this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
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Archaeology

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Archaeology or archeology[a] is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscapes.

Archaeology has various goals, which range from understanding culture history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies through time.

The discipline involves surveying, excavation, and eventually analysis of data collected, to learn more about the past. In broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research. Read more...

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The influential idea that in the past men were hunters and women were not isn’t supported by the available evidence

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[–] [email protected] 61 points 9 months ago (20 children)

I'm gonna turn into some kind of Jordan Peterson guy, just for the duration of this article.

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

What are you talking about

It assumes that males are physically superior to females and that pregnancy and child-rearing reduce or eliminate a female's ability to hunt.

I wouldn't say "superior" like a value judgement that muscle strength is the most important thing in terms of physical ability, but I don't think that it's controversial that the average man is physically stronger than the average woman, or that being pregnant interferes with your ability at physical tasks. This article keeps going on about how it's clear that there's not any physical difference when it is blatantly clear from sporting events that (in the average, accounting for individual variation) there is.

But Man the Hunter's contributors often ignored evidence, sometimes in their own data, that countered their suppositions. For example, Hitoshi Watanabe focused on ethnographic data about the Ainu, an Indigenous population in northern Japan and its surrounding areas. Although Watanabe documented Ainu women hunting, often with the aid of dogs, he dismissed this finding in his interpretations and placed the focus squarely on men as the primary meat winners. He was superimposing the idea of male superiority through hunting onto the Ainu and into the past.

This, I can easily believe. Male scientists past and present can be misogynistic and blatantly ignore data that contradicts the way they like to see the world. On the other hand, you literally did the exact same thing with time-to-run-marathons up above. I think balance and reality is the goal, including pointing out sexist errors when they're there, but not "feminism at all costs."

Hunting doesn't always mean wrestling a bear to the ground with your upper body strength; I am sure that women took part in hunting and that this was and is sometime blatantly ignored by (often male) scientists.

Today these biased assumptions persist in both the scientific literature and the public consciousness. Granted, women have recently been shown hunting in movies such as Prey, the most recent installment of the popular Predator franchise, and on cable programs such as Naked and Afraid and Women Who Hunt.

Why is this in your science article

The terms “female” and “male” are often used in relation to biological sex. “Gender” refers to how an individual identifies—woman, man, nonbinary, and so forth. Much of the scientific literature confuses and conflates female/male and woman/man terminology without providing definitions to clarify what it is referring to and why those terms were chosen.

Why is this in your science article

You can talk about the biology and anthropology of XX chromosome people and XY chromosome people without getting into this

research into exercise physiology, paleoanthropology, archaeology and ethnography has historically been conducted by men and focused on males ... we still know very little about female athletic performance, training and nutrition, leaving athletic trainers and coaches to mostly treat females as small males.

What the fuck is this I feel like I'm taking crazy pills

Females are more regularly dominating ultraendurance events such as the more than 260-mile Montane Spine foot race through England and Scotland, the 21-mile swim across the English Channel and the 4,300-mile Trans Am cycling race across the U.S.

This was the first part that made me think, oh shit, maybe I am the wrong one, all this stuff has been valid and I've just been being Joe Rogan and poo pooing it all. Nope, it's just more made up stuff. If Hitoshi Watanabe is sexist (which apparently he is), then this is off the fuckin charts.

I don't get why it's a bad thing when male scientists bring their biases into their papers to the point of ignoring that data and just inventing their own imagined world to fit how they like to see it (which, it is, of course, a very bad thing), but all of a sudden if a feminist does it, it turns into a good thing.

[–] ultranaut 14 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

It is correct that the worlds of science and medicine have not studied female bodies as well as male bodies. It's not as bad as it used to be but I think it's often true that things like recommended doses for drugs are based on assuming "a woman is a small man" rather than actual drug trials involving a significant number of women or any other kind of real data.

I agree though, if they are making up data to support their claims they have allowed their ideology to corrupt their integrity. It seems like an editor really should have fact checked this before publishing but maybe that's not how it works these days.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 9 months ago

recommended doses for drugs are based on assuming "a woman is a small man"

That’s especially true for contraception pills.

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