The discovery of a skeleton potentially belonging to a prehistoric huntress has triggered an intra-feminist brouhaha over gender identity.
The science: An international team of anthropologists and archeologists unearthed the 9,000-year-old female remains in the Andes Mountains of Peru in 2018 alongside a set of stone hunting tools.
- In a study published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, the researchers, led by Randall Haas, an archaeologist at the University of California, Davis, presented the skeleton as evidence of primitive female empowerment.
- Citing previous research on similar burials, they suggested women and men may have commonly shared both hunting and parenting duties in early hunter-gatherer societies.
- “Scholars have long grappled with understanding the extent to which contemporary gender behavior existed in our species’ evolutionary past,” the researchers wrote.
- “A number of studies support the contention that modern gender constructs often do not reflect past ones.”
The debate: However, not everyone is convinced that hunter-gatherers were so progressive.
Kim Hill, an Arizona State University anthropologist, told National Geographic in an article also published on Wednesday that he was skeptical of the Haas team’s study.
- Hill, who was not affiliated with the research team, said the skeleton could have been buried with tools for symbolic or religious reasons, and noted, “You can’t just stop in the middle of stalking a deer in order to nurse a crying baby.”
But Pamela Geller, a feminist archaeologist at the University of Miami, echoed the researchers’ view that such attitudes “may reflect a degree of contemporary gender bias.”
- Asked if the prehistoric woman might have been buried with someone else’s tools, Geller objected: “We typically don’t ask this question when we find these toolkits with men. It’s only when it challenges our ideas about gender that we ask these questions.”
- “There’s so much gender disparity going on right now, if we were to presume that there’s something that biologically predisposes us, then you’d be able to justify that gender disparity,” she said.
- “To me that’s dangerous, and completely unsubstantiated.”
A skeleton with a uterus?: The author of the National Geographic article, science writer Maya Wei-Haas, took it upon herself to note that the “biological female” in question may not have identified as a woman at all.
- “Importantly, the team cannot know the individual’s gender identity, but rather only biological sex (which like gender doesn’t always exist on a binary),” she wrote.
- “In other words, they can’t say whether the individual lived their life 9,000 years ago in a way that would identify them within their society as a woman.”
Helen Joyce, an editor at The Economist, responded on Twitter on Wednesday by calling Wei-Haas’ sensitivity to the skeleton’s gender identity “Embarrassingly stupid.”
- Many other Twitter users joined Joyce, an outspoken U.K. feminist and critic of the transgender rights movement, in mocking the National Geographic article.
Wei-Haas did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
