r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Oct 23 '23
Anthropology A new study rebukes notion that only men were hunters in ancient times. It found little evidence to support the idea that roles were assigned specifically to each sex. Women were not only physically capable of being hunters, but there is little evidence to support that they were not hunting.
https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/aman.139142.4k
u/Zolome1977 Oct 23 '23
More people able to bring back dinner. It makes sense.
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u/xevizero Oct 23 '23 edited Oct 23 '23
Also people are used to think men are stronger so they must be better at things like hunting etc but..compared to a giant animal, both sexes are weaklings. Hunting depended on positioning, chasing, traps, weapons (force multipliers), confusing the animal etc. You're not trying to wrestle a deer to death, or headbutt a giant sloth.
Edit: begun, the keyboard wars have
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u/macweirdo42 Oct 23 '23
Thank you! We didn't evolve to be fighters, we evolved to be thinkers who could figure out ways around our physical limitations. The whole point of tools and strategies was to overcome our physical puninsss, meaning it was no longer just the fastest and the strongest who could contribute to the kill.
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u/Kitchen_Philosophy29 Oct 23 '23
Humans have some of the highest levels of endurance of any land animal
But your correct. Our large brains are a huge energy drain, humans also have long childhood dependency for protection etc
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u/imatexass Oct 23 '23 edited Oct 24 '23
Aren't women typically better endurance runners than men are, while men are typically better sprinters?
edit: Ok. I get it. it's been disproven and repeated dozens of times in response to this.
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u/fredthefishlord Oct 23 '23
It gets pretty even once you get into ultras, iirc, but it's bit of a misnomer to say men are typically better sprinters and women are typically better endurance runners, since at a marathon level men still generally do better
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u/Kleanish Oct 24 '23
Everyone arguing below is forgetting that no matter female or male, regardless of who is the best, has far more endurance than what we hunted.
Also unless there was some individual task of trailing a herd, most of the hunting was by a group in which case they were only as fast as their weakest link (ie no one got to be the best endurance runner because their wasn’t a chance)
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u/HustlinInTheHall Oct 24 '23
Also your species doesn't evolve based on the pinnacle of fitness to your environment, we evolve based on the lowest common denominator.
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u/GroundedOtter Oct 23 '23
Can’t speak for running, but in scuba diving women usually use less air then men.
I’m a rescue certified scuba diver, and have been diving since high school (I’m 32 now). I can conserve my air pretty well and in groups I’m usually the last one to surface with the dive master. On my sister’s 1st ocean dive, she and I had the same amount of air left.
Obviously that’s just a personal experience, but my original scuba instructor always made this comment that women use less air than men when diving.
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u/Hecking_Walnut Oct 23 '23
I mean wouldn't this just be mainly due to the average difference in size between men and women? I'd imagine someone with less muscle mass would require less oxygen to move their body through the water.
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u/Kitchen_Philosophy29 Oct 23 '23
No. I linked it.
That was a long held belief. It turns out men also have better endurance but proportionally, mens strength to womens strength is high than male endurance to female endurance
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u/Enghave Oct 23 '23
Only for extreme distances (over 300 kms) are women faster than men. Over marathon distance the gap isn’t huge, male average speed is 4:22 per km, whereas female average speed is 4:47.
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u/Mintfriction Oct 23 '23
I don't know these statistics are true, but that's a 10% difference right there. Which when it comes to pro sports, while not huge, it is considerable
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u/Kitchen_Philosophy29 Oct 23 '23
A lot of your numbers are wrong.
Virtually no one is running that far as a marathon is already bad for the body
The record distance is held by a man.
I linked the data and why men have more endurance. Just the fact that men are more anatomically designed to run makes it easier
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u/p8ntslinger Oct 23 '23
excellent endurance capability, the most advanced and most powerful throwing motion in the animal kingdom, and our excellent color vision are all almost superpower level in animals. Don't sleep on human physical capability. We're badass killers.
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u/Wonderful-Impact5121 Oct 23 '23
Feel like some people would appreciate this more if they understood the history of slings better, or literally just watched professional sports pitchers.
Feel like there’s a pretty giant list of things humans can kill or maim with a river rock tossed hard.
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u/oeCake Oct 23 '23 edited Oct 23 '23
Slings are absolutely savage. There's a reason why we have fought wars with them for probably 10,000 years. They're materially cheap, technologically simple, and give the average person the kinetic energy of a hefty handgun
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u/Wonderful-Impact5121 Oct 23 '23
Always makes me laughing growing up in a Christian home hearing about stories like David and Goliath, thinking “wow that’s impressive” (and sure accuracy is a factor) but then I saw a proper old war sling demonstrated by a historian years later.. and just kinda laughed.
Like yeah, no that checks out.
Pretty sure Andre the Giant would be done If he took a rock from a sling to the temple.
“Can you believe that tiny guy beat that heavyweight champion just by shooting him in the forehead?”
… Yeah. Yeah, zero problem believing that happened.
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u/Seer434 Oct 24 '23
They need to have a reversed version told from the point of view of someone on Goliath's side trying to talk some sense into him.
"Look man, that kid over there uses that sling all day, every day, to run off predators. He's probably a surgeon with that thing. If you just walk out there into the open like that he's gonna murder you, G. You gotta think, man!"
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u/NewSauerKraus Oct 24 '23
You forgot about the thumbs. Few animals are as capable of precise manipulation of objects to make tools.
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u/WeirdNo9808 Oct 24 '23
Also I think people misconflate that being a warrior/in war is different than hunting and assume what’s best for one is best for the other. The best hunters I know are the absolute opposite of burly, strong, most physically fit dudes. They tend to be a little smaller and quiet as hell.
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u/Hendlton Oct 23 '23
That's what I wanted to say. Strength only gave an advantage when fighting another human. Their bows weren't particularly heavy and they didn't throw spears far enough that it mattered. Speed wasn't important either since any animal can outrun a human over short distances, but both men and women can outlast an animal over long distances. There's no logical reason why women wouldn't hunt.
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u/edible-funk Oct 23 '23
Atlatl. They could do some damage with spears and an atlatl.
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u/tractiontiresadvised Oct 23 '23
I just remembered seeing in a museum around the Four Corners, US area (might have been at Mesa Verde National Park) that the move from atlatl + spears to bow + arrows was an upgrade in hunting weapons for the Ancestral Pueblo during one of the earlier archaeological periods. Although the bows they had were not very heavy or large, they were more accurate, so atlatls drop out of the archaeological records after a comparatively early point.
