In the Stone Age Americas, a woman’s place may have been on the hunt, a new study reports.

The study has archaeologists rethinking ideas about gender roles in prehistoric hunter-gatherer cultures. But some scientists are not so sure about the results.

 Archaeologists involved in the research found the remains of a young woman at a 9,000-year-old burial site in Peru. She is buried with what appears to be a complete set of big-game hunting tools: spear points, scrapers, blades and more. “Big-game hunting” means the hunting of very large animals.

Researchers could not tell the individual’s sex at the place where the remains were found. “We all just assumed it was a dude” or male, said University of California Davis archaeologist Randy Haas.

But after studying the remains back at a laboratory, scientist Jim Watson of the University of Arizona said, “I think ‘he’ is a ‘she.'”

In nearly every hunter-gatherer culture studied, big-game hunting is done almost always by men. Scientists had guessed that, for the most part, that is how it has always been.

So, was this a special case? Or were prehistoric women hunters more common than thought? These are hard questions to answer because these kinds of sites are hard to find.

However, scientists in those studies did not identify many of these women as hunters. Haas notes that at some other sites, the tools were described not as hunting tools but as tools for preparing food or clothing, which were considered women’s work.