Prehistoric women were hunters and artists as well as mothers, book reveals

French book and documentary coming to the UK in September seeks to ‘debunk the simplistic division’ of gender roles

Daniel Boffey
Fri 29 Apr 2022 08.34 EDT

From academic works giving women a supporting role to hunter-gather men, to Raquel Welch’s portrayal of a bikini-clad cavewoman in the 1966 film One Million Years BC, the gender division of the stone age is firmly entrenched in public consciousness.

While men strode out to spear woolly mammoths, women, as mothers or exploited objects of male desire, sheltered in caves from the violent world, according to an understanding said to be increasingly removed from the latest research.

The historians and film-makers behind Lady Sapiens: the Woman in Prehistory, a French book and documentary to be published in the UK in September, say they are now seeking to debunk the simplistic division of roles by highlighting advances in the study of bones, graves, art and ethnography often ignored in the public sphere.

“For a long time, prehistory was written from the male point of view, and when women were mentioned, they were portrayed as helpless, frightened creatures, protected by overly powerful male hunters,” Sophie de Beaune, a professor in pre-history at the Université Jean-Moulin-Lyon III, writes in the book’s preface. “Since women have begun to enter the ranks of prehistorians, a different picture has gradually emerged.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/apr/29/prehistoric-women-were-hunters-and-artists-not-just-mothers-book-reveals