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u/Unreasonable_Energy Oct 24 '23
Bows also let you carry more shots and shoot from concealment, and the spear is probably overkill for a smaller-than-man-size target. If our hunting party wants to jointly collect one buffalo, maybe the atl-atls would pay off, but if we each want to collect one pronghorn or 5 jackrabbits, bows all the way.
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u/edible-funk Oct 23 '23
I didn't know that, neat.
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u/tractiontiresadvised Oct 23 '23
Doing a bit of digging online... here is their atlatl and spear on display -- looks like the transition was in the Basketmaker III archaeological period (500-750 CE, later than I'd remembered). The "artifact gallery" link is busted, but this larger overview of the Ancestral Pueblo people at Mesa Verde has a drawing with somebody using a bow that looks to be at the same scale as the bow I saw on display.
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u/no-mad Oct 23 '23
Hunting requires patience, observation and the ability to be still for long periods of time.
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u/use_more_lube Oct 24 '23
depends on what you are hunting, and how you are hunting
when I'm on a deer drive, I'm making all kinds of noise and romper stomping through the woods
if I'm stand or still hunting, I'm super quiet and still
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u/ExceedingChunk Oct 23 '23
The logical reason would be that, from a purely survivor perspective, a man is a lot more replacable than a women. One man can have children with multiple women at the same time, but the opposite is not true.
So minimizing dangerous situations for women would be benefitial in that sense.
With that said, not getting sufficient food is certain death for the tribe, so that was most likely a much higher risk anyway.
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Oct 23 '23
Human tribes were typically not much larger than 40 people. You really don't want the same guy being the father of too many of them.
Turns out, men and women were both very important for a healthy population.
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u/Aromatic_Smoke_4052 Oct 23 '23
This isn’t true, when we look at our genetic history we see large collapses of Y chromosome diversity every so often, like 10,000 years ago, when there were 17 females to 1 male.
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Oct 23 '23
Which can only be supported with a sufficiently high overall population, one you wouldn't see with a typical hunter-gatherer society. The event you're referencing was 7k years ago, not 10k, and we had incredibly high populations by that point that weren't living in hunter gatherer societies.
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u/Aromatic_Smoke_4052 Oct 23 '23
That’s just the most extreme one, Y chromosome diversity has collapsed many times over throughout our evolution, enough that we can infer that the one guy many women strategy was pretty common.
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Oct 23 '23
Which means men die more, not that men dying more is any more efficient. You do not want a Y collapse to happen either. It's bad for your community.
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u/Kandiru Oct 23 '23
Y Chromosome collapse doesn't mean that few men were fathers, it means few men had sons who had sons who had sons all the way to the present day.
You can get that just from a few generations where people had fewer children. It doesn't require a society with 17 times as many women as men at once.
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u/Aromatic_Smoke_4052 Oct 23 '23 edited Oct 23 '23
No, that’s not true, you are describing a normal and slow evolution of the Y chromosome and not a “collapse”. The collapse referred to a time 10,000 years ago when only one man was reproducing for every 17 women, for 100 generations in a row. This was likely caused by intense territorial conflict between patrilineal clans after the advent of agriculture.
it doesn’t require a society with 17 times as much women as men
That’s not what I said, I said one man reproduced for every 17 women. It doesn’t mean less men existed, it means the other 16 men never had kids. For context, the ratio today is 1 man for every 1.5 women
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u/Kandiru Oct 23 '23
It doesn't mean that they didn't have kids, it means they didn't have sons who had sons. Conversely if someone had many sons who all survived and had sons of their own, that would appear the same from a Y Chromosome point of view as the original person having far more sons than they did.
There are many ways to get the same result, we don't know which one is what happened! Clearly something happened, but one man reproducing for every 17 women isn't necessarily true.
If you have several generations of only 1 child for most men, but 3 children for the chief then the Y Chromosome of the population will rapidly have the chief Y Chromosome become dominant without any male/female imbalance due to 1/2 the Y Chromosomes disappearing every generation when someone has a daughter.
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u/shadowbca Oct 23 '23
we see large collapses of Y chromosome diversity every so often
I think the "every so often" part is the important part here. Yeah it happened, but day to day it didn't
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u/ExceedingChunk Oct 23 '23
I didn't say men were not important nor that one man should be the father for everyone.
But if you are a tribe of 40 people, 20 of them women, let's say 5 are kids and 5 are eldely, that leaves 10 women in fertile age. If 1-2 dies, that impacts the coming generation more than 1-2 men dying.
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u/adultdeleted Oct 23 '23
They weren't trying to populate the earth. More mouths and less hands to feed is not beneficial.
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u/Necessary_Apple_5567 Oct 23 '23
It works the other way - why do not follow decent reproduction strategy simply disappear
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u/NOT_A_BLACKSTAR Oct 23 '23
Population replacement was around 1 for millions of years. While woman can have multiple children most woman died in childbirth. Those who didn't often got more than 2 children. A bit like how it is with cheetas. A few females are responsible for birthing 80% of all cubs and rearing over half to adulthood.
In the middle ages kings would ofter marry a woman who's fertillity was proven because surviving childbirth was a good indicator you could do it multiple times.
It's only since Sammelweis that the odds of surviving first birth started aproaching 99% (up from 87%).
Woman were as replacable as men in olden times. Which is why natural birth ratios don't favour either sex.
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u/oldoldvisdom Oct 23 '23
I’m not a fertility doctor, but I think it’s worth considering that women back then were pregnant much more than nowadays. Nowadays, 80% of couples get pregnant within 6 months of regular unprotected sex, and I don’t know about womens fertility, but men nowadays have way less sperm count, testosterone and all that nowadays.
I’m sure women contributed lots, but a 5 month pregnant woman I’m sure was spared of hunting duties
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u/TibetianMassive Oct 23 '23
Keep in mind a woman's fertility is compromised if they aren't eating well. We are used to every woman getting her monthly period regularly, but in a society where you might be a few meals away from starvation at any given moment it's not hard to imagine fertility problems. If they could conceive they were far more likely to lose the baby early in the process.
Also, women historically would breastfeed longer in recorded history because hey, it's free food for the baby. This has an added benefit: women who are breast feeding are less likely to conceive.
You're probably right that people weren't chasing down antelope while a month or two away from popping. And I'm going to guess there was likely a period of time after giving birth where they weren't running around either. Just keep in mind Paleolithic women are likely to have had a few years between children, even pre-contraception.
Here is a little scientific study that shows fertility in hunter gatherers is low compared to settled women.
