• El Barto
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        08 months ago

        The downvoters don’t realize that science is all about finding out about stuff. The whys, the hows… you know, what “woke” people do.

    • haui
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      -18 months ago

      Using the word woke unironically is one of the best tells that someone is an idiot.

  • Buglefingers
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    28 months ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
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      8 months ago

      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.

    • @[email protected]
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      8 months ago

      Same here: the t seems the most logical answer. I’m not especially convinced by the arguments in this article, except that they are at least as strong as “man the hunter” arguments so neither changes my mind

      • @[email protected]
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        08 months ago

        Man the hunter presupposes any woman is weaker than the weakest man. It really is junk science. When they say those guys ignored evidence of women hunting, they mean it. And at the end of the day, women doing it is the biggest evidence you’re going to find.

  • @[email protected]
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    8 months ago

    [Edit] I think people are misunderstanding my comment. In no way is this meant as something negative. I’ve just come to notice that most men don’t do a little squeal when startled, but women do. I just notice these things and I’m curious why there’s a difference.

    • @[email protected]OP
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      08 months ago

      I’m not sure this is generally true but if there was a difference it’d likely be due to social conditioning.

      • @[email protected]
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        8 months ago

        Not true, the fight or flight response is an automatic response of the nervous system.

        The fight-or-flight or the fight-flight-freeze-or-fawn[1] (also called hyperarousal or the acute stress response) is a physiological reaction that occurs in response to a perceived harmful event, attack, or threat to survival.

        • @[email protected]OP
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          08 months ago

          I mean technically all of human behavior is an automatic response of the nervous system. That doesn’t mean it’s not influenced by culture or personal experiences. What constitutes a threat is highly modified by your past experiences, and people can learn to behave differently in stressful environments. We don’t just completely turn off the brain when frightened, that’s nonsense.

          • @[email protected]
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            -28 months ago

            We kind of do but there’s no sex correlation between the three responses. Except for mothers. They will go aggressive more often if their kids are involved. But that’s not a guarantee or a norm, more like a statistical bump in the data.

      • @[email protected]
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        08 months ago

        Well imagine a car accident happening while people are walking on the sidewalk. There’s always a couple women doing a high pitched screech out of shock. However I hardly ever hear men do it when it’s almost gueranteed to trigger this response in women.

        • @[email protected]
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          -18 months ago

          I think you’ve watched too many movies. If you’re watching YouTube videos you may just not realize that those are full grown men finding new octaves in their vocal range.

          • @[email protected]
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            8 months ago

            What are you talking about? I’m not talking about YouTube at all. I’m speaking from personal experience. Wonen tend to do a little squeal when startled. Men usually don’t.

            • @[email protected]
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              -28 months ago

              Are we talking about being startled or things like car accidents? Because I’m a combat veteran and I guarantee you that you will ask the medic for your mommy as they’re giving you morphine. I guarantee you men yelp when shit surprises and hurts them. It’s an automatic response. And this entire charade of innocently asking why on a false pretense can fuck all the way off.

              • @[email protected]
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                8 months ago

                Startled by something happening around them. My example was a car accident happening somewhere in the same street, like one car hitting the other at slow speed.

                You maliciously assuming there is a different motivation behind my comments is what’s the actual problem here. I see people acting like this all the time, thinking in extremes like everything is either black or white, no gray areas. Not giving others the benefit of the doubt. I can tell you this is what’s wrong with the world. All this tribalism and taking everything as an insult or an act of malice. People like you can go fuck right off.

  • @[email protected]
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    18 months ago

    I absolutely agree with the thesis that both men and women hunted, but I think the claims of women’s superior endurance are not represented in reality. The fastest marathon time for men is 2 hours 1 minute and for women it is 2 hours 14 minutes. These were in 2023 and 2019 respectively, so it’s not like it was years ago with drastically different treatment of the sexes. Both runners were Kenyans too, so that limits non-sex based biological differences.

