In a new analysis published in Evolution and Human Behavior, a group of researchers have scrutinized the findings of a widely-publicized study by Anderson and colleagues, which had claimed significant female participation in hunting across diverse foraging societies. The reassessment reveals that while the original findings spurred important discussions, they likely overstate women’s involvement in hunting due to methodological shortcomings.
In 2023, Anderson and colleagues published a study titled “The Myth of Man the Hunter: Women’s contribution to the hunt across ethnographic contexts” in which they analyzed data from the last century on 63 foraging societies across various global regions, including North and South America, Africa, Australia, Asia, and Oceania.
Their research found that in 79% of these societies, women actively participate in hunting. Furthermore, the study claimed that the majority of this hunting by women — over 70% — was intentional rather than opportunistic, meaning these women deliberately set out to hunt rather than merely killing animals they happened to encounter while doing other activities.
The remarkably high rates of female participation in hunting across numerous foraging societies contradicted long-established research, which typically shows a more limited role for women in hunting activities. The study’s conclusions resulted in viral media coverage. According to Altmetric, the study has been mentioned in more than 400 news stories.
The researchers behind the new critique were already engaged in studying similar themes — specifically, the ecological and social factors influencing women’s participation in hunting across cultures. When Anderson et al.’s study was published, it directly intersected with their ongoing research.
“The reason we wrote this response piece was because of a coincidence. Back in spring 2023, I was doing an in-depth study of women’s hunting in foraging societies along with two of my students, Jordie Hoffman and Kyle Farquharson. We were asking: across cultures, what are the ecological and social factors that lead to women’s participation in hunting?” explained first author Vivek Venkataraman, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Calgary.
“When we saw the Anderson et al 2023 PLoS ONE study published in July 2023, we realized we’d been studying the same material but coming to very different conclusions. We wanted to figure out why. So we tried to replicate the Anderson study. Unfortunately, we learned that their methods were not reliable and biased toward finding evidence for women’s hunting, and therefore their conclusions are not robust.”
Venkataraman and his colleagues initially aimed to reproduce Anderson et al.’s results by following the same methodologies and utilizing the same datasets. This process involved accessing the ethnographic data from the D-PLACE database, which Anderson et al. had used. The critique team sought to confirm whether the coding of data related to women’s participation in hunting was accurate and consistent with the source material.
However, this endeavor faced challenges due to insufficient methodological details provided by Anderson et al., which hindered the precise replication of their analysis. This included a lack of specific information on how societies were selected and the absence of detailed coding procedures, which are essential for replicating the analytical processes.
When reproduction proved problematic, the analysis shifted toward replication, which entailed using different but analogous data and methods to test the robustness of the original findings. The researchers expanded their analysis to include additional ethnographic records and applied a more rigorous coding scheme to assess the presence and extent of women’s hunting.
Venkataraman and his colleagues identified a fundamental problem with how Anderson et al. selected their sample. The original study likely suffered from selection bias, as it included only those societies from D-PLACE where explicit data on hunting was available, potentially skewing the sample towards societies with non-typical gender roles in hunting. Some societies were also included based on criteria that were not transparent or consistently applied, which could inflate the incidence of female hunting reported.
The researchers also said they uncovered inconsistencies in how women’s hunting activities were recorded. Anderson et al. had often coded any evidence of women participating in hunting, no matter how minor or infrequent, as indicative of regular hunting practices. This binary approach failed to capture the varied nature of hunting practices among women in different societies. Furthermore, there were significant discrepancies in the references and secondary sources used, some of which did not align with the primary ethnographic evidence.
Another critical issue was pseudoreplication, where data points from culturally or geographically similar groups were treated as independent, leading to inflated statistics on female hunting participation. Anderson et al. also tended to overgeneralize rare instances of female hunting as common or regular practices, which was not supported by a more detailed examination of the data, Venkataraman and his colleagues alleged.
“Note that our study doesn’t try to estimate the percentage of foraging societies in which women hunt,” Venkataraman said. “This is a complicated task and I don’t blame the authors, who are not ethnographic specialists, for not being able to arrive at a defensible estimate.”
These issues suggest that while women do participate in hunting across various foraging societies, the extent and nature of their involvement are far more complex and less prevalent than initially reported by Anderson et al.
“The media storm around the Anderson paper in summer 2023 was completely unjustified and misleading,” Venkataraman told PsyPost. “It was driven by an agenda that had little to do with science itself and did not accurately reflect the way most anthropologists think about this issue. In foraging societies men and women tend, on average, to do different sorts of activities. Anthropologists have long recognized that women sometimes hunt in foraging societies.”
Venkataraman’s noted that there is good reason to doubt the “Man the Hunter” narrative developed by early 20th-century anthropologists, which posited that hunting was almost exclusively a male activity and a central aspect of human evolution. However, there is still strong evidence for gendered divisions of labor.
“The average person should also realize that when they hear the phrase ‘Man the Hunter,’ they should be cautious,” Venkataraman explained. “This phrase has a few different meanings. One is an idea going back nearly a century which says that human evolution was driven by male hunting, and that this created everything we consider special about humans: our bipedalism, big brains, tool use, and social behavior.”
“This is an outdated idea that has been thoroughly debunked. But a different meaning of the phrase is that in hunting and gathering societies, it’s mostly men that do the hunting. This idea is robust and well-verified cross-culturally. These two ideas have distinct intellectual heritages, but they are often confused. That’s what happened with the media storm around the Anderson paper.”
In their own research, Venkataraman and his colleagues have found that while gendered foraging roles are evident in modern hunter-gatherer societies—typically with men engaging in high-risk hunting and women in low-risk gathering—such divisions may not have been so pronounced in early human societies.
One pivotal piece of evidence comes from the analysis of a 9,000-year-old female hunter-gatherer burial in Peru, where the individual was interred with a full hunter’s toolkit, suggesting that women could and did participate extensively in hunting activities, especially in big-game hunting.
The researchers highlight various conditions under which women’s hunting appears more frequently. These include scenarios where hunting does not conflict with childcare, where cultural restrictions on women’s use of hunting technology are minimal, and where hunting involves low-risk strategies near the camp. Evidence indicates that women frequently engage in group hunts or drive game into traps, and often fulfill crucial logistical or informational roles within hunting groups.
“Anthropologists recognize that modern foraging societies show sexual/gendered divisions of labor, but it’s not clear when this came about in human evolution,” Venkataraman said. “It could have been a few tens of thousands of years ago, or it could have been as far back as 2 million years ago. The long-term goal is to try to figure out a good answer to this question.”
The new analysis, “Female foragers sometimes hunt, yet gendered divisions of labor are real: a comment on Anderson et al. (2023) The Myth of Man the Hunter,” was authored by Vivek V. Venkataraman, Jordie Hoffman, Kyle Farquharson, Helen Elizabeth Davis, Edward H. Hagen, Raymond B. Hames, Barry S. Hewlett, Luke Glowacki, Haneul Jang, Robert Kelly, Karen Kramer, Sheina Lew-Levy, Katie Starkweather, Kristen Syme, and Duncan N. E. Stibbard-Hawkes.
