326
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
326 points (87.7% liked)
science
14876 readers
85 users here now
A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.
rule #1: be kind
<--- rules currently under construction, see current pinned post.
2024-11-11
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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..
your are connecting two different pieces of data. The speed that a person can run a marathon vs. the ability to run a marathon.
What they are stating is that women are better able to run that distance not that they are faster at running that distance than men.
A marathon is not a speed race. It is a 42 km endurance race, similar to endurance hunters would have done on, say, the plains of Africa.
The vast majority of people today would be unable to finish even a half marathon without collapsing due to utter and complete exhaustion.
Ok, better how, you mean?
Speed is less of a factor than endurance in a persistence-hunting scenario where we're much slower than our prey anyway.
I don't know the facts for this specific claim, but the logic is fair. One group can be better suited for endurance without being faster. One group could also be faster on average without having the individual fastest performers. Not only because of cultural factors, but also because the distribution curves might have different shapes for men vs women. There could be greater outliers (top performers) among men even if the average is higher among women in general. It's not necessarily as straightforward as, say, height, where men's distribution curve is almost the same shape as women's, just shifted up a few inches.
I don't have the data to draw any real conclusions, though.
One of the problems looking at athletic records is that it's really just the elite among a self-selected group of enthusiasts, which doesn't tell us a whole lot about what might have been the norm 100,000 years ago, or what might be the norm today if all else were equal between genders. These are not controlled trials.
I've read that the top women outperform the top men in long-distance open-water swimming, supposedly due in part to higher body fat making women more buoyant, helping to regulate body temperature, and providing fuel. This is the first time I've read that women might have an advantage in running, though.
I wish the article provided citations. The reality is probably too complex to fit into a headline or pop-sci writeup.
Women have a higher pain threshold, and may be able to handle long distance endurance better. However, judging by existing tribal groups in Africa who still practice endurance hunting, that really isn't the case so it's probably bullshit.
I just looked at the measured data and came to a conclusion. I don't even know what conclusion you're trying to communicate, but it beats me...
I explained why that data does not contradict what the previous commenter was trying to say.
I was asking the commenter to explain what a 'better' runner is supposed to mean? And tou perhaps was answering something else..
Better doesn't always equal faster.
Better can equal going further.
Better can equal being more efficient.
Efficient means using less calories to do the same thing.
Sure. But you then need to show the data that supports those points
Can you please show us what connects your data to being a success as an endurance hunter? Because "men hold more records running a specific distance faster than women do" is not in any way an indication of hunting success.
Do you think Olympic target shooters make the best hunters when it comes to guns and bows?
Another factor is, with endurance hunting, you will need to carry the carcass back to home base. So let's take am antelope, which weighs 125 kg. You need the hunters to bring that all back to base, AFTER the multi kilometer hunt is over.
However, as far as portaging, women are very adept at that: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-carrying
Olympic shooters would make the absolute worst hunters, have you actually seen them shoot? It's a test of hand eye coordination to hit a paper target.
I never said anything about exactly what makes a good hunter. I was making a counterpoint to the quote of the article
Maybe a better runner uses calories more efficiently.
From what I've researched in the past ( I don't have time to look it up) is that due to fact that women naturally hold more body fat than men that they then have more energy to use on endurance runs. That while they are not faster than men due to smaller muscles they can move for longer periods of time due to having more fat energy.
I could be wrong it happens often with me.
That may be, who knows (without supprting evidence)? But see, things is, I don't think hearsay is what a good article in Scientific American should be based on.
If you read the article that was posted, you will see that it confirms what they just stated.
Nowhere does it definitely state that's the case. In fact, the data doesn't even support that claim since women should excel at ultra marathons, but they don't. In fact, women don't excel in any running exercise that I can find.
It's in the ultra marathons that women keep up with men and sometimes beat them
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-49284389
What? I just looked at the records for ultramarathons, and there is not a single instance of women beating men for their respective runs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultramarathon?wprov=sfla1
For the IAU records on Wikipedia, yeah. A couple things to keep in mind, 80% of the people who complete an ultra marathon are male. And the gap between the sexes, some estimate around 4% for ultra marathons, seems to be trending down.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nicholas-Tiller/publication/348547781_Do_Sex_Differences_in_Physiology_Confer_a_Female_Advantage_in_Ultra-Endurance_Sport/links/6002ea5c92851c13fe1514f7/Do-Sex-Differences-in-Physiology-Confer-a-Female-Advantage-in-Ultra-Endurance-Sport.pdf
Here's better research I found. You're right, men still win more often and have the records. But honestly it's more complicated than just who is faster.
As I said to them above- it's like suggesting that Olympic target shooters would make the best range hunters. Just being able to run long distances quickly is not any sort of indication someone will be the best endurance hunter.
In backyard ultras, where competitors keep running until they can no longer maintain a pace of approximately 4 mph, the male record is 50% longer at 450 miles than the female record of 300 miles.
No one is running 450 km to hunt though.
women are excellent long distance slow pace powerhouses.
I agree that they overstated their point there. But regardless, I think it’s fair to say that any differences between men and women in these sports are fairly small, so I don’t think it changes the overall conclusion.
The men's world record marathon time is 9% faster than the women's. That's significant. The male runner would finish over two miles ahead of the female runner.
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.
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.
I wouldn’t consider 9% to be that large in this context. Certainly a difference that would be overshadowed by individual variation.
Even if we assume women are physiologically 9% slower at persistence hunting (which that statistic is far from proving) it still suggests they could and likely were successful at it, albeit maybe not the very best.
How many marathons are run in a weaving path on uneven ground full of underbrush while trying to keep up with an animal that could potentially go in any direction at any time in the hopes that it will get tired before you do?
Because otherwise this marathon measurement is silly.