The Hunter They Assumed Was a Man

In 2018, archaeologists in the Peruvian Andes uncovered a roughly 9,000-year-old burial.

A teenager. Laid to rest with extraordinary care.

Beside her: stone projectile points, hide-processing tools, and what researchers identified as a big-game hunting kit.

The first assumption was the old one.

A hunter buried with this much gear had to be male.

Dental protein analysis said otherwise.

So researchers looked wider.

Across early burials in the Americas associated with big-game hunting tools, they found 27 individuals whose sex could be estimated.

Eleven were female.

Tuesday we talk about Wilamaya — the hunter who cracked open a hundred years of “man the hunter.”