UW Researcher Explores How Ancient Hunters Succeeded While Carrying Babies

Earlier this fall, a headline on Cowboy State Daily captured the attention of many: "Wyoming Bowhunter Bags Big Buck With Napping Toddler On His Back." The unusual event garnered media attention, but how unusual was it?

While the Wheatland man featured in the story was stalking a mule deer with his 1-year-old daughter on his back, an assistant professor in the University of Wyoming Department of Anthropology, Randy Haas, was conducting research with his 1-year-old son on his back in order to understand the effects of child care on hunting practices in early human societies.

"The study was inspired by my research on early human economies, interests in hunting and love of being with my son," Haas says.

His study challenges the long-held assumption that child care limited ancient humans' ability to hunt large mammals.

Haas's research focused on the atlatl, a spear-throwing tool used widely in early hunting practices. The full study is available in the journal PaleoAmerica here.

The study tested 208 atlatl casts and found that baby wearing -- or carrying a baby in a sling on one's front or back -- does not affect accuracy or force. The results suggest that the atlatl's efficient design would have allowed child caregivers, often women who were also tending to children, to hunt effectively.

"This is an experimental study that my son, Hank, and I performed to evaluate the effects of baby wearing on the use of atlatl technology -- a spear throwing technology that was likely the most pervasive hunting technology in human history," Haas says. "Hank and I found that atlatls can not only be safely and effectively operated while carrying a baby in a baby carrier; we also found that baby wearing has no effect on atlatl accuracy or kinetic energy, contrary to what I originally hypothesized."

While Haas plans to further investigate the ways in which child care may have affected the division of labor in forager societies, the results of this analysis reveal that atlatl technology likely made hunting large mammals accessible to child caregivers who are most often females.

That said, there may have been other elements of child care that hindered the ability to hunt, he explains.

Haas isn't the first UW professor to conduct atlatl experiments to better understand humanity's past. In the 1980s, the late George Frison famously traveled to Africa to test the effectiveness of atlatl technology in hunting elephants, leading him to conclude that atlatl technology would have been effective for hunting mammoths in North America.

Haas is an archaeologist who investigates hunter-gatherers of the past in order to better understand human behavior in the present. Particular topics of interest include forager diets, mobility, technology, inequality, cooperation, gender and diversity.

He leads archaeological excavations and survey projects in the Andes Mountains of Peru and mountain regions of western North America. He also specializes in quantitative comparative approaches that integrate large datasets across North and South America.

To learn more about Haas's study, email him at [email protected].