Gender convergent labor and technological change at the Pleistocene to Holocene Transition in the Great Basin

• Great Basin wetlands allowed both genders to reliably hunt prey during the PHT. • Women butchered game and processed hides when hunting conflicted with childcare. • Middle Holocene desiccation triggered gendered labor divergence. • Women processed plants with high handling costs as men assumed prey handling tasks. • Reorganization of gendered labor explains key technological shifts. Specialized flake tools and eyed bone needles occur in Great Basin assemblages dating to the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition (∼13000–11000 BP), whereas ground stone and tightly woven basketry become common by the Middle Holocene (∼8000 BP). Although suggestive of a transition from big game hunting to broad-spectrum foraging, subsistence evidence reveals that Paleoindian Period populations hunted smaller game and consumed seeds without using the milling and basketry technologies of later Archaic Period peoples. Using ethnographic correlations between gender-specific activities, we model how hunting success and childcare influenced gendered technological choices and labor organization. Before the Early Holocene, women hunted diverse fauna near wetlands while performing transport and processing tasks for large game hunting, requiring investment in tools for processing meat and hides. As wetlands desiccated and large game became scarce, gendered labor diverged. Women increasingly harvested low-yield resources like seeds to reliably provision children, investing in tools that reduced seed processing costs. Men continued pursuing large game but with diminished support from women. This transition established the strongly divergent gendered labor documented among ethnographic Great Basin hunter-gatherers and resolves apparent contradictions between subsistence and technological evidence in the archaeological record.