I'm going to kind of go off on a connected tangent here. It's interesting to me that many women in my largely rural, conservative family in the U.S. are quite enthusiastic hunters. You're as likely to find some of them in deer blinds this time of year as you are to find men in my family. I have siblings and cousins who take their girl children hunting as often as they take their boy children.

If you read publications dedicated to deer hunting and other similar activities, you will often find pictures of girls and women. That's not even remarkable ... not anymore, not like it used to be when I was a kid.

Strict gender-role rules that mostly pushed girls and women out of hunting when I was a child have loosened up, and not by any organized means. Women simply started doing what they wanted to do because it looked enjoyable to them and because it turned out they were good at it. Looser societal rules made that possible —made it no longer scandalous or automatically objectionable.

So my point, I guess, is this ... given that change has happened in my lifetime, and with what feels like lightning speed, why should anyone presume that traditional gender-role rules of previous decades and centuries must have been the same or nearly the same going back tens or hundreds of thousands of years?

I think the point of your story is very well taken. Of course the way we humans define and perform gender at any given point in history cannot be projected into the past with uniformity, not if we wish to be able to truly understand where we come from.