Women were present in prehistory and in its graves, and they disappeared from the story through the work of those who excavated those graves and read them with the prejudices of their time. Pascal Picq, a French palaeoanthropologist and former collaborator of Yves Coppens at the Collège de France, sums it up in an interview broadcast by the channel Les Découvreurs with the image of a masculinist layer that would have weighed on the discipline until today. The documented cases prove him right in essence, from Paviland to Menton, from a symposium held in Chicago in 1966 to a French Civil Code that made a wife’s obedience a legal obligation. The correction now under way nonetheless demands a reserve of rigour, because part of today’s enthusiasm claims more than the data allow.
A Roman lady who was a man and a clan chief who was a woman
In 1823, the geologist William Buckland excavated the cave of Paviland, on the Gower coast in south Wales, and found a skeleton stained with red ochre (an iron oxide pigment) surrounded by perforated shells and ivory rings. Buckland, whose chronology left no room, as historians recall, for human remains older than the biblical flood, dated the burial to Roman times and, seeing the jewellery, concluded that it was a woman, a hypothesis he tried out alongside those of a witch and a painted prostitute, which was the one he kept. He named her the Red Lady of Paviland. The skeleton was that of a man aged 25 to 30, buried between 33,000 and 34,000 years ago according to the radiocarbon dating of 2008.
Picq attributes the correction of the sex to a recent DNA analysis. The sources consulted attribute it to the examination of the skeleton by William Sollas in the early twentieth century, and none mentions a genetic analysis.
The case of Menton is the reverse. On 26 March 1872 the physician Émile Rivière discovered, in the Cavillon cave on the border between France and Italy, a burial some 24,000 years old, from the Gravettian period (a phase of the Upper Palaeolithic). Haematite and red ochre covered the body, with more than two hundred perforated shells and twenty-two red deer canines around the skull. Finery identical to that which in Wales had served to declare a man a woman did not prevent a woman from being declared a man, because the bones were massive and Rivière saw in them a clan chief. Scholars called the find the Man of Menton for more than a century.
In 1988, the anthropologist Marie-Antoinette de Lumley pointed out, before the skeleton reconstructed at the Musée de l’Homme, that the pelvis was broad and the sciatic notch very open, in other words female. According to the specialist portal Hominides, the later study confirmed it. She is now called the Lady of Cavillon. Picq also presents this case as a result of DNA, and here again the available documentation speaks only of morphology.
Both errors share a logic. At Paviland, the adornments were enough to feminise the bones. At Menton, the bones were enough to masculinise the adornments. The criterion shifted toward the expected conclusion, and that mobility is what, in my reading, gives the operation away.
Today’s correction risks repeating the mechanism with the sign reversed. At Wilamaya Patjxa, at 3,925 metres above sea level in the Peruvian Andes, a team led by Randy Haas described in 2020, in Science Advances, the grave of a young woman aged 17 to 19, about 9,000 years old, buried with five complete projectile points and tools for working hides. The sex was established through dental protein analysis and osteological study, and the authors speak of a big-game huntress. A functional object beside a body proves that the object existed, and in my view it does not establish by itself who used it in life.
Birka, in Sweden, shows the limit of the most modern method. Grave Bj 581, from the Viking age, held weapons and elite objects and was attributed for about 140 years to a warrior. In 2017, a genomic analysis led by Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson found two X chromosomes and no Y. The identification as a woman was established, that of a warrior was disputed, because the weapons could have belonged to other people. DNA settles the sex and leaves the problem of meaning intact.
Chicago, April 1966, the making of the hunter
From 6 to 9 April 1966, at the University of Chicago, the anthropologists Richard Lee and Irven DeVore brought together specialists on hunter-gatherers, that is, human groups who obtain their food from hunting, fishing and gathering without agriculture or livestock, and whom Anglophone literature calls foragers. The resulting volume, ‘Man the Hunter’ (1968), argued that hunting had been humanity’s first way of life and that understanding hunters amounted to understanding human nature. Gathering, a female task in the model, remained a supplement of no evolutionary weight. The reply came in 1981, when Jane Collier and Michelle Rosaldo questioned the male bias of those assumptions and Frances Dahlberg brought together in ‘Woman the Gatherer’ the studies on female gatherers.
Picq traces the problem back a century earlier. He holds that prehistory was born in the Europe of the late nineteenth century, racist and patriarchal at once, and that its founders transposed into the caves the domestic order they knew. To this would have been added the projection of the family of the Trente Glorieuses, the period of French economic growth between 1945 and 1975, with the man who hunts and the woman who waits in the cave. These are the theses of an oral interview, and none of the sources consulted documents them.
What the rehabilitation can affirm and what it cannot
If the story erased women from prehistory, it remains to be seen how much of what is now given back to them withstands examination. The most cited figure comes from the meta-analysis by Haas’s own team, which reviewed individuals buried at Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene sites across the two Americas.
Between 30 and 50 per cent of the big-game hunters of the early Americas may have been women, according to the estimate by Haas and colleagues based on 429 individuals from 107 sites. (Science Advances, 2020)
The authors themselves acknowledge that this level contrasts with recent hunter-gatherers, among whom female participation in hunting remains, according to Haas, below 30 per cent. They conclude that the sexual division of labour was very different in that past, probably more equitable.
In 2023, Anderson and colleagues published in PLOS ONE a study entitled ‘The Myth of Man the Hunter’, which reviewed the ethnographies of forager societies. Only a fraction offered explicit information on hunting.
