(1/n) This stuff about women hunters is still circulating, so I feel like I should clarify something.

It is absolutely the case that, even in small-scale hunter-gatherer societies, women do hunt. Sometimes. It would absolutely be wrong to say that women never hunt.

(2/n) However, it would also be misleading to portray big game hunting as gender-neutral. Here is a quantification from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample.

In the vast majority of societies, hunting of large fauna is predominantly a male activity. Not strictly, predominantly.

(3/n) This discussion was recently sparked by a study which found ancient burials with hunting tools. In total, 11 women and 16 men were found.

So they actually found more men (just not statistically significantly so, due to small sample). https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/woman-hunter-ancient-andean-remains-challenge-old-ideas-who-speared-big-game

(4/n) They did find more men than women. But there is also the problem that we are absolutely not certain that being *buried with hunting tools* implies that the specific person *was a hunter*. It could be gifts put in the burial to honor the person, etc.

(5/n) However, there is another obvious point which I think many fail to adequately appreciate. That is, even if these women were hunters, that does not mean they hunt as much as the men. Therefore this data cannot show "gender-neutrality" in any strong sense.

(6/n) As an example to illustrate my point, I point to some contemporary data. Almost 60% of Baka women qualified as a hunter (did at least one hunting trip).

However, the total hunted biomass brought by women was ~9% = 476.43/(4609.23+476.43)*100%.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12110-020-09375-4

(7/n) This shows that a large proportion of women can be considered "hunters", by some reasonable definition, and yet the (quite substantial) majority of hunted biomass was still brought in by men. I think calling this "gender-neutral" would be misleading at best.