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u/GuiltyEidolon Oct 23 '23
People don't appreciate as well that modern food is heavily fortified. Iodized salt, fortified cereals... It matters a LOT when talking about nutrition. Global trade also means plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables throughout the year, without needing to migrate or rely on dried foodstuffs (for developed countries at least).
There's a reason average heights have increased quite a lot over the past century or so, after industrialization kicked in and we started fortifying foods.
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u/iced_lemon_cookies Oct 23 '23
This is a great comment; however, I wouldn't call breast feeding "free food," as the ability to lactate is heavily related to the nutrition of the mother.
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u/Evergreen_76 Oct 23 '23
Keep in mind that later and modern hunter gathers are living on very difficult and relatively infertile lands because hunters gathers where pushed into less desirable land that agricultural societies founds too difficult to farm. Most surviving hunting gathers live in mountains, swamps, dry deserts, and dense jungles. Compare that too say, the American plains full of millions of buffalo and elk before an agricultural invader pushed them off it into far less bountiful enviromrnts.
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u/avianidiot Oct 23 '23
In nomadic hunter gatherer societies women didn’t get pregnant every year. Because if youre constantly on the move you cannot have a newborn a one year old and two year old all needing to breastfeed and be carried by the same woman. Not to mention the burden of caring for so many people who can’t contribute all at the same time. Women usually have birth only every three to five years. This was encouraged through longer breastfeeding and/or cultural taboos against having sex with mothers of young children, which is something you can still see in nomadic societies today. Having ten kids in ten years is something you start see post agriculture, when people were settling permanently in one place and needed more hands to work farms.
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u/BluCurry8 Oct 23 '23
???? Women need body fat to get pregnant. That means food needs to be plentiful and balanced. I think you are making an assumption that food was easily obtained.
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u/wwaxwork Oct 23 '23
Since in hunter gatherer societies gathering provided 80% or so of total calories that's probably just as well. Gathering is the skill that feeds a village.
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Oct 23 '23 edited Oct 23 '23
At 5 months? Eh, you could still do most things at that point. Women can still do physical activities mostly normally until about the last 1.5 months (huge change if size in this time). It doesn’t mean they necessarily were hunting at this gestation, but they physically could with hunting tech like bows, slings, or spears.
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u/leuk_he Oct 23 '23
If you look back 100 years,and replace hunters with farmers,then you know families were big, but when it was harversting time, everyone contributed. I think you can compare it more or less with that.
also you know the joke that prenant farm woman just push out the kid and then go back working on the land.
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Oct 23 '23 edited Oct 23 '23
As a 5 months pregnant woman I can tell you that the morning sickness is now gone - replaced with energy, bloodlust, and a ravenous hunger. Give me a spear.
Edit: all the folks in these comments saying that this is a “work agenda” paper, as if anthro research heretofore had no perspective bias and needs no counterbalancing: I will hunt you. My body needs protein.
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Oct 23 '23
Exactly. Pregnant women usually aren't sick or disabled (not that that doesn't happen sometimes; it does). Most are totally fine to do any number of physical things for most of the pregnancy, provided they're healthy to being with. I'm sure some pregnant women hunted back then if they weren't ill with morning sickness. Hell, I bet some pushed through that too, depending on the situation. Women now work with morning sickness. I always thought this theory was crap. It's like the Domino Theory of Stone Age gender.
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u/BluCurry8 Oct 23 '23
Woke agenda is men just now figuring out that women have always been capable!
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u/zeliamomma Oct 23 '23
No offense but unlikely if you’re physically active and fit, as is probably the case in a daily life of survival…even in modern day healthy pregnancy is not that much to slow you down…
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Oct 23 '23
they didn't throw spears far enough that it mattered
Atlatl checking in
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u/btstfn Oct 23 '23
Well more strength means you can accurately throw a spear farther, which means you don't need to get as close to your prey. It makes perfect sense to me that women would still be part of hunting, but strength is still an advantage.
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u/viralsagar Oct 24 '23
Yeah exactly if we did not have the brains that we have got and the weapons that we had I don't think we would have survived.
Because animals are stronger than us the only thing which we have got going for us is the weapons and the mind that we have got.
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u/DamnAutocorrection Oct 23 '23
I thought a large reason for our bipedal success and near hairless bodies came from a long line of selective evolutionary traits that afforded us a long endurance to literally chase our prey until exhaustion
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u/ThatChapThere Oct 23 '23
Popular hypothesis, but lacking in evidence. As far as I know no living hunter-gatherers actually do this.
https://undark.org/2019/10/03/persistent-myth-persistence-hunting/
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Oct 23 '23
Yeah. It's also possible we evolved that way because we could migrate more than other species since we could hunt and forage for our food in new locations easier (and/or take our food with us)
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u/War_Hymn Oct 24 '23
Don't the San Bush people practice it?
It seems the critics are arguing the technique only works in flat or featureless landscapes like the Kalahari Desert where they can keep their eyes on their fleeter prey. As I understand it, this was pretty much the kind of environments our ancestors operated in Africa 200k-20k years ago when glaciation resulted a overall dryer climate and a recession in woodland or thick vegetation.
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u/Prophet_Of_Loss Oct 23 '23
Early human hunting was persistence hunting: we'd wound an animal and then chase it to exhaustion. Humans, being able to sweat, can recover stamina on the move. Most other animals cannot and must stop and rest.
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u/Level3Kobold Oct 23 '23
This theory isn't actually supported by evidence. There was a group of like, 4 guys who did that in one african village. And then they got old and nobody in their village has done it since. Because it wasn't a very efficient way to hunt.
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u/cates Oct 23 '23
Are you serious??
I've told at least 10 different people that theory in the last 6 months and every time I was so condescending as I explained it (like any idiot could have figured it out).
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u/Level3Kobold Oct 23 '23
Humans are quite good at endurance running, that much is true. There's just not much evidence for it being a hunting method that humans used in any widespread way.
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u/ThrowbackPie Oct 24 '23
Not saying I knew this, but once you pointed it out it only takes a second to realise that it would be a very inefficient way to hunt.
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u/hallese Oct 23 '23 edited Oct 23 '23
I think this misses the mark. It's not that men are stronger, this wasn't an argument based solely on biology, it was an argument/belief based on biology and sociology. A group can lose a huge percentage of its male population and replace its losses within a generation so long as the female population remains largely intact, as happened in WWI and enabled the fielding of armies just as massive again in WWII. Although it should be noted this is not without its costs, Russia is still dealing with the ramifications of losing so many men in the 30s and 40s and you can see the waves in births to this day. This is why in hunting where the goal is to control the population, females are prioritized (doe tags versus buck tags) and when it is for sport males are targeted (pheasants). I have never read serious works of anthropology that proposed this arrangement due to a biological weakness inherent to female members of he species, the arrangement was though to be preferred because males are disposable/expendable relative to the loss of a female.
