Were the roles of hunter-gatherers in ancient times really that gendered?

All we're really doing is taking evidence that has been around four decades and shining the light back onto it so it can no longer be ignored because it should be included in our

reconstructions of the past. It's Tuesday, December 5th and once again it's Science Friday.

I'm Cyfry producer D. Peter Schmidt. We're all familiar with the Hunter Gather narrative in ancient times,

men venturing out for me while women largely sing close to home and tending to kids,

but new re-evaluation of existing research shows that there actually isn't much evidence to back that up and

far more evidence shows that females hunted just as much as males did.

Ara Flado talks to two researchers about their findings, how the myth of man the hunter got so popular in the first place,

and why estrogen is so important for hunting and survival.

Here to tell us more about this research are my guests Dr. Kara Acaboc,

assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, and

Dr Sarah Lacy, Biological Anthropologist at the University of Delaware.

Their findings were published in the American Anthropologist.

Welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you.

Thank you so much, Ira.

Nice to have you both.

Okay, so let's get right into this.

So this man the hunter theory was introduced when in the 1960s,

how did it become Dr. Acabakh so embedded in our culture?

Yeah, so it started out as a conference in 1966 and then became an edited volume about two years later.

And it was kind of built on a lot of ethnographic evidence at the time

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