The status of women in a society depends in large measure on their role
in the economy. The reinterpretation of the Paleolithic past centers on new
views of the role of women in the food-foraging economy. Amassing critical and
previously overlooked evidence from Dolni Vestonice and the neighboring site
of Pavlov, researchers Olga Softer, James Adovasio, and David Hyland now propose
that human survival there had little to do with men hurling spears at big-game
animals. Instead, observes Softer, one of the world’s leading authorities on
Ice Age hunters and gatherers and an archeologist at the University of Illinois
in Champaign-Urbana, itdepended largely on women, plants, and a technique of hunting previously
invisible in the archeological evidence—net hunting. “This is not the image
we've always had of Upper Paleolithic macho guys out killing animals up close
and personal,” Softer explains. “Net hunting is communal, and it involves the
labor of children and women. And this has lots of implications."
Many of these implications make her conservative colleagues cringe
because they raise serious questions about the focus of previous studies. European
archeologists have long concentrated on analyzing broken stone tools and
butchered big-game bones, the most plentiful and best preserved relics of the
Upper Paleolithic era (which stretched from 40,000 to 12,000 years ago). From
these analyses, researchers have developed theories about how these societies
once hunted and gathered food. Most researchers ruled out the possibility of
women hunters for biological reasons. Adult females, they reasoned, had to
devote themselves to breast-feeding and tending infants. “Human babies have
always been immature and dependent,” says Softer. “If women are the people who
are always involved with biological reproduction and the rearing of the young,
then that is going to constrain their behavior. They have to provision that
child. For fathers, provisioning is optional.”
To test theories about Upper Paleolithic life, researchers looked to
ethnography, the scientific description of modern and historical cultural
groups. While the lives of modern hunters do not exactly duplicate those of
ancient hunters, they supply valuable clues to universal human behavior. In
many historical societies, Soffer observes, women played a key part in net
hunting, since the technique did not call for brute strength nor did it place
young mothers in physical peril. Among Australian aborigines, for example.
Women as well as men knotted the mesh, laboring for as much as two or three
years on a fine net. Among Native American groups, they helped lay out their
handiwork on poles across a valley floor. Then the entire camp joined forces as
beaters. Fanning out across the valley, men, women, and children alike shouted
and screamed, flushing out game and driving it in the direction of the net.
“Everybody and their mother could participate,” says Soffer. “Some people were
beating, others were screaming or holding the net. And once you got the net on
these animals, they were immobilized. You didn’t need brute force. You could
club them, hit them any old way.”
People seldom returned home empty-handed. Researchers living among the
net hunting Mbuti in the forests of the Congo report that they capture game
every time they lay out their woven traps, scooping up 50 percent of the animals
encountered. “Nets are a far more valued item in their panoply of food-
producing things than bows and arrows are,” says Adovasio. So lethal are these
traps that the Mbuti generally rack up more meat than they can consume, trading
the surplus with neighbors. Other net hunters traditionally smoked or dried
their catch and stored it for leaner times.
Soffer doubts that the inhabitants of Dolnf Vestonice and Pavlov were
the only net makers in Ice Age Europe. Camps stretching from Germany to Russia are littered with a notable
abundance of small-game bones, from hares to birds like ptarmigan. And at least
some of their inhabitants whittled bone tools that look much like the awls and
net spacers favored by historical net makers.
Although the full range of their activities is unlikely ever to be known
for certain, there is good reason to believe that Ice Age women played a host
of powerful roles. And the research that suggests those roles is rapidly changing our mental
images of the past. For Soffer and others, these are exciting times.
