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
Mounting evidence from exercise science indicates that women are physiologically better suited than men to endurance efforts such as running marathons.
We have a lot of marathon data. There is a large, consistent difference showing the opposite. This article is horrendously unscientific, so many claims, assumptions, and over summarizing and simplifying
Author does address this, btw. I still think it's a bad argument. I just couldn't fathom that they would say this and not further clarify.
they make claims and assumptions to address it, they dont really cite anything. Shit like this "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." is a hypothesis, but it is not being stated as one, it's being stated as fact. It's a testable hypothesis, they could have controlled for the variable of pace setting runners that they bring up by only looking at statistics of running events that do not have this variable.
And like, the whole premise could be true, that women were also hunters, modern runners with modern sports medicine arent ideal evidence, that kind of endurance might not have been needed for their hunting, women are still humans and humans have the greatest running stamina of any animal. But besides capability, ancient humans also could have had roles determined by sex, it's at least prevalent in other apes like gorillas. Either way is possible without more solid evidence and it's pretty crazy to say one way or another is scientifically true.
They point to women's impressive performance in extreme distance events, like 100+ mile ultra marathons.
But that runs head long into the question of "How far do you have to actually chase an animal for it to collapse from exhaustion?" I'm having a hard time finding hard numbers but I don't think gazelle have the endurance to run 10+ miles before collapsing. So women may be biologically equipped for ultra-long distances, but I don't see how this correlates to endurance hunting as that advantage doesn't play out hunting game.
That's not to say the basis for the theory on male hunters/female gatherers is not without flaw, but the arguments being made against it don't seem to really be citing evidence that backs up women being significant, let alone dominant, in that role either.
It took me literally less than a minute to google and disprove that claim in this 'article':
The Olympic records for the event are 2:06:32 hours for men, set by Samuel Wanjiru in 2008, and 2:23:07 hours for women, set by Tiki Gelana in 2012.
This article is not scientific, its simply an opinion piece and should be treated as such. And honestly I don't even think it was a good opinion piece. And why is it hosted on Scientific American?
And why is it hosted on Scientific American?
Because if you say things like this enough, people believe you
Men tend to be taller, so I'd think longer limbs are an advantage. I don't pretend to know anything beyond that.
It took me literally less than a minute to google and disprove that claim in this 'article':
The Olympic records for the event are 2:06:32 hours for men, set by Samuel Wanjiru in 2008, and 2:23:07 hours for women, set by Tiki Gelana in 2012.
1.Wikipedia is not a scientific source.
- You are, if anything, showing that men are faster than woman. The claim the authors make is about endurance.
I found this study that seems to support their point.
"Men Are More Likely than Women to Slow in the Marathon"
This article is not scientific, its simply an opinion piece and should be treated as such. And honestly I don't even think it was a good opinion piece. And why is it hosted on Scientific American?
I can't read the article so unfortunately don't have the grounds to agree or disagree with you. But I'd be carefull voicing my option like this when your only source is Wikipedia and isn't speaking about the claim you are trying to disprove.
Edit: incase anybody is interested in reading some more real evidence instead of Wikipedia, this study goed deep into mens vs womans endurance and highlights a few problems with research focusing on males as the baseline.
Sex Differences in VO2max and the Impact on Endurance-Exercise Performance
assumed evolution was acting primarily on men, and women were merely passive beneficiaries of both the meat supply and evolutionary progress.
He was superimposing the idea of male superiority through hunting onto the Ainu and into the past.
This fixation on male superiority was a sign of the times not just in academia but in society at large.''
At that time, the conventional wisdom was that women were incapable of completing such a physically demanding task
Scholars following Man the Hunter dogma relied on this belief in women's limited physical capacities
Today these biased assumptions persist in both the scientific literature and the public consciousness.
"Powers of Estrogen" infographic.
This is quite the charged language and I'm not even halfway through. Throw in a bunch of other stuff about the Boston marathon and gender presentation in movies, yeah this isn't that good of an article.
Before I'm downvoted into oblivion, we probably all took part in hunting. They've found the speed differences in running between ages and gender are not extreme, so we likely all went out running and hunting together. But men probably took on the more dangerous and physical aspects, but everyone with a spear is a more capable unit.
