Gone is the myth of the prehistoric man who hunts the mammoth, while the woman waits for him in the cave with the children! The vision of prehistoric society, as seen in the film The fire war, is tarnished by recent discoveries, such as the study by Randall Haas, anthropologist at the University of California, published in the journal Sciences advances.
It all started with the discovery near Lake Titicaca in Peru of the skeleton of a young lady dating from less than 9000 years before our era. She was surrounded by her weapons: scrapers, points, knives, projectiles. It is not a question of offerings, but of everyday objects. This young woman was a respected hunter of her clan. LAmerican anthropologist took his reasoning further by looking at all the graves of hunters buried with their weapons in America how many were those of women. Answer: 11 out of 27. He estimates that 30 to 50% of humans who stalked big game 10,000 years ago were possibly female.
It must be said that science has made progress to also improve interpretations and understand life in prehistory. Paleontology was born around 1822, the technique known as carbon 14 dating at the end of the 1950s, which made it possible to date the fossils, but it was not until the 1980s and DNA analysis to have more details on inbreeding, or to know the sex of the fossils. Paleontologists therefore rely on the fineness of the bones, on the larger pelvis in women to identify their fossil, but this is not an exact science. Australopithecus Lucy, discovered in 1974 in Ethiopia, could very well have been Lucien.
Researchers have sometimes been wrong: “the Red Lady”, discovered in Wales in 1823 with a necklace around her neck, was in fact a man. And “the man of Menton” discovered in 1872 surrounded by offerings, necessarily a respected dominant, was renamed “the Lady du cavillon“once better analyzed in 2016.
Several researchers like Claudine Cohen, from the School of Higher Studies in Social Sciences, also think that the first paleontologists being men, they reproduced a patriarchal vision of their society whereas the evidence today accumulates to say that the healthy adults regardless of gender were welcome in prehistoric times for hunting.
The difference in size between the phalanges of the hand also showed that they were also artists who painted caves like the Cueva de las Manos in Argentina, they also regulated births with breastfeeding to have fewer children and go hunting. It was later, in the Neolithic era, when humans settled down, that more differences appeared. Physically men get much taller, women bear more signs of undernutrition or pathologies.
In his book Prehistoric man is also a woman, CNRS research director Marylène Pathou Mathis shows us that the era of the caves was much more egalitarian than we thought and that the patriarchal organization of societies does not go back to the origins of Humanity.
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