science

14360 readers

302 users here now

just science related topics. please contribute

note: clickbait sources/headlines aren't liked generally. I've posted crap sources and later deleted or edit to improve after complaints. whoops, sry

Rule 1) Be kind.

lemmy.world rules: https://mastodon.world/about

I don't screen everything, lrn2scroll

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

324

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

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

191 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Women were first allowed to compete in marathons in 1972. In 1972 the men's record was 2:10:30. The current record is 2:00:35 which is about an 8% difference. Pretty close to the difference between men and women currently.

The first women's record was 3:40:22 and the current women's record is 2:11:53.11 which is 40% faster.

Once funding for women's athletics reaches parity and once girls are encouraged into athletics as much as boys, then we will see if the ladies catch up. So far they're doing a pretty good job catching up, and you can't look at one current window in time and say you have the answer, you need to look at trends.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago

And that's what people miss when quoting sports statistics. They confuse culture with biology. We live in a society that imparts certain roles based on gender. Men are encouraged to exercise and run more from a young age than women are. In an egalitarian society, that disparity wouldn't exist. We really can't say how things would play out. That's why studies of paleolithic skeletons are a much better tool than just navel-gazing based on modern sports. Those statistics cannot be separated from our current society. Instead of just speculating, we can look at the actual skeletons of paleolithic people, which this article discusses. These skeletons record a record of the kinds of lives these people lived. There's no need to speculate; we can ask these people directly how they lived.