[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (31 children)

Mounting evidence from exercise science indicates that women are physiologically better suited than men to endurance efforts such as running marathons.

Looking at marathon athletic records; that's not at all true and took me about 3 min to verify. In fact, out of all the top 25 record times, all are by men (and almost all Kenyan and Ethiopian men).

What is this tripe? They could at least try to be serious..

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[–] [email protected] -5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Who gives a fuck lol as long as I eat.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Huh, I wonder why virtually every uncontacted tribe we've found so far has the men doing all* the hunting?

*I don't consider foraging for clams hunting, but people are free to disagree

[–] [email protected] 27 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Certainly a question for the ages. If only there was some way to learn more about this topic… perhaps some kind of article. Maybe one that even addresses this very point. But alas…

Tap for spoiler

Abigail Anderson and Cara Wall-Scheffler, both then at Seattle Pacific University, and their colleagues reported that 79 percent of the 63 foraging societies with clear descriptions of their hunting strategies feature women hunters.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Sigh, taking such claims at face value and not looking into how the underlying data was obtained is how we end up with so many successfully published but false scientific papers.

The paper referenced here is https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0287101

The cultures 'surveyed' are

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0287101.t001

Notice any uncontacted peoples missing from those data points? Here's a quick list of them from Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_peoples

Immediately I can tell you the Sentinelese, Awa, Toromona, Nukak, Tagaeri and the Taromenanepeople are not represented here. It's almost like the societies selected for this paper weren't a complete picture.

I wonder why that would be.... surely not to conform to any biases of the authors.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (1 children)

So there are tribes with both dynamics, maybe more one than the other?. We can also look at things like, say, competitive records between "sexes" (it's a spectrum, so the binary divide is weird to begin with, but I digress). Men run on average like 30 seconds faster on the mile than women in societies with clear disadvantages to women's training.

Is this actually significant enough to exclude women? I fail to see how it could be for a role that requires a multitude of skills.

Society's seem to have stratified based on sex to "protect" women, and maybe a lot of women even prefer it. The issue is when we use some societal preferences to override the individual and prescribe roles before the individual can even develop their own preference (men and enbies included).

What I'm seeing are some societies seem to have figured that out well enough, others are more oppressive.

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

I am concerned only with the factuality of the data presented and have zero interest in cultural implications and any inferences that may be drawn from them.

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

You do you. Data alone is pretty useless to me.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 months ago (1 children)

You think they should have surveyed the uncontacted people?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago (10 children)

Uncontacted peoples are groups of Indigenous peoplesliving without sustained contact with neighbouring communities and the world community.

It’s right there in the link I provided, so yes, because infrequent contact and observation is possible.

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

"science"

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Did you.... read the article?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I did! Running endurance today is nothing. The maon issue is, most women then would have had children early on in life. Having children can mess up womens hips, causing problems with running. That is if they lived through child birth and healed properly afterwards. They can assume what they want though, none of us were there, and there is no going back. 🤷

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 3 months ago (4 children)

My theory is that men evolved much higher grip strength due to incessant masturbation.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Wouldn't the men who were "best" at masturbation have the fewest children?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (3 children)

No, they wouldn't. What does "best" mean in this context, anyway?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

He means they wouldn't need women, because they were THE BEST!

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

Trust me bro

[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Yeah this article is almost a year old and it got torn up when published last year. People already knew women helped hunt. But acting like that was a primary role without evidence because of modern sports science is silly.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I'm also curious about the role pregnancy plays into all of this. Obviously everyone back then would need to help out in any way they could back then, but without contraceptives how frequently would women be pregnant? It seems like that would play the largest contributing factor into roles/responsibilities and the article seems to ignore that issue.

While today you could breastfeed while running a marathon, there wouldn't be a way to keep the baby close by back then. Additionally, while for the first couple months a pregnancy might not impact your ability to hunt, eventually it certainly would.

[+] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 79 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Can't believe even history is going WOKE! 😡

/s

[–] [email protected] 36 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Using the word woke unironically is one of the best tells that someone is an idiot.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 months ago

i hope i never have to tell anybody i just w*ke up from a nap

[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 months ago (1 children)

As an insult, yeah, but not if it's the original context like "stay woke"

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

Okay! You got me there!

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 months ago (1 children)

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago

The downvoters don't realize that science is all about finding out about stuff. The whys, the hows.... you know, what "woke" people do.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 3 months ago (10 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

What (widely popular) race could possibly be a better metric of endurance than the marathon?

[–] [email protected] 55 points 3 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Right. Even with persistence hunting, I doubt our ancestors were going 50+ miles chasing prey.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

persistence hunting was one of the main hunting strategies during a large portion of human evolution before ranged weapons were invented

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (1 children)

How do ranged weapons invalidate persistence hunting?

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.

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

Were you also watching Seinfeld yesterday? It was one of his stand-up bits before or after the show

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

women want to see what’s on TV, men just want to see what else is on TV.

one of those jokes that’s about to age out of relevance.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

I was thinking about that as well