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
So why aren’t women beating men in endurance races across the board?
There’s a point at which women do tend to get better at endurance racing and often surpass men. And it’s in the ultra long distance races. Which actually tracks, as hunting would have likely been a mix of long and ultra long distance running
Even in endurance racing, men outperform women as a rule. It’s true that women do occasionally win coed races, but that’s not common.
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.
You’re describing the backyard ultra. The male record is 450 miles over 4.5 days. The female record is 308 miles over 3 days.
I’m just wondering why some women respond with screaming when something happens when some men just take action. No anti women speech intended. Just curious.
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.
do you mean like a woman ?
/s
I’m just wondering why you respond with screaming?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s not tribalism. It’s just your misogyny being shown the door.
I’m not sure this is generally true but if there was a difference it’d likely be due to social conditioning.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Ah yes, the two genders, can swim and not can swim
I identify as a doggy paddler
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.
Can’t believe even history is going WOKE! 😡
/s
The downvoters don’t realize that science is all about finding out about stuff. The whys, the hows… you know, what “woke” people do.
Using the word woke unironically is one of the best tells that someone is an idiot.
Honestly have no idea what “woke” even is. Seems to be a word the right uses to describe anything they don’t like.
i hope i never have to tell anybody i just w*ke up from a nap
As an insult, yeah, but not if it’s the original context like “stay woke”
Okay! You got me there!
Naked and Afraid and Women Who Hunt
Sounds like a very …interesting show.
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.
Pregnancy had a major impact on women’s roles throughout history, all the way up until the invention of the birth control pill in the 1950’s. To a lesser degree, menstruation did as well, especially in societies which viewed that period as unclean.
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.
Who gives a fuck lol as long as I eat.
Huh, I wonder why virtually every uncontacted tribe we’ve found so far has the men doing all the hunting?
Certainly a question for the ages. If only there was some way to learn more about this topic… perhaps some kind of article. Maybe one that even addresses this very point. But alas…
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.
It’s 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%
We have these things called binoculars, telescopes, cameras and drones. All of which are able to observe subjects from a safe distance.
I suspect that the number would be around a 50% split, what would then be interesting is determining which group has a better diet and survival rate to determine which tactic is superior.
I suspect not. To get to 50%, they would need to study an additional 37 societies, and every single one would have to have only males doing the hunting.
We have these things called binoculars, telescopes, cameras and drones. All of which are able to observe subjects from a safe distance.
Binoculars, telescopes and cameras will tell you little about what islanders are doing inside the forest where they hunt if you are using them from the ocean. Drones flying over Sentinel Island would violate Indian law and whoever did it would be in huge trouble. Their data would likely be disregarded due to the ethical issues.
On top of that, if they heard a drone coming, they might just change what they normally do.
Like these people. Hunting becomes less of an issue suddenly when there’s a flying threat.
I look forward to reading your study.
I can’t believe so many people upvoted this comment. Do they just assume because there are lots of words and you referenced the original paper that this is a good critique? But I guess a lot of people just turn off their brain when they feel cognitive dissonance.
Do you know what a survey is? It’s not meant to be comprehensive, it’s supposed to be representative. Furthermore, it is based on existing ethnographic data, so it’s obviously not going to include data on tribes that are currently uncontacted, because there is little or none. The reasons why are obvious but since you don’t seem to understand, we can spell it out.
Conducting anthropological research on these tribes typically involves going to the tribe and living with, observing, and interviewing them for an extended period to fully understand their culture and way of life. This is not advisable with uncontacted tribes because it is dangerous for researchers and dangerous for the tribe which may lack exposure to endemic diseases in the rest of the world. It’s simply not done and I guarantee no ethics board would approve such research today.
Furthermore, it’s hilarious to suggest that the authors deliberately omitted cultures we know little about to reinforce their own agenda. How would they even know which tribes the exclude? And, as others have pointed out, even if all of these uncontacted tribes had only male hunting (a fact which would be highly surprising), it would barely change the conclusion here that in most forager societies, women engage in hunting.
Overall, this seems a very bad-faith critique. It’s good to delve into the science and examine whether a given paper was conducted in a sound way, but you need to approach it with an open mind, not just seek to undermine it with the simplest and most superficial criticism you can conceive of that supports your pre-existing position.
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.