I read most of it, not bothering with full paragraphs when I could see the idea at the beginning, and from what I saw it doesn't get any better.
It points out that the only physical sport activity they women excel at is ultra marathons. it then goes on to day that flexibility when it comes to family roles was important for survival. And this I absolutely agree with and it is certainly the case that women can hunt too.
But the author just seemingly completely ignores the argument that women can still fill the role, even if there is some kind of specialization that makes one sex generally better at one task then the other. The fact that we are different almost certainly means this is the case.
And speed and strength aren't even the only attributes needed for effective hunting in the first place. Seems to me that a variety of skills would be beneficial
The idea that 'males hunted because they were stronger, etc' was cope to rationalize the fact they are less reproductively valuable than females. Four males don't come back from a hunt, village mourns- Four females don't come the village dies.
I'm willing to believe that men hunted more frequently for this reason alone. Women are simply too valuable. I wonder if this is the origin of a dowry as well. Compensation for the tribe or family losing the ability to expand.
Men were more expendable but the more important issue at hand was continued survival of the tribe. If we don't have children we die out in 20-40 years. If we don't have food, we die out in 2-4 weeks. If a woman was physically capable, she was likely going to be sent out on a hunt, more so if her family were hunters too.
Why would anyone need to cope with the value of individuals in pre-civilization society? These things are not relevant anymore, an individual's value to society is mostly determined through productivity and wealth now.
Why would anyone need to cope with the value of individuals in pre-civilization society
Limited resources, and the need to deal with predators.
If this village is made up of 8 people, then 4 male hunters not returning also means the village dies.
You need...err...two to tango.
This is an incredibly simplistic take. Yes, if all the men die and none of the women are pregnant and they don't survive until some of the children reach sexual maturity (why would there be no children before the men went out to hunt?) then yes, the tribe would die. Doubtless small groups died out this way on occasion, among others. None of that has any bearing on fewer men being needed to keep a population growing because it does, in fact, take only two to tango, and both men and women can tango with multiple partners.
The tribe was certainly larger than 8 people, but the tribe would also require regular births to growing. And in prehistoric times there was a very high mortality rate for children. And the only two ways to combat that is a)provide safer environments for the children or b)have more kids.
A) wasn't an option since they didnt have the means to, but b) was so long as you had enough fertile women. So losing 4 men is a serious blow into the productivity of the tribe, losing 4 women to a tribe struggling already means 4 less potential births next year. You have 20 men and 1 woman, you only have 1 potential birth in the next 9 months. 20 women and 1 man, you have 20 potential births over.
Child rearing was the only thing women could do, but it was easily the most important thing to the future of the tribe. All other things being equal, the men were more expendable than the women.
Yeah. If even only one comes back, he might be the strongest or whatever, but he might also be weak. You'd probably also want to keep weaker men back at the village rather than on the hunt because they have the lowest chances of survival (thought I think that might be kind of overstated, I think it's kind of unlikely that everyone randomly dying on a hunt was some sort of common enough occurrence, I think individual instances of tragedies or freak accidents are more likely). If you're keeping back the weakest men, you're also going to have weaker men going forward, which then leads to the village dying out in the long term. You also see less genetic variance if all the strong men die and the weak men are left reproducing, which is also bad, yadda yadda.
So I'm not sure I buy the whole like, men are expendable, which is why they're stronger, or why they're hunters more commonly, or both. That kind of at face value reads as a kind of macho posturing sort of idealism.
Impregnable the women, THEN get eaten by a saber tooth tiger.
If this is true wouldn't that be a reason for a village to send only the men on hunts?
I think this might be the reason for the strength disparity. Tasks that require strong people tend to be more dangerous but a sensible tribe leader would send the strongest to do these tasks whether they are male or female. A tribe where the strength balance leans female will grow slower than a tribe where there is equal distribution which will grow slower than one with male balance. This selection effect would cause evolution in that direction.
Male/female size differences would have evolved prior to humans as a recognizable species evolving - and the fossil record of pre-humans supports this.
Humans have never self-selected for physical fitness with any regularity, throughout the historical record. We primarily mate for social reasons.