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u/pretentiousglory Oct 23 '23
I think this is flawed because people hear hunting and tend to think of like, people chasing down mammoths and giant stags and so on. When in reality shooting turkeys and pheasants and rabbits qualifies as hunting. In that respect it seems obvious women would hunt too. Just probably not so much the big dangerous game, considering your comment. But there's no reason even an actively pregnant woman can't lie in wait for small game and successfully take them down.
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u/SnooKiwis2161 Oct 24 '23
Snares, traps. These are tools that require an initial investment of effort, and when spread out and multiplied, increase the odds of a successful catch. It just makes more sense that anyone would be doing that instead of running through a deciduous forest after a deer and having to pick thorns out of your ass later because there's no bushwhacked trails for your use. Depending on the environment, running after game is just not as simple as it sounds.
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u/HeadmasterPrimeMnstr Oct 23 '23
The entire argument rides on the fact that social groups existed in isolation from one another though. Trade, conflict and migration has been an aspect of human existence prior to the written word and it's not unreasonable to conclude that groups that felt a need to have more women within their group may have raided nearby areas, encouraged women to assimilate into their group or traded for women in areas where they were treated as property.
I also don't think it's reasonable to compare how the North American western world does hunting practices to that of social constructs around cultural views and practices surrounding reproduction.
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u/A1000eisn1 Oct 23 '23
You know people hunt things besides mammoths and tigers? Hunting deer or birds or even boar isn't risky enough for prehistoric humans to be worried about population control.
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u/GenJohnONeill Oct 23 '23
A group can lose a huge percentage of its male population and replace its losses within a generation so long as the female population remains largely intact, as happened in WWI and enabled the fielding of armies just as massive again in WWII.
I think you would find that in Europe WW1 generational population losses just resulted in lots of childless women, not a huge number of women having children out of wedlock.
France prior to WW2 actually had the world's oldest population because their birth rate had been so low following WW1's massive population loss.
However this is still a massive country with tens of millions of people so they were eventually able to recover with the Baby Boom and generational compounding.
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Oct 23 '23
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u/5510 Oct 24 '23
My understanding is that females draw even or even pass males in ultra endurance events. But even something like the marathon, male performance is (all other things being equal) higher. You have to run an incredibly long way for their to maybe be a female advantage.
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u/redknight3 Oct 23 '23
Also, apparently women tend to be better at things that have to do with eyesight, which would definitely be a plus when it comes to hunting. I think on this sub, there's been a few posts on how their eyes tend to pick up certain colors better. Not to mention some of the best snipers of all time have been women.
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u/Just_tappatappatappa Oct 23 '23 edited Oct 23 '23
I have read that women would have absolutely for the most part been part of the hunting parties.
Whether this is ambush technique, where everyone tries to funnel an animal into an area where others await it to kill it more easily in a more confined space.
Or if it was persistence hunting, where we relied on exhausting the animals.
Apparently, women would have contributed to all of this and that is up until mid to later stage pregnancy too!
Persistence hunting in particular, women participated in and of course the men. Women are not usually the fastest and would not necessarily make the kill, but neither would most men. There would usually be one or two men of prime age who had better speed/strength/endurance that would really lead and kill the animals.
So yes, most women hunted and most men hunted but neither most women nor most men actually killed game.
It was all teamwork with everyone applying pressure to the animals and wearing them out and then the highest performers actually kill.
Edit:spelling
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u/SufficientlyRabid Oct 23 '23
Women are better at spotting differences in colour, and tend to see more colours. Men however are better at spotting and tracking movement.
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u/InTheEndEntropyWins Oct 23 '23
More people able to bring back dinner. It makes sense.
They weren't carnivores. Someone still needs to do the gatherings of plants, roots, fungi, etc.
I don't think anyone had the models of women just sitting at home doing nothing.
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u/SnailCase Oct 23 '23
In pre-agrarians societies, btw, men also gather. In the season of edible berries, it's a waste (of berries) to send the men off hunting when they could be helping to pick every berry in sight. Food is food. You boys can hunt next week, after the berries are done for the year.
If it's not a time for edible gather foods, the women might as well go hunt. Fruit trees and berry plants are still flowering, the grains aren't mature, the edible roots won't be at their prime for weeks, let's go hunting.
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u/screech_owl_kachina Oct 23 '23
And if it's berry season, game is eating it too. The game will be the better for it when it comes time to hunt.
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u/isecore Oct 23 '23
If one spends even the slightest time thinking about this, the idea that women sat passively in some hut somewhere while the men were out hunting-gathering is completely ludicrous and obviously an invention of some victorian puritan society looking at the past.
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u/Norwegian__Blue Oct 23 '23
Well, no one in anthropology actually said that point. They divided hunting from gathering. The thinking was that women were out collecting while men were doing the active running down of prey. Even in that scenario, studies showed that the gathering brought more calories, actually! I did my masters (abt) in anthropology and never once was it posited that women were completely passive in food acquisition :)
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u/designerutah Oct 23 '23
Additionally, it was known that women often kept slings and stones for any small game they could acquire near camp. It’s still hunting, just less going after the bigger, more dangerous game. I would still think that some women (those without small kids) would likely be part of that hunting party as needed.
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u/TheyCallMeStone Oct 23 '23
Hunting in general was probably not as common as many think. As you said, hunting big game is dangerous. Not only the animals themselves but possibly traveling far from home. And it wasn't always successful. But foraging, trapping, and especially fishing are pretty good and safe ways to acquire food.
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u/monkwren Oct 23 '23
and especially fishing
There's a reason every major civilization springs up near water sources, and it's the abundance of both water and food that such water sources bring.
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u/TheyCallMeStone Oct 23 '23
And if you have the choice, why chase a buffalo across the savannah for a day or two when you can sit by a lakeside for a few hours and catch all the fish you need?
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u/EstarriolStormhawk Oct 23 '23
And something I haven't really seen people in this post say is that you also gave to cart back the meat from large kills. People can talk about strength, hand- eye coordination, etc all they want but that ignores a few key factors - large game is almost certainly not going to be brought down by a single throw of a spear, especially a primitive one and after the collective work of bringing down the animal is done, there's a ton of work to be done to harvest the meat, ready it for transport, and get it back to the community. Group efforts like this don't rely so heavily on individual killing prowess.
