Prehistoric Peruvian Woman was likely a big game hunter

I love it!

And it makes total sense: if a small group of people are surviving by hunting large mammals, then any of the group with the strength to 'man' a spear, or whatever the weapon is, is going to be encouraged to 'man' up and take part.
I suspect that on the 'gathering' end of 'hunter/gatherer', a man unable to keep up, or wield a weapon, would go out with the women, gathering plants, or catching smaller game.
We all gotta work together, or nobody survives.

I saw this and it's really cool. Stuff like this always makes me think of how we just assumed the big bee in charge was the King Bee for centuries because we couldn't get over our cultural biases of a woman being in charge. There's probably so, so many things like burial sites that have been interpreted wrong over the years because people refused to consider that a woman could be a hunter or warrior (or that a couple could be gay, or what have you).

I can understand why this has generated interest, but it's really nothing that surprising, at least to researches who have made an effort not to be ethnocentric (in the context of palaeoanthropology, being male-centric because you come from a male dominated culture counts as being ethnocentric because it's interpreting other cultures through the lens of your own culture).

The BaMbuti people of the Congo are a modern hunter-gatherer society where men and women hunt and gather together and men share childcare duties with the women (to the point that they were once dubbed "the tribe of lactating men" because men suckle babies to comfort them albeit they don't actually lactate), and they don't have gender roles and are likely to be the least sexist society on the entire planet (or joint least sexist with other indigenous people of the Congo rainforest). Even though the majority of hunter-gatherer societies do have gender roles (men hunting and women gathering) it's not unheard of for women to hunt and men to gather in these societies. They tend to be a lot more flexible than people have been led to believe, for example girls learning to hunt with the boys then hunting as teenagers and young women and stopping when they become pregnant. Which, given the age of this Peruvian woman, is another possible scenario for her people. Though the idea of men and women hunting together is also very plausible.

Unfortunately a lot people have only heard very outdated, ethnocentric interpretations both of the fossil record and of recently-contacted modern hunter-gatherer peoples. Western, male anthropologists went over there, observed what the men did, paid very little attention to what the women did, saw that it was the men who went hunting, assumed this must be true for all human societies for the entire time humans existed and also assumed there were strict taboos against women hunting. When people have gone over there more recently to get to know people from these societies while making an effort to not be ethnocentric and also find out what the women are doing, they found quite a different reality, but as none of this gets taught properly in schools, universities etc, people just carry on believing the myths, including holding horrible and extremely damaging racist stereotypes about modern hunter-gatherers, together with believing that our ancestors were a load of brutes and human culture didn't ever become anything until agriculture was invented. The whole men always hunt and women always stay at home and don't do anything, err, err, I mean gather a few berries and look after the children is an idea that persists very strongly. The idea that women go gathering therefore it's not as important as hunting also comes from western ethnocentricism. Hunter-gatherer societies value hunters and gatherers, and most are relatively egalitarian in terms of sexism because the role of gatherer is so important. And men can be gatherers and women can be hunters.

Another thing I've seen a lot in the past is the assumption by western male anthropologists that all toolmaking was done by men. Ditto cave painting and all kinds of other impressive things. However there's quite a lot of evidence for women making tools and doing cave painting, and in the absence of evidence, there is no reason whatsoever to default everything to "men did it and women didn't do anything interesting".