The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong
The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong
The influential idea that in the past men were hunters and women were not isn’t supported by the available evidence
cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/15901115
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
If you look at races that are longer than marathons it seems that the women have the upper edge. https://ultra-x.co/are-women-better-than-men-at-ultra-running/
But that doesn't necessarily correlate with hunting.
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.
The OP article said the same thing, and like this article, it provides no evidence for the statement. I looked for some numbers, and for world bests, men had better performance in every category I found. The study linked below looked at speeds over decades and in every case men had better performance. Both men and women have improved over time, and as a percentage the difference is getting smaller, but in absolute difference it appears the same. It is an admittedly brief search, but I can't find evidence in the form of measured times (not conjecture about estrogen) indicating at all that women perform better in ultra marathons. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3870311
Speed of marathon doesn't necessarily serve as a benchmark for endurance, does it? Endurance is a metric of how tired you get over time, no? A cheetah can run 1km waaaay faster than a human. Doesn't mean that it has better endurance than humans.
What (widely popular) race could possibly be a better metric of endurance than the marathon?
The fastest marathon time for men is 2 hours 1 minute and for women it is 2 hours 14 minutes.
"Fastest" does not mean the best endurance. You would be looking at the "longest".
There have been several people, men and women who run a marathon every day for months or even years on end. In that sense there is no upper limit, but those people almost certainly all have a genetic mutation which most people don't that prevents lactic acid buildup.
The fastest marathon time for men is 2 hours 1 minute and for women it is 2 hours 14 minutes.
It's an unacceptable leap in logic to infer (from that statement) anything about populations of men and women. You've picked only a single sample from each population and chosen that highly biased representative.
Let’s run a marathon where everyone is underfed and has foot injuries as well as painful dental problems. I guarantee you more women will finish the race ;D
Most marathon runners have a lower body fat than is considered medically healthy and their toe nails pop off during the race, so we are already 2/3 of the way there.
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.
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
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.
Well.. many of the younger women would be constantly pregnant back then, and engaged in communal child rearing. So they are going to be spending less time on mammoth hunts.
Ancient people's also worked way less than we do now.
My theory is that men evolved much higher grip strength due to incessant masturbation.
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
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?
Running an animal to death is just one method. Useful on a hot day when your prey is far more susceptible to heat exhaustion/stroke than you are. And the calories gained from the animal outweigh the calories expended to gain them.
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.
I'm also curious about the role pregnancy plays into all of this. Obviously everyone back then would need to help out in any way they could back then, but without contraceptives how frequently would women be pregnant? It seems like that would play the largest contributing factor into roles/responsibilities and the article seems to ignore that issue.
While today you could breastfeed while running a marathon, there wouldn't be a way to keep the baby close by back then. Additionally, while for the first couple months a pregnancy might not impact your ability to hunt, eventually it certainly would.
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".
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.
I think the wrong point of view here is using evolution as the biological term. As we are genetically make to do that. We probably are not. As most human behavior is not a product of genetics but a product of culture.
As most human behavior is not a product of genetics but a product of culture.
Pretty sure it's a heavy combination of the 2. Not just culture
Naked and Afraid and Women Who Hunt
Sounds like a very ...interesting show.
[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.
I don't know, I'm a man and I respond with screaming to most things. My gatherer woman is kinda sick of it btw
I'm a man and I scream when something scary and surprising or unstoppable happens.
I remember a couple of years ago, I was getting breakfast, half asleep, and out of the corner of my eye, a mouse climbed down the kitchen cabinet and ran under the stove and I had no idea what it was at first, just some moving blob, and it scared the shit out of me and I screamed like a child.
I’m not sure this is generally true but if there was a difference it’d likely be due to social conditioning.
Or have you never heard women do a little squal when startled? Most women seem to do that, while most men seem not to.
I'm just curious why there is a difference.
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.
I've heard the female screech pretty much all over western societies. I hardly ever hear men do that. So I was just wondering.
As an autistic person, noises trigger me, and that's why I noticed females doing it more than males.
If it is conditioning, it's something particular to western society, I suppose.
I'm just wondering why you respond with screaming?
Who gives a fuck lol as long as I eat.
Were you also watching Seinfeld yesterday? It was one of his stand-up bits before or after the show
women want to see what’s on TV, men just want to see what else is on TV.
one of those jokes that’s about to age out of relevance.
I was thinking about that as well
I like how they are lumping hunting and trapping in one pot