I am concerned only with the factuality of the data presented and have zero interest in cultural implications and any inferences that may be drawn from them.
You do you. Data alone is pretty useless to me.
Conclusions drawn from incomplete or misleading data are worthless to everyone
If you think my argument is missing something, by all means, it would be useful to say that rather than passive aggressive.
“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. 🤷
That’s a ton of assumption and reductionism. This is frankly insulting. Your primary argument that endurance is meaningless only makes me think that it comes from many current popular sports that rely on fastest speeds rather than what the article was actually trying to convey. Women in the past could have and did hunt, especially given that many in several different cultures were buried with hunting weapons, and the article used the scientific nature of a woman’s body to prove her endurance. Just because you discount endurance completely doesn’t mean the rest of society is so closed minded.
Maybe women hunted, probably they did, maybe they didn’t. Being able to run 100+ miles is freaking cool and great.
You DONT ENDURANCE HUNT into the next state. This is shit “evidence” of anything. It does not matter if you can lift 25% of not very much 2000% more than someone else can lift 25% of a lot, or if you can walk until 8 days from now and be less tired than someone else.
The premise is probably true that men and women both hunted, but endurance++ isn’t a cut and dry argument for being a good huntress.
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.
deleted by creator
Evidence shows that women have better endurance for long distances. They tend to be less susceptible to fatigue and beyond 195 miles are actually faster than men. Considering humans were better at outlasting their prey and chasing them to exhaustion rather than burst speed, this data indicates that women are at least as capable as men at those tasks if not better.
So your theory is that women were the hunters, because they’re faster after 200 miles? These people walked like 10-20 miles a day, and had to carry the food back home so that everyone else could eat. You imagine them going on month-long expeditions, carrying dead animals for 2 weeks back home? Are they also carrying mini fridges to keep the meat from spoiling?
I’m trying to even, but I can’t.
That’s not my theory. That’s the data.
One interpretation could be that women were constantly engaged in strenuous endurance activities and so through evolution built up tolerances against exhaustion that at least rivals if not exceeds that of men. And one historical activity that used a lot of stamina and took a lot of tolerance against fatigue was the way in which ancient humans hunted.
That’s not what a theory is, it’s a hypothesis at best, hope that helped.
I just don’t think the evidence that supports this idea is very strong at all. Like maybe men on average did more hunting than women, but I haven’t seen any evidence to support this framing that women only hunted in times of need.
Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to know much for certain about the culture of prehistoric humans. But there is strong circumstantial evidence, like women buried with hunting implements, etc. which suggests that female hunters were prominent in at least some cultures.
Idk, i don’t really care, men hunted women hunted, whatever. But what i don’t understand is that there are still tribes around that hardly have any outside connection and they are always as shown that men hunt and women did everything else. I remember seeing a documentary where one of the guys stayed with the women to see what their day looked like and the other tribes people made jokes about him being a “women”. I’m the first one that is for equality, but there is a reason you hardly see any women working in construction. I don’t think i have ever seen a women taring a road. I have not once seen a women laying bricks. This has nothing to do with toxic masculinity, i’d rather sit in a village and collect berries and cook than go hunting.
No shit it’s wrong. Has anyone ever gone hiking with a bitch? They have no sense of direction, only way I’d send one out to gather is if I didn’t mind her not finding her way back.
If you were lost in the wilderness and had to rely on either my wife, who spent almost her entire childhood in Girl Scouts, then worked for the Girl Scouts, then was a Girl Scout leader while my daughter was also in Girl Scouts, who also goes camping with her best friend regularly, or me, who hates sleeping in tents and wants a flushing toilet in the morning… rely on the “bitch” and not me. Because you’re going to die if you decide the MAN has to be in charge.
I think if you sent a woman out to gather and she didnt come back, it wouldnt be because she got lost.
No shit it’s wrong. Has anyone ever gone hiking with a bitch? They have no sense of direction, only way I’d send one out to
gatherdo literally anything is if I didn’t mindherhim not findingherhis way back.FTFY
Put the gun down, incel and get into some therapy. Srs. And stay away from women. Far far away. In fact maybe stay out of topics like this cuz they are clearly a trigger for you.
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 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.
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?
There are tribal people that live in matriarchy. If that answers your question. Also, the amazons are not just a myth.
no, that does not answer my question. but thanks
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 ;)
So damn sexy
