Males dominate society. The ideas about who and what men and woman are, biologically and socially (gender and sex) are dominated by a male perspective.

I feel like the second part isn't true anymore. I actually think in modern academia, the feminist perspective dominates, case in point being this article, where there are some extremely strong claims that are seemingly fine to present, whereas I feel like if it had the mirror-image claims then it'd a huge big deal and a problem.

If we are looking at the present and how these theories are questioned, it is worth noting that the perception in society has, also, started changing. In fact the very fact, that the discourse has opened up enough to allow portraits of female hunters, shows that rethinking the evidence we have in this new framework might make sense (preferable with an open mind tough). Since this is an intersection of the societal issue of how we see gender and archology it makes sense to "zoom out" a bit and see how those perceptions have changed.

Since the studies about man-hunters are not using this sociological angle, sure it would feel out of place if they started talking about movies. But for the angle the article is taking it makes sense, in my opinion.

Ooooh... so, I actually for whatever weird reason was looking at this through the "academic paper" lens, like it was an article that was about a new anthropological paper that these two authors had submitted. It's not that. It's just a magazine article. So, I think some of my criticism about stuff that shouldn't have been included was 100% unfair. I don't know why I was looking at it that way but talking about movies and pop culture in addition to the evolution and anthropology is 100% fine for just an article. I have no idea why I thought that but I withdraw that complaint.

Thanks for clearing this up. I did a tiny bit of a deep dive and it seems, contrary to your believe, that females are indeed not studied very well in regards to many topics that are sport-related (with is relay just a specific field of medicine, btw.). Here are some quotes from studies or articles about the topic:

But on what would that coach base their approach? There is no scientific data to use. Thats the point. The only way how to "know what they are doing" is by using the knowledge that has been acquired from male athletes and hope that it translates to females.

So two reasons why I * can* agree with you that there's still a blind spot in academia about female exercise physiology, but it's not as big a deal to me:

1. There's a whole galaxy of knowledge outside of academia. I do agree with you on a certain only-study-the-males bias in academia even now. I just don't think that translates to an overall human lack of knowledge about how things work and how to train athletes of any gender, e.g. by the ones who are doing it for a living. In terms of where they get their knowledge, it's like anything; it's a mix of academic theory, personal experience, observation of what's working for other people, folklore, and judgement. And crucially the chance to put your theories to a not-up-for-debate test.

2. I don't feel like it's necessary to understand gender differences in physiology in a ton of detail in order to draw anthropological conclusions. The example of hunting with dogs in the article is a great one; you don't need to understand the physiology to understand that example or draw the conclusions that the different authors draw from it. You do need to be able to look unbiased at the evidence in front of you, and I think that's important for all authors concerned to be able to do. Besides that, athletic physiology in prehistorical societies is dramatically different from either athletes' or lay people's physiology in the modern day (I say that based on reading accounts of modern people who lived with prehistorical-culture people and experienced their daily physical life). I'm not sure that learning about the latter prepares you to be real qualified about the former whether you're doing it gender-unbiased or not. But like I say I'm not convinced it's necessary.

IDK, I don't think there's a huge gulf between our viewpoints. And thank you for the ultramarathon study in particular; it was really interesting.