It’s a persistent prejudice about prehistoric hunter-gatherers: men hunted, women gathered. Just; A comprehensive study of the sources indicates that there is hardly any evidence for this.
Whether you look at diet, forensic materials, anatomical differences between men and women, or preserved art from cavemen, there is plenty of evidence that women participated in hunting, researchers say. Their studies of prehistoric gender roles appeared in the journal American anthropologist.
The idea that hunting was primarily a male task is pure assumption, a projection of existing divisions of roles by contemporary scholars, is their conclusion. For example, Sarah Lacy, a biological anthropologist specializing in human health in the distant past, found almost no differences between men and women in the bone fractures she observed in skeletons. “There was no difference in trauma patterns between men and women because they were all doing the same activities.”
People lived in very small groups at that time, and this required flexibility. “Everyone should be able to play any role at any time. That’s very clear.”
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In large groups, Neanderthals could eat an entire forest elephant
As a long-standing unintelligent cousin of humans, it seems once again that Neanderthals had a lot more to offer than they thought. Research on the remains of European forest elephants in a German cave suggests that humans routinely hunted and butchered these animals as early as 125,000 years ago.
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