can infer what other uses those prehistoric women found for the fiber. 

Women may also have been the driving force behind farming. The remains of a culture that had lived in Arizona 3,500 years ago show evidence in the femurs of the people that men were still spending most of their time hunting, while women were staying in one place, likely working with growing plants (Anonymous, 2007).  However, agriculture was invented at least 10,000 years ago, and women are assumed to have begun the process because they were in charge of gathering while men were off hunting. 

Did women invent language?  There is a theory that suggests that women had a greater need for communication, so they may have started vocalizing first.  Women needed to communicate with other women about which plants were poisonous, and probably other topics, and they struggled to get their messages across.  It probably started as sign language or cave painting, but eventually became the spoken word.

It is very difficult researching women of prehistoric times because much of the data was collected by male archeologists.  Men have tended to give history a decidedly male slant.  Apparently, no one questioned the findings of these esteemed men until some female archeologists and anthropologists spoke up in the mid-1900s.  Now we have much more information about prehistoric women, but we still have a long way to go toward squashing the gender bias in research.