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2024-11-11

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The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong (www.scientificamerican.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/15901115

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

but estimates from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in the UN and the nonprofit group Survival International point to between 100 and 200 uncontacted tribes

We're in luck, there are more than enough to bring the sample size to a reasonable quantity.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

You would need to be in luck. Let's assume that they studied all 200 uncontacted tribes. To bring the overall rate to 50%, you would need 119 out of the 200 to be exclusively males hunting - 60% of those societies. The researchers studied 63 societies and found that 20% of them were exclusively males hunting.

But what's the point anyway? The hypothesis is that males evolved to be bigger for hunting, even 50% of societies where women hunt is enough to make it implausible. In those societies, women are hunting in spite of their apparent size disadvantage.

I think you should ask yourself whether size is actually important for hunting. We don't wrestle our prey. Size doesn't matter if you're bringing down monkeys from the trees with a bow and arrow, and size doesn't matter if you're trying to bring down a mammoth.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Size matters in all these cases. To your point, size matters in long distance running, which is the crux of the articles message.

If you think size doesn't matter when you're bow hunting, you probably haven't taught someone with a significant size difference how to draw a bow.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

The top of this comment thread is a person claiming that men do all the hunting in every primitive society, not just hunting based on long distance running.

You came into the thread to criticise a paper that showed that women hunt in 50 different societies around the world. Even your estimate of 50% is plenty enough examples to debunk the "all the hunting" claim.

Women are perfectly capable of drawing a bow that is suitable to hunt monkeys, rabbits, squirrels, small birds, etc. Accuracy is more important than power.

If your strategy for hunting mammoths involves your physical strength, you're gonna have a bad time.