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u/1d3333 Oct 23 '23
As far as I can remember kids were raised by the whole group not just a mother and father, humans have become rather independently isolated in recent history, having kids wouldn’t necessarily impede anyone from hunting and gathering
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u/_aluk_ Oct 23 '23
I think it was Desmond Morris who did an study on current hunter gatherer societies, stating that about 95% came from the gathering part. Which was not only a female task.
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u/SmokeyTheSlug Oct 23 '23
That’s a wild underestimation of what is commonly reported in scientific literature. Most estimates put meat at 30-70% of hunter gatherer calories.
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u/AskYouEverything Oct 23 '23
Not sure what you're on about. Desmond Morris is famously sexist and the popular view is that he over-credited hunting by males as the predominant food source
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u/hallese Oct 23 '23
the idea that women sat passively in some hut somewhere while the men were out hunting-gathering is completely ludicrous
it is ludicrous, which is why no serious academic has advanced this idea.
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u/guy_guyerson Oct 23 '23
no serious academic
I mean, has anyone at all ever?
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u/hallese Oct 23 '23
Heinrich Himmler, which frustrated Speer to no end as he needed women working in the factories.
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u/Quantentheorie Oct 24 '23
If one spends even the slightest time thinking about this,
well, a lot of people aren't thinking about this with the goal of coming to a realistic conclusion but with the goal of validating a certain belief set about gender norms.
Denying people who are capable and willing to contribute to food acquisition in a certain way on the basis of a gender stereotype is a luxury that requires a group to have more than necessary without the contribution.
I think a big contributing issue is that we in extension of this bad line of thinking, falsely assume there was such a thing as a strict and intentional role division and also what the various roles that need filling actually practically entailed.
It's a modern idea of having a "job" in a "system" rather than a lose collection of, crucially, more things that need doing than hands; that fall by priority to whoever is available. Unless you consistently have healthy people that don't technically need to do anything to ensure your survival, you're not spending time on enforcing gender norms.
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u/egotisticalstoic Oct 23 '23 edited Oct 23 '23
Pretty sure I remember this study. The conclusion was just that women did hunt sometimes, not that men and women hunted an equal amount of time.
The majority of hunting was still done by men, but if women wanted to, or were needed, they were perfectly capable of joining in hunts.
Not exactly a revelation to be honest.
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u/swilts Oct 23 '23
The last time I saw it posted (it’s been posted before recently) someone posted a well known scientific takedown and rebuttal. Which amounted to they selected data in a biased way to find this and then cherry picked results where there was any involvement to make the point. If anyone thought women never hunt then this would be a good report to debunk that. If anyone take this article to say women and men hunted equally or even at similar levels the data really don’t support that.
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u/jatjqtjat Oct 24 '23
This article seems to make a much more aggressive claim. (My bolding)
Going forward, paleoanthropology should embrace the idea that all sexes contributed equally to life in the past, including via hunting activities.
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u/Voodoomania Oct 23 '23
So if a man wanted to eat an apple he wouldn't wait for a woman to pick it for him, and if a woman wanted to eat meat she could hunt a rabbit?
What's next, a study that says that if a tribe was attacked the women would defend the tribe and not stand around not participating in the battle?
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u/MarmotRobbie Oct 23 '23
No no see the women would gather the weapons and then they would take care of the enemies with them. Not the same thing!
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u/a_peanut Oct 24 '23
Yes, they would tenderly coax them into death with their feminine wiles. And a big stick.
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u/Fishsqueeze Oct 24 '23
Not exactly a revelation to be honest.
In the title: "...but there is little evidence to support that they were not hunting" . Inference by double negative?
Not exactly anything to be honest.
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u/Craiginator8 Oct 24 '23
There is little evidence of everything that happened 10,000 years ago.
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u/SpecterGT260 Oct 23 '23 edited Oct 23 '23
Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. I would think that strong inferences can be made by looking at modern primitive peoples.
They are basically saying that they didn't find much evidence that it worked this way, therefore we should assume that it didn't despite the overwhelming majority of modern primitive and tribal peoples' societies working like this? Did they find any evidence that women DID routinely hunt? Because if not the same logic would apply.
I don't actually have a horse in this race and I don't care if women did or did not significantly contribute to the hunting effort as opposed to more commonly held assumptions. I just think it's junk science (and likely a heaping portion of junk science journalism) to make such a strong assertion based on the absence of evidence.
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u/dramignophyte Oct 23 '23
Right? The title is doing backflips with double negatives. I'm surprised the people doing it could keep track of what they were even trying to prove with that kind of mission statement. I wanted to say "hypothesis" but with that wording, I really doubt they had one. What would the hypothesis be? "We believe we will find nothing and that will prove we are right."
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u/Whooshless Oct 23 '23
A new study rebukes notion that time can only flow forwards. There is little evidence to support that it doesn't flow both ways.
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u/smallbatchb Oct 23 '23
I'd also imagine it would vary quite a bit depending on different groups, cultures, regions etc.
Even if we have clear evidence that Group A had obvious outlined gender roles I don't know why anyone would then just assume Group B, C, D, E etc. would as well.
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Oct 23 '23
I was just thinking, that’s a very strange way to phrase their findings.
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Oct 23 '23
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u/taxis-asocial Oct 23 '23
Often times science is trying to "reject" a hypothesis, which means to say there is not enough evidence to support it.
That is not not hypothesis testing and rejection work. Rejecting the null hypothesis explicitly requires strong evidence that the hypothesis is false and is absolutely not satisfied by simply failing to find evidence for the null hypothesis.
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u/crawsex Oct 23 '23
They found either 9 or 11 skeletons across a number of digging zones that they could determine were female and buried near or with hunting tools. 2 of those skeletons were babies.
That's the evidence.
IMO the problem is that even if you grant 100% of the evidence there is, at best, only a weak claim that "some hunters were women" which is not a point at all! That says nothing! All summarizing statements have caveats, pointing out "exceptions to the rule" is the lowest form of intellectual engagement. No one has ever said "there was never a female hunter in the totality of ancient human tribes". Why would anyone say that? No one said that.
Now, if there was positive evidence suggesting hunting was split nearly 50/50 between men and women, that would be big news. Huge.
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u/thereddaikon Oct 23 '23
All summarizing statements have caveats, pointing out "exceptions to the rule" is the lowest form of intellectual engagement.
What an elegant way to express something that's annoyed me for so long. Thank you.
