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The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong
(www.scientificamerican.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2024
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I absolutely agree with the thesis that both men and women hunted, but I think the claims of women's superior endurance are not represented in reality. The fastest marathon time for men is 2 hours 1 minute and for women it is 2 hours 14 minutes. These were in 2023 and 2019 respectively, so it's not like it was years ago with drastically different treatment of the sexes. Both runners were Kenyans too, so that limits non-sex based biological differences.
I don't buy that it is socialization. For one thing, the difference disappears in sports like shooting and horseback riding where physicality is not the determining factor. On top of that, when children compete at sports there are negligible performance differences until after puberty. The article mentions the record a woman holds for swimming across the English Channel. I think that women's higher body fat provides buoyancy that massively reduces the energy required to stay afloat for a prolonged time. We don't see the same supposed superiority in other endurance events.
This link touches on many of the same topics as the main article and adds some more info.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240731-the-sports-where-women-outperform-men
It's an unacceptable leap in logic to infer (from that statement) anything about populations of men and women. You've picked only a single sample from each population and chosen that highly biased representative.
That set is inclusive of every official marathon ever ran, so no it is not a single sample. We see consistently that the women's record always is slower than the men's record.
Fair, but it's also limited to the very top of the bell curve at any point in time.
Let’s run a marathon where everyone is underfed and has foot injuries as well as painful dental problems. I guarantee you more women will finish the race ;D
Most marathon runners have a lower body fat than is considered medically healthy and their toe nails pop off during the race, so we are already 2/3 of the way there.
"Fastest" does not mean the best endurance. You would be looking at the "longest".
There have been several people, men and women who run a marathon every day for months or even years on end. In that sense there is no upper limit, but those people almost certainly all have a genetic mutation which most people don't that prevents lactic acid buildup.
Your anecdotal evidence is countered in the very article you posted
the article you didn't read goes into that, and ultra marathons show parity between the sexes.
Men and women have about the same peaks but the floor is much higher for men.
Interesting rebuttal to evidence of peak female athletes getting bodied by fairly average high school aged males.
In terms of stamina and the ability to endurance hunt? It’s true. Peak female runners and peak male runners tend to average out in the marathon, the records being about 10 minutes apart. For bursts of speed needed to play Soccer and other sport? Men take the win easily. Also, these are not peak female athletes, they are just a “pro” tram from Australia.
Your arguments would be more convincing if you could read.
https://www.standard.co.uk/sport/football/australian-womens-national-team-lose-70-to-team-of-15yearold-boys-a3257266.html
Thought it was this one, my bad.
And you downvote me for being correct?
It must really hurt that reality doesn’t agree with you.
I’m not the one downvoting you
Oh, that was me. I think they're being unnecessarily unfriendly in an otherwise reasonable discussion. Bad vibe.
Speed of marathon doesn't necessarily serve as a benchmark for endurance, does it? Endurance is a metric of how tired you get over time, no? A cheetah can run 1km waaaay faster than a human. Doesn't mean that it has better endurance than humans.
What (widely popular) race could possibly be a better metric of endurance than the marathon?
You're adding parameters to say that women don't have as much endurance as men. Have a race in which everyone has to run the same speed and see how long they can do it. That is true endurance. You can't add parameters and say it's a true test of a single one.
By your logic, ultra-marathons are an even greater test of endurance. And women compete at parity with men (if not better) in those events.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-49284389
If you look at races that are longer than marathons it seems that the women have the upper edge. https://ultra-x.co/are-women-better-than-men-at-ultra-running/
But that doesn't necessarily correlate with hunting.
The OP article said the same thing, and like this article, it provides no evidence for the statement. I looked for some numbers, and for world bests, men had better performance in every category I found. The study linked below looked at speeds over decades and in every case men had better performance. Both men and women have improved over time, and as a percentage the difference is getting smaller, but in absolute difference it appears the same. It is an admittedly brief search, but I can't find evidence in the form of measured times (not conjecture about estrogen) indicating at all that women perform better in ultra marathons. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3870311
Those are athletes. To really know, you would need to use average people going for the same time/distance at more moderate speeds. While the fastest men are probably faster than the fastest women across most any distance, I doubt we have good data on average men and women going the same distances.
Right. Even with persistence hunting, I doubt our ancestors were going 50+ miles chasing prey.
i thought the same thing, but these people persistence hunt today for over 8 hours. no mention of total distance but 8 hours is no joke.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=826HMLoiE_o
That is definitely impressive stamina. An Olympic marathoner can average 12mph for around 2 hours and an "average" marathoner does 8mph, but that is on a road or track. Savannah is one of the few terrains where you could approach those speeds. I would believe they could go 50 miles on a hunt. Trying to run far in sand or snow, through heavy vegetation, or up and down mountains drastically increases the energy it takes (and the max distance and speed you are capable of). That's a whole other thing.
Well, the theory is that persistence hunting was one of the main hunting strategies during a large portion of human evolution before ranged weapons were invented. So it may well have relevance for distribution of labor between men and women during most of human prehistory, and therefore our evolutionary psychology.
Everything moving through a space leaves tracks or a trace
There will certainly be areas where the trail disappears, but tracking isn’t necessarily about locating every individual footfall.
With an understanding of movement and behavior, one can make inferences about where the animal went to find and follow the next sign.
Even moving over rock or packed soil, sign is left. You may not be able to perceive it yourself, but to someone who spends hours a day reading and studying the ground over the span of years, those subtle differences are perceptible.
An animal will eventually reach a place to stop and rest, but with repeated interruption that rest won’t count for much.
Persistence hunters today do track their prey, and often have to guess where the prey may have gone when the tracks are lost.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=826HMLoiE_o
How do ranged weapons invalidate persistence hunting?
If you're trying to chase down an animal till it's exhausted, I think you'd want to be throwing stuff at it to injure or at least to keep it moving.
Also, was there a time before ranged weapons? As soon as humans have weapons we have ranged weapons because we can throw. Atlatls and slings - tools to help you throw sticks and stones - wouldn't have been developed if we weren't already throwing sticks and stones at things.
Even with a modern bow it's still really difficult to sneak close enough to a deer to reliably make a kill shot. You're not going to sneak close enough to poke it with a spear and with game that size, throwing rocks is not really an option either because that wont kill it. Something like axis deer is quick enough to even dodge a modern arrow.
The reality is that the animal will notice you and it will out-sprint you as well but it wont outrun a human on a long distance. When the animal is exhausted and no more able to run, then you can then stick your spear in it.