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The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong
(www.scientificamerican.com)
Can't believe even history is going WOKE! π‘
this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2024
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Using the word woke unironically is one of the best tells that someone is an idiot.
As an insult, yeah, but not if it's the original context like "stay woke"
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i hope i never have to tell anybody i just w*ke up from a nap
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The downvoters don't realize that science is all about finding out about stuff. The whys, the hows.... you know, what "woke" people do.
I had always assumed that Hunter-Gatherer societies were very loosely sex divided and strongly necessity based. Meaning, sure men could be the typical hunter and women the typical gatherer but if necessity dictates, any person would do any job, and, given the times, that was probably frequently.
Furthermore they also likely didn't have societal structures the way modern societies did, meaning people likely weren't barred from any job or forced into any job, it was a community effort for survival, if you meet a criteria that can help, you do that.
These are not factual statements, these are just my assumptions on how I figured they reasonably existed.
At least some of them took the kids down to the creek every 6 months or so, and threw the babies in the water to see who would swim. The ones that didn't swim stayed back at the camp and fixed pottery, cleaned, cooked, etc. The swimmers became the hunters and gatherers. Several of the Native American Nations in the Eastern US did this when white man came over and invaded. According to their oral histories, they had been doing this for a few tens of thousands of years, which seems to match up to the archaeological evidence we've found in the last couple decades.
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Mounting evidence from exercise science indicates that women are physiologically better suited than men to endurance efforts such as running marathons.
Looking at marathon athletic records; that's not at all true and took me about 3 min to verify. In fact, out of all the top 25 record times, all are by men (and almost all Kenyan and Ethiopian men).
What is this tripe? They could at least try to be serious..
your are connecting two different pieces of data. The speed that a person can run a marathon vs. the ability to run a marathon.
What they are stating is that women are better able to run that distance not that they are faster at running that distance than men.
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It's in the ultra marathons that women keep up with men and sometimes beat them
What? I just looked at the records for ultramarathons, and there is not a single instance of women beating men for their respective runs.
For the IAU records on Wikipedia, yeah. A couple things to keep in mind, 80% of the people who complete an ultra marathon are male. And the gap between the sexes, some estimate around 4% for ultra marathons, seems to be trending down.
Here's better research I found. You're right, men still win more often and have the records. But honestly it's more complicated than just who is faster.
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My theory is that men evolved much higher grip strength due to incessant masturbation.
Wouldn't the men who were "best" at masturbation have the fewest children?
Have you had sex? One doesnt prevent the other from happening
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Huh, I wonder why virtually every uncontacted tribe we've found so far has the men doing all* the hunting?
*I don't consider foraging for clams hunting, but people are free to disagree
Certainly a question for the ages. If only there was some way to learn more about this topicβ¦ perhaps some kind of article. Maybe one that even addresses this very point. But alasβ¦
Tap for spoiler
Abigail Anderson and Cara Wall-Scheffler, both then at Seattle Pacific University, and their colleagues reported that 79 percent of the 63 foraging societies with clear descriptions of their hunting strategies feature women hunters.
Sigh, taking such claims at face value and not looking into how the underlying data was obtained is how we end up with so many successfully published but false scientific papers.
The paper referenced here is https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0287101
The cultures 'surveyed' are
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0287101.t001
Notice any uncontacted peoples missing from those data points? Here's a quick list of them from Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_peoples
Immediately I can tell you the Sentinelese, Awa, Toromona, Nukak, Tagaeri and the Taromenanepeople are not represented here. It's almost like the societies selected for this paper weren't a complete picture.
I wonder why that would be.... surely not to conform to any biases of the authors.
You think they should have surveyed the uncontacted people?
Uncontacted peoples are groups of Indigenous peoplesliving without sustained contact with neighbouring communities and the world community.
Itβs right there in the link I provided, so yes, because infrequent contact and observation is possible.
You explicitly mentioned the Sentinelese. Exactly how would you go about this infrequent contact and observation with them?
In any case, let's assume that hunting is exclusively performed by males in all of those peoples. How much would that change the statistic and the overall conclusion? 79% would be 72%
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So there are tribes with both dynamics, maybe more one than the other?. We can also look at things like, say, competitive records between "sexes" (it's a spectrum, so the binary divide is weird to begin with, but I digress). Men run on average like 30 seconds faster on the mile than women in societies with clear disadvantages to women's training.
Is this actually significant enough to exclude women? I fail to see how it could be for a role that requires a multitude of skills.
Society's seem to have stratified based on sex to "protect" women, and maybe a lot of women even prefer it. The issue is when we use some societal preferences to override the individual and prescribe roles before the individual can even develop their own preference (men and enbies included).
What I'm seeing are some societies seem to have figured that out well enough, others are more oppressive.
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Ah, the sound of Joe Rogan's head exploding.
This article boils down to "well women can run marathons too, so let's throw history out of the window"
Which history do you think they're unfairly ignoring?
And I think the argument isn't that they can run marathons, too, but that they're naturally better at it than men:
physiologically better suited than men to endurance efforts such as running marathons
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"science"
Did you.... read the article?
I did! Running endurance today is nothing. The maon issue is, most women then would have had children early on in life. Having children can mess up womens hips, causing problems with running. That is if they lived through child birth and healed properly afterwards. They can assume what they want though, none of us were there, and there is no going back. π€·
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Trust me bro
Yeah this article is almost a year old and it got torn up when published last year. People already knew women helped hunt. But acting like that was a primary role without evidence because of modern sports science is silly.
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Meh...call me when a woman holds the world record for a marathon. It might happen in the next 100 years, but I strongly doubt it.
What bugs the shit out of me about all this...of course women hunted in times of need. They also hunted small game to help the tribe as needed.
I don't think that disrupts the overarching narrative of the male hunter and female gatherer. It's a general rule rather than a law.
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It seems obvious that some of the women would be better hunters than some of the men. But that only suggests that too much specialization was bad, not that there wasn't any specialization at all. So headline seems wrong.
Also persistent hunting seems like the most inefficient type of hunting. You exhaust yourself and the prey and loose calories, the time it takes, traveling far over unknown terrain and then having to carry it all the way back and beware other predators. Is the argument that women are best at "shitty hunting"?
I imagine you'd track an animal, get close, throw spear, miss, keep tracking the animal. And if they haven't invented the spear yet, can they even be called human?
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