Of 391 forager societies examined, 63 provided explicit data on hunting, and in 50 of them (79 per cent) hunting by women was documented. (Anderson and colleagues, PLOS ONE, 2023)
In 36 of the 41 cases where intention was specified, female hunting was described as deliberate and not opportunistic. A reply of 2024 in Evolution and Human Behavior, signed by Venkataraman and fourteen co-authors, sums up the dispute in its title, ‘Female foragers sometimes hunt, yet gendered divisions of labor are real’. It calls a focus on hunting alone myopic.
The archaeologists Steven Kuhn and Mary Stiner, of the University of Arizona, proposed in 2006 in Current Anthropology that a division of labour by sex and age, with women and children busy processing plants and making objects, and men at big-game hunting, appeared relatively late, at the start of the Upper Palaeolithic, and gave modern humans a demographic advantage over other hominins. It is a hypothesis and not a fact. It presents the sexual division of labour, today scorned as an ideological fossil, as a possible innovation and not as a datum of origin.
Picq further repeats that bipedal walking narrowed the pelvis and left women an evolutionary burden, the so-called obstetrical dilemma. In 2012, Holly Dunsworth and colleagues proposed in PNAS the EGG hypothesis (energetics, gestation and growth), according to which the baby is born when the mother reaches her metabolic ceiling and not when the birth canal imposes it. The objection exists and the interview does not mention it.
What remains standing is little and solid. Some women hunted, in some societies and at some moments, and one Andean site suggests big-game hunting. The division of labour by sex appears in known societies, in variable forms. The obstetrical dilemma is a hypothesis with objections and not a closed datum. An egalitarian prehistory is not established, however much today’s enthusiasm takes it for granted.
The matriarchy that was invented and the patriarchy that became a code
The erasure of women has an older version, of greater political prestige, the one that made them sovereigns of a remote past. In 1861, the Swiss jurist Johann Jakob Bachofen published ‘Das Mutterrecht’ (Mother Right), in which he argued that archaic societies had been matriarchal. In 1884, Friedrich Engels took up the idea in ‘The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State’ and linked it to property, with the famous ‘world-historic defeat of the female sex’. Later anthropology set aside the primitive matriarchy. Cynthia Eller wrote in 2000 that few specialists found it persuasive, and Joan Bamberger argued in 1974 that myths of dethroned women served to justify the subjection of the present. Picq sums it up in a phrase I subscribe to, ancestral matriarchy is the inverted mirror image of patriarchy.
For a Latin American reader, the most useful work comes from the anthropologist Rita Segato, an Argentine and professor in Brasília. In an essay published in Hypatia in 2021 she argues that pre-colonial communal societies had patriarchal structures, but with a dual organisation of gender, plural in essence, very different from the binary colonial-modern structure, which operates in terms of a One and its marginalised others. That transformation would have intensified inequality and violence against women, hence her distinction between a low-intensity and a high-intensity patriarchy. The thesis does not absolve the world before the conquest or turn it into an Eden, and it seems to me the one that best withstands the double filter, because it needs neither a lost matriarchy nor a prehistoric equality.
In France, legal history leaves no room for hypothesis. Article 213 of the Civil Code of 1804 laid down that the husband owes protection to his wife and the wife obedience to her husband. The law of 18 February 1938 abolished that duty and the wife’s civil incapacity, but the husband kept the headship of the family and the power to oppose her working. It took the law of 13 July 1965 for her to open a bank account and take up a profession without her spouse’s permission, and that of 4 June 1970 for the husband’s headship to give way to joint parental authority.
That regime was written, applied and reformed in stages in historical times, with signatures, dates and beneficiaries, and that documented record weighs more than any skeleton. In my reading, the disappearance of women from the prehistoric story does not look like a mere accident of method. They were turned into chiefs, into adornment or into silence in stories that served, to a good extent, a present domestic order, and whoever rehabilitates them today by dint of hypotheses runs the risk of the symmetrical error, that of demanding that the past prove them right. Prehistory will remain a mirror, and whoever consults it to learn what women were, or ought to have been, will almost always find what they already brought with them…
G.S.
Sources
- Interview with Pascal Picq, channel Les Découvreurs, YouTube (link and date to be confirmed)
- De l’homme de Menton à la Dame du Cavillon, Hominides
- Dame du Cavillon, Wikipédia
- Red Lady of Paviland the story of a 33,000 year-old skeleton, The Conversation
- Red Lady of Paviland, Wikipedia
- Female hunters of the early Americas, Science Advances (2020)
- Early Big-Game Hunters of the Americas Were Female, Researchers Suggest, UC Davis
- Wilamaya Patjxa, Wikipedia
- Birka grave Bj 581, Wikipedia
- A female Viking warrior confirmed by genomics, PMC
- Man the Hunter, Wikipedia
- The Myth of Man the Hunter, PLOS ONE (2023)
- Female foragers sometimes hunt, yet gendered divisions of labor are real, Evolution and Human Behavior (2024)
- What’s a mother to do, Current Anthropology (2006)
- Gendered division of labor gave modern humans advantage over Neanderthals, ScienceDaily
- Metabolic hypothesis for human altriciality, PNAS (2012)
- Long-held theory on human gestation refuted, ScienceDaily
- Matriarchy, Wikipedia
- Gender and Coloniality, Hypatia (2021)
- Code civil, art. 213, version de 1901, Criminocorpus
- Fin de l’incapacité civile des femmes, 1938, 8mars.info
- Chef de famille en France, Wikipédia
- Loi du 13 juillet 1965 portant réforme des régimes matrimoniaux, Wikipédia
- Johann Jakob Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht (1861)
- Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884)
- William Sollas, Paviland Cave, an Aurignacian station in Wales (1913)
