Hunting the Elephant

Description:

On the plains of Africa somewhere around 150,000 years before present, this troop of Homo sapiens (anatomically modern human) women is ready to bring down the mighty bush elephant. Because our species needed the practice before colonizing northern Eurasia to hunt the woolly mammoth. Of course this was my subversion of the classic artistic trope of Paleolithic era men hunting woolly mammoths on the tundra of Ice Age Eurasia. Instead of Cro-Magnon European males, I went for African women living before our species's great Out-of-Africa migrations. I personally am not 100% sold on projecting the whole "men hunt, women gather" cliche so far into the pre-agricultural past; I'm sure women would have been perfectly capable of hunting back then as long as they weren't pregnant or nursing.