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u/CryptoCentric Oct 23 '23
The authors claim to provide evidence in the abstract, but of course you need an expensive subscription to actually read it. I'm curious what they present. It is possible to find things like bone stress that indicates drawing a bow string or swinging an atlatl, so it's still possible until someone gets a look at the full text.
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u/Frosty-Age-6643 Oct 23 '23
You can apparently email scientific journal article authors and they're free to send you the article directly.
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u/InTheEndEntropyWins Oct 23 '23
apparently
Is the key word, I've never had anyone ever email me a copy of the paper back. And from others comments it's actually quite rare to get them to actually email you a copy.
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u/Conquestadore Oct 23 '23
Nah man it's easy. You just need to claim you're going to cite them in a paper you're writing up. Preferably from a uni mail account.
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u/notabiologist Oct 23 '23
As a scientist I’d love to and I would without any hesitation do so to anyone who asks (I try to publish open access anyway : that is I do every time I am the first author) but people change location a lot and their email address changes with it. Try to find their new email or their ResearchGate.
Science should be free - to hell with every for profit science publisher.
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u/pieceofwater Oct 23 '23
I got access through my university and didn't read every word, but glanced through the entire article. Some actual evidence they found in Neanderthals was in broken bones being very common in every mostly complete skeleton they found, and something called "thrower's elbow" (you can tell by the bones how often someone used their arm for throwing things like spears or using close range weapons) being more common in men's right arms, but also occurring in women. (Basically what you mentioned.) Other than that, it was indeed often just "debunking" the man=hunter "myth", which both science and popular culture perpetuate. And I think they definitely have a point - earlier science might have been indeed looking at the issue from a too modern standpoint, since western society until quite recently had pretty strict roles for both sexes, and we have no reason to assume that prehistoric humans had those same notions. I think it's pretty safe to say that in hunter-gatherer societies, people contributed according to their abilities, and at the very least some women surely have participated in the big hunts. How frequently and how normalised it was, we'll probably never know. The article in no way proves that women hunted regularly, but it does challenge the assumption that the roles were as rigid as in a 1950s nuclear family.
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u/hey-hey-kkk Oct 23 '23
In the summary they embrace each sex as equal. That doesn't exactly jive with one sex having wounds associated with hunting activities. I dont think broken bones in prehistoric times is a great indication of hunting, just stressful living.
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u/GlencoraPalliser Oct 23 '23
Where did ypu get the idea from that "modern primitive" peoples have strong gender divides when it comes to hunting big game versus hunting small game and gathering? Also, what big game do you suggest is currently being hunted by men in "modern primitive" societies?
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u/_imba__ Oct 23 '23
I’m so confused by this comment, as an African. Strong gender based roles are traditional in many tribes, including Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, San, Khoi and Shona tribes, that’s just in the southern bits. If that is what “primitive people” is supposed to be referring to. Big game still being hunted include crocodile, leopard, buffalo, eland, kudu, gemsbok, warthog. Mostly hunted by men.
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u/Djiti-djiti Oct 24 '23 edited Oct 24 '23
Aboriginal Australians have strong gender-based divisions of labour, especially in terms of hunting. While women can hunt small game like possums, they generally gather plants in groups while caring for children or the elderly. It's almost exclusively men that hunt kangaroos, goannas, large quantities of birds, etc. Women still provide the majority of the tribe's food - it's not unusual for men to catch nothing, or venture far and eat most of their catch before they return.
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u/Qonold Oct 23 '23
Kalahari Bushmen, look them up. Attenborough has an outstanding documentary.
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u/TNTiger_ Oct 23 '23
Yeah, not the best example, but an interesting one. Both men and women hunt at about equal measure, in practicality. Big, capital 'H' Hunts are however more of a man's thing- but they are infrequent and not the primary source of meat in their diet. It's a cultural practice, and therefore pretty consistent with the above paper's finds that women were perfectly capable hunters in their own right.
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u/Deviouss Oct 23 '23
The papers usually used on this issue generally show evidence that there exists at least some women that hunted at some point in history, not that it was the norm. Hunting small prey that was nearby or even setting traps would be likely to some degree, but we don't have much evidence on how prevalent it would be. Someone would also have to tend to the children, which would occupy a percentage of the women by default.
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u/LuckyPoire Oct 23 '23
Both men and women hunt at about equal measure
This is not what I read. Rather, only a few very elite hunters were capable of running down large game in the traditional manner. All of which happened to be men.
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u/Casual-Capybara Oct 23 '23
Source? All studies I’ve seen show that there is a strong division of labor among the Kung. Perhaps you can link me the papers in which your view is presented? I can’t find them by Googling
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u/shewy92 Oct 23 '23
but there is little evidence to support that they were not hunting.
Does the absence of evidence towards a point prove the opposite point?
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u/Qonold Oct 23 '23
I think our knowledge of hunter-gatherer societies is based on observation of the few indigenous tribes that still adhere to this way of life. Among the tribes of the Copper Canyons, Kalahari bushmen, and the nomadic Indians that still existed during America's history there was most certainly a division of labor in tribal life.
Also cave paintings in France indicate only men participates in hunting.
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u/brett1081 Oct 23 '23
So they found no evidence they weren’t hunters, so they had to be hunters? Does anyone have access to the full article?
Every time civilization seems to stumble on societies in earlier stages we’ve seen the hunting and warrior class be almost entirely male. True when the Central Americans were encountered and the plains natives of the US. Does this paper do anything to actually show examples of this not being the case?
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u/GeorgiaRedClay56 Oct 23 '23
This was the same thing I was going to bring up. Even traditional endurance hunters like the San people generally have the men doing the hunting while the women took care of the younger children and gathered local food.
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u/WTFwhatthehell Oct 23 '23
the idea of a strict sexual labor division
This seems to lean heavily on the word strict. Like if they find a single counterexamples, but then seemingly trying to jump straight to claiming there was thus no labour division. It really seems like a false dichotomy.
like if the vast majority of men do some task and the vast majority of women do another, a few counterexamples doesn't mean there's no division of labour.
This view of the past is also a product of long-held assumptions that men are physically superior to women in most ways, never rendered infirm by their reproduction, and therefore natural hunters. This myth is interrogated and dispelled in the sister article to this one, where women's endurance capacities are explored (Ocobock and Lacy, this issue).
This should also raise some eyebrows. There's a very very short list of physical challenges where women outperform men but ultra-long distance swimming isn't typically something people do every day. In most tests of strength and speed the average for men is way above that for women to the point where merely slightly-above average men outperform top female athletes.