    I don’t buy that it is socialization. For one thing, the difference disappears in sports like shooting and horseback riding where physicality is not the determining factor. On top of that, when children compete at sports there are negligible performance differences until after puberty. The article mentions the record a woman holds for swimming across the English Channel. I think that women’s higher body fat provides buoyancy that massively reduces the energy required to stay afloat for a prolonged time. We don’t see the same supposed superiority in other endurance events.

    This link touches on many of the same topics as the main article and adds some more info.

    https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240731-the-sports-where-women-outperform-men

      • @[email protected]OP
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        8 months ago

        Well, the theory is that persistence hunting was one of the main hunting strategies during a large portion of human evolution before ranged weapons were invented. So it may well have relevance for distribution of labor between men and women during most of human prehistory, and therefore our evolutionary psychology.

        • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet
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          08 months ago

          Persistence hunting only worked in areas with wide open terrain, like the African or American plains. Prey in the jungle or heavily wooded areas can just disappear into the underbrush and be gone. It doesn’t matter how far you can walk at that point, because you’ll never find that animal again.

  • @[email protected]
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    08 months ago

    The theory proposes that hunting was a major driver of human evolution and that men carried this activity out to the exclusion of women. It holds that human ancestors had a division of labor, rooted in biological differences between males and females, in which males evolved to hunt and provide and females tended to children and domestic duties. It assumes that males are physically superior to females and that pregnancy and child-rearing reduce or eliminate a female’s ability to hunt.

    Oh boy, what a load of bullshit to start an article that may very well have a solid point. I lost all interest in reading at this paragraph.

    “It holds” - as if there was only one theory - and everyone who believes that men were mostly hunters and women mostly gatherers would be guilty of the assumptions mentioned thereafter.

    I, for one, only ever heard that due to men mostly hunting (because women were busy with children), men evolved to have a better perception of moving images e.g. small movements of prey in hiding, and women evolved to have a better perception of details of inanimate objects (e.g. finding things to forage). And that explanation - while not necessarily correct - made sense, and is in no way the sexist bullshit that the article insinuates.

    The author of that article is not doing feminism a favor by basically alleging “all who believe men evolved to hunt and women to gather are chauvinists”.

    • @[email protected]
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      18 months ago

      it is just an example how gender stuff infitrates siences like archeology and anthropology.

      “It assumes that males are physically superior to females”

      I hate how this is presented. I have vitamin deficency and i am really weak and lost a lot of weight, but i am still able to lift objects most women would not get of the ground. I weigh 64 kilos. that is not that much for a man.

      this does not make me superior. it is just like it is.

      I want to know how women like it to hunt while pregnant, having a baby on their hip, or small whiny children in tow.

      give me a break. men evolved to hunters because the women told them to hunt.

      they did not want to have them sit around and chew the fat with the children.

      show me ONE women who says the she is worse than her husband in child rearing.

      right, that will never ever happen. maybe if we have a drug addict or a severely cancer ridden person, but no.

      women will die to have their children around. they will not go hunting if there is someone else that wants to do it.

      • @[email protected]
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        28 months ago

        I think you went off on a tangent. This is not what I was complaining about. Also, I do not have a problem with “gender stuff” - I just have a problem with a lack of objectivity.

        • @[email protected]
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          18 months ago

          but this is what I complain about. but yeah, i went over the rails, you are right. you have a point.

          in that other thread, i mean, where the crosspost is, they talked a lot about patriarchy and stuff.

          and i wondered: if women in the past were hunting and thus using their skill like men do and yada yada, not gender roles like today and stuff, does that mean that there was no patriarchy back then?

          • @[email protected]
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            18 months ago

            There are tribal people that live in matriarchy. If that answers your question. Also, the amazons are not just a myth.

              • @[email protected]
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                18 months ago

                and i wondered: if women in the past were hunting and thus using their skill like men do and yada yada, not gender roles like today and stuff, does that mean that there was no patriarchy back then?

                But you asked exactly that - and I gave you examples of women that “were hunting and thus using their skill” and there was no patriarchy in some of those systems - even into the present.