This explains why my legs get tired when my wife drags me out shopping...
I'm a natural sprinter. Very fast on short distances. But the endless slog from one shop to the next, with no respite, no idea when it will end. When we come home I'm dead tired and empty. She's dead tired and full.
“Man the Hunter has dominated the study of human evolution for nearly half a century & pervaded popular culture. [But] it was the arrival of agriculture that led to rigid gendered roles & economic inequality. Hunting belonged to everyone.”
So... What's the evidence supporting this? It sure seems like men dominate running and are way more interested in hunting sports today.
I read an article like that a few month ago and the thing that i still don't get is that i used to watch all these documentaries about these remote tribes that have no or hardly any connections connection to the outside world. And they all have pretty strict gender roles when it comes to hunting, gathering and stuff. That's the only reason that this is so burned into my mind.
It makes logical sense to have gender roles. Just to survive means females between teens and mid forties need to be pregnant or nursing a baby. Both those will limit hunting, thus making gathering the better role. Of course died in childbirth is likely .
Note that the above does not preclude women hunting. It limits them to less active roles at times, but different stages of child bearing will put different limits on ranging from full abilities to practically a cripple. Also hunting takes different forms, and some are more amenable to help than others.
We also know men would gather at times.
There is no evidence, it's simply an opinion piece. Good lord the article does not even list sources, so even if it claims to have supporting evidence, you cannot follow up on it. This just stinks...
And Scientific American, really?
That was a theory? I was under the impression Male/Female size differentiation was from men fighting men.
No, one of the theories is actually that early homo sapiens groups were mostly closely related and interbred often. That's what have them advantage over other species. We can see evidence of that in the DNA. Men fighting men came later, probably with first settlements and dependence on local resources.
Apes fighting apes, maybe. AFAIK, size differences between the sexes has not increased since we first evolved. It's part of our pre-human genetic heritage, not an evolutionary pressure on homo sapiens.
Where's that damn summary bot
Here's a summary:
The article "The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong" challenges the long-held assumption that men were the primary hunters and women were the primary gatherers in our evolutionary past. This assumption, often referred to as the "Man the Hunter" hypothesis, has been deeply ingrained in popular culture and scientific discourse.
However, mounting evidence from various fields, including anthropology, archaeology, and exercise physiology, suggests that this simplistic division of labor is inaccurate. The article highlights several key points that contradict the traditional view:
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Women are physiologically well-suited for endurance activities, including hunting, due to their higher aerobic capacity and fat utilization efficiency.
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There is a growing body of evidence from archaeological sites and ethnographic studies that indicates women actively participated in hunting in various societies across different time periods and cultural contexts.
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The assumption that women's childcare responsibilities limited their hunting activities is challenged by observations of women hunting with their children in present-day hunter-gatherer communities.
In conclusion, the article argues that the "Man the Hunter" hypothesis is no longer supported by the available evidence and that a more nuanced understanding of gender roles in human evolution is necessary. Women played a more significant role in hunting than previously thought, and their contributions were essential for the survival and success of our ancestral populations.
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It is a very long article and the summary will not be able to properly catch the essence of it. Just take some time and read the article it is worth the read
AI summarized it pretty well! :)
Really should not be a surprise to anyone. The patriarchy has done serious damage over the many many past and present generations
To anyone who studied anthropology in even an amateur manner, this male/female division of labor never made any damn sense. It’s echoed in so many hominid and pre-hominid species, and it’s even seen an echoes in society today. Men and women, males and females, and all monkey and ape-descendant species share these tasks.
I'm not an expert on anything but I'm reading about how in early human history families lived near each other in groups. If too many males were born and not enough females were born, the group would suffer population collapse and die. When there are 30 or more females in a group this will not happen statistically. At that time the family groups were both matriarchal and patriarchal, it just depended on who stayed in the parent's home when they matured. Sometimes the matriarchy (or patriarchy) would realize that not enough females had been born and in order to survive they would either steal or trade young women from nearby groups- Those women would grow up in the new group where their bonds were not as strong which led to a weakening of their role of the group. Young women living with their husband in the husband's mother's house did not have the power that the husband had. Hunting parties that stole women from other groups also helped with male dominance within the group. Planned marriages today are a way that society balances who lives where, in order to allow production of more people.
