A new study on chimps might reveal that women were actually the first gender to use weapons to hunt. The study finds that female chimps are actually more likely to develop weapons – like spears – and use them to hunt for food. This is an interesting insight because it’s one that tends to challenge the stereotypes of what people have largely thought. While many have contended that women were gatherers, while men were hunters – this challenges the baseline theory that has existed for many years.
This new study also challenges some of the societal norms that people have associated with women and hunting in general. In fact, this pretty much challenges everything that contemporary sociology has suggested to this point. However, it isn’t an unheard of notion, the idea that women might have been the first to use weapons, as scientists have been becoming increasingly split on whether people used weapons initially, or who might have been using those weapons. Some have even been suggesting that women might have done more hunting than previously thought.
The study found that 61% of females in hunting groups actually carried the spears – whereas they only made up 39% of the group. Basically, this becomes a situation where the entire reasoning for them being unlikely to carry weapons was due to the fact that they were unrepresented in larger groups. However, that logic has been thrown out the window with this new piece of information that scientists previously didn’t have. Now, the Fongoli chimps served as one of the best examples of why women actually do most of the killing in those hunting groups.
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This will certainly spur a lot more studies in this region and further into the lives of these chimps. It will also give scientists the ability to further understand communities like this around the world – and to actually dive deeper into the social order of animal groups like this – while even feeding some information to scientists on what humans might have been like at one time, or at early stages of development.