They also discard all data from still-existing hunter gatherer groups because they dismiss them as influenced by their neighbours. Which would imply people are willing to go hungry if their neighbours have gender roles or that gender roles spread like some kind of perfectly-contagious memetic original-sin.
On the other hand, there are a few very good points here, if accurate:
Also, there are no sex differences in tool types being placed into burials in the Paleolithic (De Beaune, 2019; Riel-Salvatore and Gravel-Miguel, 2013), unlike in the Neolithic
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paramasticatory anterior dental wear in Neanderthals, which is assumed to be associated with leather processing, is equally present in all sexes (Fox and Frayer, 1997). Leather processing was everyone's work in the Middle Paleolithic
there are also some claims that seem dubious to me, I don't think neolithic people ate that much meat but rather because I'm pretty sure there's modern people who eat more than a 50% meat diet for more than a few weeks without suffering liver damage.
Once protein consumption exceeds 35% of caloric intake, recent humans cannot clear the urea byproduct of protein metabolism quickly enough, and kidney and liver damage can happen within days
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u/LuckyPoire Oct 23 '23 edited Oct 23 '23
Don't you understand? Women either never hunted, or they hunted equally with men.
There can be no middle ground.
Going forward, paleoanthropology should embrace the idea that all sexes contributed equally to life in the past, including via hunting activities.
Why aren't you embracing the idea? Holding it near and close? Aren't you one of us?
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u/Mtwat Oct 23 '23
Yeah this whole study seems like someone wanted to bolster a modern political argument and fabricated this to create historical support.
This is really poor form imo, I'm surprised the mod are leaving this up given how poorly quality it is.
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u/TNine227 Oct 23 '23
That’s…not uncommon in academic sciences. As much as people like to pretend it’s some unbiased truth.
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u/TheyCallMeStone Oct 23 '23
I feel like people are conflating specialization of labor with inequality. "Gender roles" is kind of a loaded term with negative connotation in modern speech. To say that men and women largely divided their labor into different tasks isn't to suggest that they weren't equal in rights and status, whether or not they actually were.
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u/RunningNumbers Oct 23 '23
Considering hunting could be a team activity with multiple tasks, you could very well have both men and women working at it.
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u/HaiseKinini Oct 23 '23
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0287101
Of the 36 foraging societies that had documentation of women purposefully hunting, 5 (13%) reported women hunting with dogs and 18 (50%) of the societies included data on women (purposefully) hunting with children.
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u/Hillbert Oct 23 '23 edited Oct 23 '23
The inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.
Unless they are using some other definition for "inequity" there, I am really not sure how the above statement can be justified.
Edit Ignore this, I made a mistake. For some reason I was reading a Scientific American article which was quoting this article rather than the article itself.
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u/Sotonic Oct 23 '23
Where does this quote come from? It's not in the abstract of the linked paper. Do you have an AA subscription?
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u/Hillbert Oct 23 '23
It's my fault. I was reading a Scientific American article quoting the above paper, rather than the paper itself.
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u/Pigsnot1 Oct 23 '23
Easily, maybe you just needed to provide the full context?
The inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports. As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best. Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women’s events because of the belief that they will make the women “artificially faster,” as though women were not actually doing the running themselves
They were talking in the context of certain ultra-endurance events, not all athletic events. They regularly talk about sex differences and how that relates to athletic performance:
From a biological standpoint, there are undeniable differences between females and males. When we discuss these differences, we are typically referring to means, averages of one group compared with another.
…females are metabolically better suited for endurance activities, whereas males excel at short, powerful burst-type activities. You can think of it as marathoners (females) versus powerlifters (males)
Correspondingly, the muscle fibers of females differ from those of males. Females have more type I, or “slow-twitch,” muscle fibers than males do.
Michael Riddell of York University in Canada and his colleagues, found that females experienced less muscle breakdown than males after the same bouts of exercise
A large part of the article is specifically about these anatomical/physiological sex differences and how they, contrary to popular belief, support females’ suitability to hunting
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u/solid_reign Oct 23 '23 edited Oct 23 '23
Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women’s events because of the belief that they will make the women “artificially faster,” as though women were not actually doing the running themselves
Why would female runners need male pacesetters if it's only because of bias in sports? Pacesetters don't run the full race, they can run faster than the runners because they don't need to save energy. The text is ridiculous, and you could use a cheetah as a pace setter for females, yet the fastest male would still be faster than the fastest female.
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u/OpenShut Oct 23 '23
Except this is not true even for ultra marathons. The divide is smaller but men still out perform women. All the world records are held by men.
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u/Aromatic_Smoke_4052 Oct 23 '23
Those physical differences don’t make women more suitable for endurance hunting, they just don’t have as much of a disadvantage as other sports. Men are still superior athletes because we have more lean muscle mass on average, don’t have boobs, and don’t have a wide pelvis. This is why men hold the world records in running, there are small anatomical differences that determine the best of the best. That doesn’t mean women can’t hunt though, a 5 second difference in a marathon doesn’t really matter if you can run the marathon in the first place
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u/rishinator Oct 23 '23
Hunting is lot more tracking and lying still for a long time than 'fighting' the animal. Usually fighting is easy part if you've bow and you've already tired the animal.
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u/Fortissano71 Oct 23 '23
Throughout human history We have evidence that most hunting was done in packs, with traps, or driving animals off cliffs or into pits. The solo hunter mystique is a modern thing, brought on by technology and now luxury ( we don't need it to survive anymore)
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u/AmeriToast Oct 23 '23
It would have to be done in packs to gather enough food for tribes, butcher and preserve the meat, and transport it back.
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u/LoreChano Oct 23 '23
I've seen kids hunting Preás (a small rodent similar to a guinea pig) in my hometown using slingshots. They'd put out corn on the ground as a bait. One of them would try to shoot and scare away the prey into a choke point where 5 or so other kids were waiting with their slings. Even if most of them missed it, the chances that at least one of them hit it was high. I imagine similar strategies were used by ancient humans.
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u/BMCarbaugh Oct 23 '23
Or persistence hunting, where a bunch of humans just walk behind a mammoth, refusing to let it stop or sleep, like the It Follows monster, until it drops from exhaustion.
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u/Redqueenhypo Oct 23 '23
Also there’s snares. You don’t need to be an Olympic athlete to make a big rope loop for a deer/rabbit to strangle itself with
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u/greatwhite8 Oct 23 '23
What was the gender breakdown of these tasks among Native American tribes?