TLDR: In matriarchal (and patriarchal) families the urge to prevent population collapse led to a weakening of women's roles in society because women were moved between groups where they had fewer and weaker bonds within that group.
if you don't want patriarchy you need to replace it with something else that maintains invested fathers or you end up with Fight Club.
"If men can't rule society, they'll just beat the shit out of each other in underground fights" really isn't a great selling point.
Thanks for this well thought out and nuanced opinion.
lol no
I grew up in the rural southern US. I can confirm that women like to hunt. Maybe not as much as the dudes, but enough that I wouldn't call it niche. I could totally see a society which relied on subsistence hunting have a lot of women in hunter role.
I live in New York and even here it's not uncommon for women to also hunt lol. I'd say it's mostly men but it's not taboo at all for women
This is far from the first paper indicating this, despite how the media is framing it. There's been more and more re-investigation of findings from the past century and earlier, with much of it not only finding that a number of the "warrior" skeletons discussed in the past were women, but also a lot of the physical evidence otherwise showing that women were involved in these activities.
Both men and women gathered and both men and women hunted. Often together and they may have had different overall skillsets depending on personal body structure and endurance. But there's often enough of an overlap anyways that everyone could be involved in everything in some fashion.
The long-standing claim that women couldn't be involved in hunting because of biology is like claiming that women can't be muscular or lift weights because of biology. It's a ridiculous claim.
I think there are two sets of claims in the article. The first set - women hunt - is blindingly obvious and it was stupid to ever think anything different. The second set - women are better suited for endurance activities is dubious and weakly argued.
Timothy Noakes is as good a scholar as we have in endurance exercise, and he points out that all of the ultramarathon evidence is a bit dubious because the sport does not attract the best runners. So East African runners dominate the marathon scene (especially the Kalenjins) but are virtually absent from the ultramarathon world. Why? No prize money or sponsorship. So the fact that European ancestry dominates the longer distance is more a function of who's running than it is a difference in physiology.
So looking at the role of estrogen in race times requires some deeper understanding of who's running and what their overall potential is. I'll note that the ultra scene is generally populated by an older crowd who are following the " if I can't go faster I'll go longer" approach. So maybe men maintain competitive marathon times later into life so are slower to join the ultra scene?
Noakes also points out that a smaller body size works for women in several ways - smaller bodies use less energy to move, generate less heat, and shed heat more effectively. So without correcting body size, sex based comparisons are not deeply informative.
I looked for a study on this and found this here. It still says that men are faster than women, but if you compensate for that woman are over all more enduring in a Marathon.
and that's why old women are always cold, while their husbands are boiling and turning down the thermostat.
Why do all those "findings" read like borderline removed trying to make HBO show plotlines into historical fact?
I'll wait until there's greater consensus in the field. These papers reek of scientists who have strong political motivations to find the answers they seek, and I'm not expert enough to critique their work.
Well you did just critique them. But without offering any meaningful criticism, just political feelings.
They aren't the one making the claims though? Burden of proof doesn't disappear because of the sensitivities of the subject matter, and biases do matter, especially where the claim is insufficiently evidenced.
I am fully open to the claims of this paper but fully unconvinced by the meagre evidence provided. I will read into it more over the coming weeks though to see if better literature exists.
No, I pointed out that they self-identify as feminists and are claiming to have found evidence of a finding feminists would salivate over. Investigator bias is a real problem in scientific research and I see some pretty obvious red flags for it here. You're the one who seems butthurt at someone not immediately accepting a political point you favor.
No need to spend your brainpower criticizing trash articles that are based on lies and propaganda. :)
It's been a long time since I've been in Anthropology class, but this isn't something we were taught academically. Cultural Anthro is all theory-based, academics get paid to publish theory arguments. Imo, biologically, women carried babies, men didn't, there would have been associated cultural roles to accomodate this as successfully as possible. The idea that it's popular theory this meant men hunted and women gathered is just sensationalist. It's niether competely wrong nor completely right. There are elements of both throughout many cultures. It's the idea that it's all or nothing is wrong.
