Saying that someone’s views on women are “prehistoric” is now a compliment.

Hunting in ancient times has notoriously been characterized as a male pursuit. However, a recent discovery from an ancient Peruvian burial ground suggests that prehistoric women were no strangers to bringing home the bacon.

Scientists announced Wednesday that they’d exhumed the 9,000-year-old remains of a female hunter — the Americas’ oldest — from a high-altitude excavation site in the Andes. The woman, determined to be between 17 and 19 years old when she died, had been interred with stone spear points and makeshift skinning and gutting implements, indicating that she pursued big game.

“It’s now clear that sexual division of labor was fundamentally different — likely more equitable — in our species’ deep hunter-gatherer past,” Randy Haas, an assistant anthropology professor at the University of California at Davis, said in a news release. His gender-role-bending analysis of the female hunter was published in the journal Science Advances.

The findings are particularly eye-opening given that “highly gendered” contemporary hunter-gatherer societies suggest “that sexist inequalities in things like pay or rank are somehow ‘natural,’ ” said Haas.

In fact, many academics still dismiss the idea of ancient female game hunters despite prior discoveries of hunting tools in their gravesites, according to the study.

Fortunately, it appears that the team’s latest study has finally shattered sexist preconceptions. “It took a strong case to help us recognize that the archaeological pattern indicated actual female hunting behavior,” he said.

In order to determine whether the lady hunter was an anomaly, scientists studied 429 skeletons from 107 North and South American gravesites dating back 8,000 and 14,000 years, during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene epochs.

They found 11 women among the 27 individuals interred with hunting tools. Based on statistical models, Haas concluded that up to half the hunters in the Americas at the time could have been women.

“It is time to stop thinking of [ancient] female large-game hunters as outliers,” said archaeologist Ashley Smallwood of Kentucky’s University of Louisville.

Most importantly, the study supports “the contention that modern gender constructs often do not reflect past ones,” according to the researchers.