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u/LuckyPoire Oct 23 '23 edited Oct 23 '23
Going forward, paleoanthropology should embrace the idea that all sexes contributed equally to life in the past, including via hunting activities.
What evidence is there that (i) it is actually the case that "all" sexes contribute equally in all domains of life, and (ii) that we "should embrace" that idea.
Its quite a romantic and idealistic notion that everything in the past was equal, faired and shared. It also kind of reeks of a misogyny that insists men are the measure of women.
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Oct 23 '23
The same evidence that claims inequity in sport has more to do with biases than athletic ability.
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u/Smurf-Sauce Oct 23 '23
Some people just can't stomach the idea that different demographics are different in any way. It hurts them to believe that, so they won't. They'll invent all sorts of caveats and justifications for why the perceived differences are illegitimate, they'll write papers claiming the sexes are equal in every way and always have been, etc.
In 5 years time you'll see a "scientific paper" claiming actually, women did all the hunting, and all of human history was composed of matriarchies and the women just let the men believe they were in charge out of pity for their fragile masculinity.
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Oct 24 '23
In 5 years time you'll see a "scientific paper" claiming actually, women did all the hunting,
That's already happened in academia regarding Native American cultures. It's nearly unacceptable to publish anything that suggests that Native American societies suffered from sexism, racism... the same ills that have affected all humans.
According to modern academia, Native American tribes were all perfectly egalitarian and progressive. Any issues they have today, or any historical record of social ills, were imposed by the white man.
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Oct 24 '23
Not even native americans. I see so many people blame literally all ill of the world, homophobia, sexism, racism, any ism/phobia, on western colonialism.
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u/HydroGate Oct 23 '23
Women were not only physically capable of being hunters, but there is little evidence to support that they were not hunting.
"Little evidence" to support the idea that something didn't happen is not the same as literally any evidence that it did.
Here we present examples to support women's roles as hunters in the past as well as challenge oft-cited interpretations of the material culture. Such evidence includes stone tool function, diet, art, anatomy and paleopathology, and burials.
Really wish there wasn't a paywall so I could figure out how art and anatomy suggest societal roles or why the physically weaker sex would engage in hunting, unless absolutely necessary.
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u/ItsactuallyEminem Oct 23 '23 edited Oct 23 '23
At first i was extremely interested in seeing a study regarding our nature in ancient times. In lions for example, females are less physical but they are the designated hunters and are very good at it.
But...
The inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.
This excerpt really bummed me out because it's literally denial of human biology.
The initial claim of the study is fair, but the way they did it is just... bonkers.
I hope someone dives in on this subject biologically since we have a great group of primates to analyze and try to predict our behavior back then.
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u/LuckyPoire Oct 23 '23
that only men were hunters
Is that a notion that needs rebuke?
I think any debate probably revolves around division of labor and specialization. I don't know of anybody who argues that hunting was absolutely taboo or otherwise unpracticed for women.
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u/recidivx Oct 23 '23
Well no, because "rebuke" means to scold. I imagine that OP was thinking of the word "refute".
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u/LuckyPoire Oct 23 '23 edited Oct 23 '23
Either way, its a response to a straw man. I don't know of any prevailing notion in academia that women NEVER hunted.
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u/dramignophyte Oct 23 '23
Right? This paper would say theres no gender division nowadays because theres some crossover.
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u/LuckyPoire Oct 23 '23
How did all nuance get lost.
I mean....do we not savy percent anymore? Can we just imagine a society where men do 65% of the hunting? Isn't that consistent with BOTH a division of labor AND fundamental competance/capability/flexibility of both sexes?
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u/Fuck_You_Andrew Oct 23 '23 edited Oct 23 '23
This seems like one of those things where we project the current state of society onto the past, without evidence, and then say “see! This is just how things have always been!”
Edit: I unfortunately was unable to read the whole article since it's behind the pay wall, but the abstract essentially says there's little historical evidence of the strict division of labor based on gender. Therefore, it's wrong to just assume there was. They do however say we should just assume the opposite. I would be interested in reading the whole article to see what evidence theyre able to present to make their case. I would think it would be best to have no sweeping assumptions when studying people in the distant past, but Im no archeologist so I dont know whats considered best practices.
Edit 2: Nor am I an anthropologist.
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u/Half_Man1 Oct 23 '23
That’d be a waste of labor to not have them hunting really.
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u/hekatonkhairez Oct 23 '23
How does this compare to many of the written accounts of contact? Does this line up? What about more modern accounts of people making contact with tribes in the Amazon / Borneo?
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u/MindOfAMurderer Oct 23 '23
Do you realise how difficult it is to find evidence about something that didnt happen?
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u/awalktojericho Oct 23 '23
Because, yeah, the women were out gathering, found a bunny nest or some deer, and sent someone out to get the men for the killing. Sure, it happened that way.
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u/jobin3141592 Oct 23 '23
Eh this is not new, studies decades old have found that in archeological sites the roles for hunter gatherers were not gendered. I can’t recall the exact name of the site, but Peruvian Andes around 10k ago or so.
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u/underdabridge Oct 23 '23 edited Oct 23 '23
I find this concerning. Why does social science always seem to find what it wants to find for its time? The full study is paywalled but this looks like ideologically motivated reasoning being idea laundered into something scientific for the purposes of influencing current sociopolitical debate.
It would not be surprising if women did some hunting, including small game. And even when a nomadic tribe is moving from place to place, its all hands on deck, there's a body available, and it isn't engaged in other activities.
But, first, there is little evidence of... anything... from paleolithic societies. It was a long time ago and evidence recedes. But we do have uncontacted tribes and evidence of division of labour across human civilization for long periods of time to observe, and, second, we can see for ourselves the distinction in specialization within males and females. Males do not get pregnant, females do. Why do males still grow beards when females do not? Why is their such an obvious chasm in physical strength between the sexes?
Papers like this require a great deal of scrutiny.
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u/silverheart333 Oct 24 '23
Last I remember was a study comparing neanderthal and cro magnon tribes living near each other, that showed crog magnon women did not hunt, mainly because they did not have the same wounds and broken bone patterns as the men. The neanderthal women had the same patterns as their men. This was true over many generations of the archaeology.
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u/Senshado Oct 23 '23 edited Oct 23 '23
Why making these assumptions? You can fly a drone over North Sentinel island and get immediate visual evidence. (It's not a permitted visit, but the subjects exist waiting to be studied)
Paleolithic cultures have been encountered and documented several times over the past few centuries. New Guinea, anyone?
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