Men are hunters, women are gatherers. That was the assumption. A new study upends it.

A group of young women from the Awa people in Brazil hold their bows and arrows as they return from a hunt. A new reexamination of ethnographic studies finds female hunters are common in hunter-gatherer societies. (Scott Wallace/Getty Images)

For decades, scientists have believed that early humans had a division of labor: Men generally did the hunting and women did the gathering. And this view hasn't been limited to academics. It's often been used to make the case that men and women today should stick to the supposedly "natural" roles that early human society reveals.

Now a new study suggests the vision of early men as the exclusive hunters is simply wrong – and that evidence that early women were also hunting has been there all along.