It's a familiar story to many of us: In prehistoric times, men were hunters and women were gatherers. Women were not physically capable of hunting because their anatomy was different from men. And because men were hunters, they drove human evolution.
From the article, given it seems most people commenting aren’t bothering to read it:
Effectively around 60 years ago anthropologists just extended assumptions from antiquity around early gender roles in their analysis, gendering hunting tools and activities as male, and it wasn’t broadly questioned because it fit in the pattern of expectations for the time (again, largely influenced from patriarchal misinformation in antiquity which had extensive impact on Western thought over the past few millennia).
Women did raise objections given the actual evidence over the past few decades, but it was allegedly dismissed as a feminist counter-narrative. The work here is attempting to more comprehensively demonstrate the case by showing that both physical markers of hunting injuries exist for both sexes and that the physiological capabilities to successfully hunt was present for both sexes.
This claim comes from 2 people, I would be a little more cautious about broadly embracing there claims of systemic discrimination, without actually knowing the corpus of research on the topic.
Also there claim of endurance being an important factor is suspect. Women have better endurance in that there performance drops more slowly than men, however the drop isn’t significant enough to result in any total advantage. Which is why women still lose in endurance competitions.
It’s fair to say that women probably weren’t significantly disadvantaged in hunting (especially smaller animals), but it’s quite misleading to argue that their endurance added some additional advantage.
You do realize that their papers are linked in the article and have references, correct?
If you actually have doubts about their underlying claims, I’d encourage taking a look at those.
Here’s an anecdote from a peer anthropologist who was a fan of their work and interviewed for a different story on it:
These kinds of “oops, it turns out someone assumed male was female/intersex” finds have been happening quite frequently over the past few years if you’ve been following the field at all.
The, “Everyone assumed roles were 100% different, but they were 100% the same, which really says something about you western people.” is distasteful to me and factually incorrect. We can see what people who live and lived without technology and access to shared culture do. Generally, men hunted more and women cared for children more. The observation has been that women spend a portion of their lives pregnant and nursing, so men go out and do things that require them to be away. We haven’t documented gender roles because preconceptions or because we’re western, but through direct observation. Those observations of how people lived could be combined with our knowledge of wear patterns on bones to construct a better understanding of how roles may have been less distinct and how bones wear. The assertion that we have 100% confidence in perceiving people’s entire lives by looking at bones and we can’t trust anything anyone said before because they were all sexist… excuse me… had preconceptions is unhelpful.