The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong

It is correct that the worlds of science and medicine have not studied female bodies as well as male bodies. It's not as bad as it used to be but I think it's often true that things like recommended doses for drugs are based on assuming "a woman is a small man" rather than actual drug trials involving a significant number of women or any other kind of real data.

I agree though, if they are making up data to support their claims they have allowed their ideology to corrupt their integrity. It seems like an editor really should have fact checked this before publishing but maybe that's not how it works these days.

Thank you for engaging with the article in this depth. I might be able to help you clear up some of your concerns and will try to do so best i can.

Mounting evidence from exercise science indicates that women are physiologically better suited than men to endurance efforts such as running marathons.

This has been an ongoing discussion for years now. There have in fact been several scientists who have made the same claim. You are right to be critical here.

This study from 2015, that analysed the performance differences between men and women from 1971 to 2012, in 50 -mile to 3100-mile ultramarathons, comes to the conclusion that men outperform woman, although they point out that one reason for the gender gap might be that less women participate in marathons.

But this preprint (!) from 2023 suggests that, even with equal participation numbers, men still outperform woman.

Either way, it still is an ongoing debate. While the quoted sentence you chose is clearly not backed up by data the authors at least hint towards this by stating that "We still have much to learn about female athletic performance [...].". I still agree: the statement as made is incorrect.

I'd like to point to this article and this study, that seem to point towards men and woman using different pacing strategies in marathons, possible showing how they could have fulfilled different roles during hunting.

The article addresses a relevant point a bit further down: "The inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports. As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best. Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women's events because of the belief that they will make the women “artificially faster,” as though women were not actually doing the running themselves."

Still, i would say the evidence is at least unclear and does not back up the statement made and therefore rightfully criticised by you.

Also I’d like to point out that all of this might be of no relevance at all to the question, if woman hunted alongside men or not, since the idea that humans outran animals as a hunting techniques (e.g. "persistence hunting") has been heavily challenged and, to my limited understanding, debunked. But this is not my field, so i am not familiar with a lot of sources on the topic. I am happy to be corrected here.

I wouldn’t say “superior” like a value judgement that muscle strength is the most important thing in terms of physical ability, but I don’t think that it’s controversial that the average man is physically stronger than the average woman, or that being pregnant interferes with your ability at physical tasks. This article keeps going on about how it’s clear that there’s not any physical difference when it is blatantly clear from sporting events that (in the average, accounting for individual variation) there is.

Have a look at the sources they give in the article. This paper seems to be the main source for the article. In regards to your concerns it states that:

"While there are real, uncontroversial mean biological differences between females and males, the differences that give females an advantage are not only regularly ignored but also understudied. Because of this, science poorly understands female athletic capabilities in terms of strength, endurance, and fatigue. Until this uneven understanding is rectified, our reconstructions of past sexual divisions of labour will be biased and limit the likely broad repertoire of activities females participated in during our evolutionary past."

In regards to your question why movies and gender roles are part of the article, i would like to ask why this seems to be problematic for you? The context for both seem quite clear? "Gender" (not Sex) is, according to Gender-Studies, something "performed". Movies and how we talk about Gender-roles very much form, how people frame a Gender and assign roles to it. The article is stating (and in my opinion correctly so) that it makes a difference if a society "performers", or believes in the idea of male only hunters, as this leads to a bias in the scientific literature and field. Why would this not be included in a scientific article? Its based on quite solid science (other than the whole endurance idea they are promoting). Maybe you could elaborate a bit why you find it not relevant?

You can talk about the biology and anthropology of XX chromosome people and XY chromosome people without getting into this

But that’s not the only topic at hand, isn't it? They clearly state that in scientific literature it is not made clear when they are speaking of biological or social genders. And it makes a difference if you are addressing gender or sex. Further, it is important to differentiate between the concepts of gender and sex, because they want to make clear where they speak about biology and where they speak about the constructed (or "performed") gender of female.

What the fuck is this I feel like I’m taking crazy pills

Why? What is the crazy part to you? Do you disagree with the statement that science has been extreme male focused? As far as i can tell it indeed has been and still is. What’s crazy in pointing that out? Or do you disagree?

This was the first part that made me think, oh shit, maybe I am the wrong one, all this stuff has been valid and I’ve just been being Joe Rogan and poo pooing it all. Nope, it’s just more made up stuff. If Hitoshi Watanabe is sexist (which apparently he is), then this is off the fuckin charts.

I don’t get why it’s a bad thing when male scientists bring their biases into their papers to the point of ignoring that data and just inventing their own imagined world to fit how they like to see it (which, it is, of course, a very bad thing), but all of a sudden if a feminist does it, it turns into a good thing.

Yes! I absolutely agree. None of their three chosen examples showes any female dominating in any category, neither once or "regularly". It is bad practice to make such a claim. I wouldn’t label it as sexist. It's just really bad science. And it invalidates a lot of the very sensible and very much proven point the authors make. And I agree with you: It is not a good thing when anybody does this, regardless of agenda.

All your questions are answered within the article. In most cases a few sentences before and/or after your quotes.

Of all the things you mention I agree that the word dominating is not the correct one in this paragraph:

If you follow long-distance races, you might be thinking, wait—males are outperforming females in endurance events! But this is only sometimes the case. Females are more regularly dominating ultraendurance events such as the more than 260-mile Montane Spine foot race through England and Scotland, the 21-mile swim across the English Channel and the 4,300-mile Trans Am cycling race across the U.S. Sometimes female athletes compete in these races while attending to the needs of their children. In 2018 English runner Sophie Power ran the 105-mile Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc race in the Alps while still breastfeeding her three-month-old at rest stations.

Why is this in your science article

Maybe they don't want people using this article to argue sex = gender and they want to clarify this.

I only read your comment and not the article, but it gives very strong "women are an enigma" energy

Edit: to be clear, I'm not referring to what you said, rather the points you pulled from the article. And its written by women, which I missed at first.

This is the kind of wack-job pseudoscience article that is published in the abandonment of scientific method, for the interest of identity politics. What's crazy is how effective this has been at swaying people's opinions. We can talk until we're blue in the face, but it's not going to change biology, or the millions of data points we already have about physical performance between the sexes. To my knowledge there has been one anthropological dig that revealed one tribe of about 40 people where the women may have hunted as often or more than the men... and now there are groups of people intent on revising known history in the interest of their agenda. It's okay that the sexes are different. It's okay for groups of people to be different. We benefit from each other's strengths, and help overcome each other's weaknesses. The world would be rather boring if we were all exactly the same.

Think about it like this:

If you're going out with weapons to hunt with, are you also going to ignore the berries and herbs and mushrooms you find? If you're going out with baskets to bring back materials for foraging, are you going to feel stupid for not also bringing along a sling or spear when you see some small game?

Yes, statistically speaking, men have more strength and lung capacity than women. That would generally make men more effective at hunting, but that doesn't mean that women didn't hunt at all.

Try watching 90s sitcoms. Gender essentialism was still ok in public discourse so you hear a lot of 'because men were designed to hunt' to explain unrelated behaviour.