                Also - let’s be real - most men nowadays who talk about “men hunting” are fat slobs who couldn’t hunt a chicken with a limp ;)

                • @[email protected]
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                  18 months ago

                  No, i asked for the past. ancient times.

                  most men nowadays who talk about “men hunting” are fat slobs who couldn’t hunt a chicken with a limp ;)

                  thats sounds like anectdotal evidence ;-)

  • @[email protected]
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    08 months ago

    This article boils down to “well women can run marathons too, so let’s throw history out of the window”

    • ivanafterall ☑️
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      08 months ago

      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

      • Makhno
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        -18 months ago

        So why aren’t women beating men in endurance races across the board?

        • @[email protected]
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          08 months ago

          Well it is in the name, endurance RACES. It is a race not a test of pure endurance. To test pure endurance you would need to start running or walking or swimming at your own pace and continue till you drop to the ground and the one that can do that for the longest would have the best endurance.

  • @[email protected]
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    8 months ago

    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…

    • @[email protected]
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      08 months ago

      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.

        • @[email protected]
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          08 months ago

          Speed is less of a factor than endurance in a persistence-hunting scenario where we’re much slower than our prey anyway.

          I don’t know the facts for this specific claim, but the logic is fair. One group can be better suited for endurance without being faster. One group could also be faster on average without having the individual fastest performers. Not only because of cultural factors, but also because the distribution curves might have different shapes for men vs women. There could be greater outliers (top performers) among men even if the average is higher among women in general. It’s not necessarily as straightforward as, say, height, where men’s distribution curve is almost the same shape as women’s, just shifted up a few inches.

          I don’t have the data to draw any real conclusions, though.

          One of the problems looking at athletic records is that it’s really just the elite among a self-selected group of enthusiasts, which doesn’t tell us a whole lot about what might have been the norm 100,000 years ago, or what might be the norm today if all else were equal between genders. These are not controlled trials.

          I’ve read that the top women outperform the top men in long-distance open-water swimming, supposedly due in part to higher body fat making women more buoyant, helping to regulate body temperature, and providing fuel. This is the first time I’ve read that women might have an advantage in running, though.

          I wish the article provided citations. The reality is probably too complex to fit into a headline or pop-sci writeup.

          • @[email protected]
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            08 months ago

            I just looked at the measured data and came to a conclusion. I don’t even know what conclusion you’re trying to communicate, but it beats me…

            • @[email protected]
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              08 months ago

              I explained why that data does not contradict what the previous commenter was trying to say.

              • @[email protected]
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                -18 months ago

                I was asking the commenter to explain what a ‘better’ runner is supposed to mean? And tou perhaps was answering something else…

    • @[email protected]OP
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      8 months ago

      I agree that they overstated their point there. But regardless, I think it’s fair to say that any differences between men and women in these sports are fairly small, so I don’t think it changes the overall conclusion.

      • @[email protected]
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        08 months ago

        The men’s world record marathon time is 9% faster than the women’s. That’s significant. The male runner would finish over two miles ahead of the female runner.

        • @[email protected]
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          08 months ago

          Women were first allowed to compete in marathons in 1972. In 1972 the men’s record was 2:10:30. The current record is 2:00:35 which is about an 8% difference. Pretty close to the difference between men and women currently.

          The first women’s record was 3:40:22 and the current women’s record is 2:11:53.11 which is 40% faster.

          Once funding for women’s athletics reaches parity and once girls are encouraged into athletics as much as boys, then we will see if the ladies catch up. So far they’re doing a pretty good job catching up, and you can’t look at one current window in time and say you have the answer, you need to look at trends.

          • @[email protected]
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            18 months ago

            And that’s what people miss when quoting sports statistics. They confuse culture with biology. We live in a society that imparts certain roles based on gender. Men are encouraged to exercise and run more from a young age than women are. In an egalitarian society, that disparity wouldn’t exist. We really can’t say how things would play out. That’s why studies of paleolithic skeletons are a much better tool than just navel-gazing based on modern sports. Those statistics cannot be separated from our current society. Instead of just speculating, we can look at the actual skeletons of paleolithic people, which this article discusses. These skeletons record a record of the kinds of lives these people lived. There’s no need to speculate; we can ask these people directly how they lived.