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Sexual division of labor with females as gatherers and males as hunters is a major empirical regularity of hunter-gatherer ethnography, suggesting an ancestral behavioral pattern. We present an archeological discovery and meta-analysis that challenge the man-the-hunter hypothesis. Excavations at the Andean highland site of Wilamaya Patjxa reveal a 9000-year-old human burial (WMP6) associated with a hunting toolkit of stone projectile points and animal processing tools. Osteological, proteomic, and isotopic analyses indicate that this early hunter was a young adult female who subsisted on terrestrial plants and animals. Analysis of Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene burial practices throughout the Americas situate WMP6 as the earliest and most secure hunter burial in a sample that includes 10 other females in statistical parity with early male hunter burials. The findings are consistent with nongendered labor practices in which early hunter-gatherer females were big-game hunters. 

We examine age of weaning and childhood diet at a Middle Period site in central California, CA-SOL-11, near Suisun Marsh. Stable isotope analyses of serial samples of permanent first molars record information about the diet of an individual when they were between 0 and 9.5 years of age. Our results show that females were breastfed, on average, slightly longer than males at the site. Because breastfeeding represents a significant time and caloric investment by a mother, this suggests greater parental investment in female offspring relative to males. After weaning, young males gained a greater proportion of protein from higher trophic levels and with greater contribution from brackish or marine environments, which we interpret as a higher quality diet. This suggests either preferential provisioning by parents in males after weaning, or evidence of gendered labor practices and diets beginning in early childhood. We also incorporate new analyses of the amelogenin proteins preserved in enamel, AMELX_HUMAN and AMELY_HUMAN, to estimate the sex of one individual previously identified as male based on osteological markers and two individuals that could not be assigned sex based on osteology