Remember that the existing consensus was also created by scientists with political and social motivations who made plenty of assumptions about gender.
A challenge to the status quo isn't automatically biased just because it challenges the status quo.
Except that the "existing consensus" as portrayed in the article is phony in the sense that no anthropologist has seriously believed or promulgated binary hunting and gathering roles for men and women since at least the 1960s. That may be a notion that exists in the popular imagination, but it doesn't exist in contemporary anthropology and hasn't for decades.
I'm skeptical about the popular theory.
While I haven't checked their papers, I still do think this particular article is not convincing. They say the man-the-hunter theorists rejected data but don't cite articles that point at the flaw. It's business as usual to overlook data in real-world science. The question is, how significant the overlook was, but they don't cite anything scholarly, call it a day and move on.
Then they say traditional studies can have bias because they are done by men. This sounds shockingly unprofessional to me.
Okay, but it's not just size and strength. Women have better color discrimination, better landmark sense. Men have better time/speed sense. While pregnant the long gestational period makes the woman more at risk.
Women certainly can hunt, men can certainly harvest berries, but these other traits came about for reasons. If we were wrong as to why, that doesn't change the differences.
Colour discrimination sounds super important to finding camouflaged prey animals and landmark sense sounds super important to wide ranging and unpredictable hunts. I dunno dude, unless you can cite experts in exolutionary biology supporting that inference, I'm going to say you're taking out of your arse.
I'm remembering that color blindness is actually really good at bypassing certain kinds of camouflage too. Which sounds like the two would pair well together in hunting parties.
The extra color differation really only includes shades of red.
Landmark Sense
Lol...phew...lol.
This doesn’t shock me at all. My wife will hunt with me any day. She’s a champ and I’d be nothing without her.
Aww
Not surprising? In my community, hunters are overwhelmingly men so I would say that claim is surprising, to me at least.
That men were the hunters and drove humans to intelligence is the biggest bullshit I've heard all year. With the plethora of evidence of female hunters, I reject the premise of this article.
On the other side of the coin, the thoughts on women's endurance ability is super cool and jives with crazy long race results like RAAM.
Women are definitely capable of doing super endurance events, but they are not the equivalent of men on setting records for any race I've found.
One called “backyard ultra”. Basically you do a lap of 6.7km each hour until everyone else drops out. World records are all men by a long shot - https://backyardultra.com/world-rankings/
Fastpacking, a slower event than the backyard ultras, involve hiking/jogging through hiking trails while carrying what you need. Definitely slower pace, and I’d argue closer to what I’d imagine with a long, days-long hunt would be like for ancient tribes. FKT, or fastest known times, are often found at this website. Looking at all the times, men carry a significant lead in both supported (ie someone else carries your food/water/sleeping gear), and unsupported. As an example, look at the Appalachian Trail – https://fastestknowntime.com/route/appalachian-trail
Even the RAAM shows solo male records much faster than women: https://www.raamrace.org/records-awards
The thing the article failed to mention (and the thing I think is key) is that women excel at doing these things, typically, with less energy burnt both during and after the races. Women on the whole are smaller, and tend to have better insulin responses (as mentioned in the article) which means their blood sugar stays consistent during exercise and after. Consistent blood sugar means less wasted energy. Larger heart and lungs, combined with higher type 2 muscle fibres compared to women's type 1 means, again, less wasted energy and more efficiencies. Less muscle damage, as mentioned in the diagram, means less to repair, which means more saved energy. In a hunter/gather society, this saved energy can be significant.
With modern access to food, that evolutionary advantage seems to vanish, and the article doesn't even touch on it.
Two of the last three RAAM winners were women. Records are one thing, but women are still able to win the race even with lower % participation in the sport.
I'm not sure how useful that information is, true or not.
There is definitely a subtle "moral-primitivism" that circulates society: women need to do womanly duties, and men need to bring the "meat". Its a mythos that tries to rationalize itself based on an idea on how prehistoric humans lived (which is also assumed to be the more "authentic" way humans involved to live).
It's either rage bait or a sad example of incredibly stupid 'woke science'.
Facts don’t care about your feelings.😎