50 of 63: What the 'Women Were Hunters' Study Actually Found
October 28, 2026 · Frisian News
Anderson et al.'s 2023 PLOS ONE paper found evidence of female hunting in 50 of 63 selected foraging societies and generated 'women were hunters' headlines. A methodological critique found the same evidence in 29 of 186 societies using a broader sample, and in just 14 of 965 in a D-PLACE database search.
Fifty of 63 foraging societies showed some evidence of women hunting, or 80% as the paper framed it. That finding, from a June 2023 study by Abigail Anderson and colleagues in PLOS ONE, drove a wave of coverage declaring that women had been hunters all along.
The paper screened 391 societies catalogued in D-PLACE, a database of human cultures and languages. Of those 391, only 63 produced what the authors called explicit data on hunting behaviour. For each of the 63, the authors recorded a single binary variable: female hunting present or absent. The study did not record how often women hunted, what proportion of a group's food their hunting supplied, or whether hunting was a routine female activity or an occasional one.
A binary presence score across 63 pre-selected societies became the basis for a claim about universal human foraging patterns. The paper's own title, "The Myth of Man the Hunter," framed the conclusion before the numbers did. The funding statement records that the authors received no specific funding for this work and declared no competing interests.
Vivek Venkataraman, who was completing his own cross-cultural study of women's hunting when Anderson et al. published, argued in a July 2023 critique that the 63-society sample was skewed toward groups where female hunting had already been documented. Selecting only societies with detailed published accounts inflates the apparent frequency. Using the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample of 186 societies, Venkataraman's team found 29 with evidence of women's hunting, a frequency of 15.5%. A D-PLACE search on the "Sex Difference: Hunting" variable across 965 societies returned 14 coded for women's hunting, a rate of 1.4%. A paragraph-level survey of the Human Relations Area Files, restricted to the 391 forager cases in the database, put the figure at 13.5%. Their conclusion: any reasonable calculation puts the number well below 20%.
Venkataraman's team also checked the individual codings. Seven of the 50 societies listed as positive had no attached references at all. Several groups the paper classified as foragers were not. The Iroquois and the Kikuyu were agriculturalists. The Tsimane, Matses and Wopkaimin were hunter-horticulturalists. PLOS ONE issued a correction in August 2024 adding page numbers and further methodological notes, but the headline finding was not retracted. The Human Relations Area Files database subsequently changed the study's primary hypothesis status to "claimed supported."
None of this erases the real finding. Women did hunt in a real number of societies, and the archaeological record supports that. What Anderson et al. did not establish is that 80% of forager societies expected women to hunt, because the sample was drawn from groups where hunting had already been written up in enough detail to code. Venkataraman's analysis, which covered far more societies, puts any defensible estimate well below a fifth.
Fifty societies from a hand-picked 63 became a claim about the whole of human prehistory. Press releases did the rest.
Published October 28, 2026 · Frisian News