The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong

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

We have a lot of marathon data. There is a large, consistent difference showing the opposite. This article is horrendously unscientific, so many claims, assumptions, and over summarizing and simplifying

assumed evolution was acting primarily on men, and women were merely passive beneficiaries of both the meat supply and evolutionary progress.

He was superimposing the idea of male superiority through hunting onto the Ainu and into the past.

This fixation on male superiority was a sign of the times not just in academia but in society at large.''

At that time, the conventional wisdom was that women were incapable of completing such a physically demanding task

Scholars following Man the Hunter dogma relied on this belief in women's limited physical capacities

Today these biased assumptions persist in both the scientific literature and the public consciousness.

"Powers of Estrogen" infographic.

This is quite the charged language and I'm not even halfway through. Throw in a bunch of other stuff about the Boston marathon and gender presentation in movies, yeah this isn't that good of an article.

Before I'm downvoted into oblivion, we probably all took part in hunting. They've found the speed differences in running between ages and gender are not extreme, so we likely all went out running and hunting together. But men probably took on the more dangerous and physical aspects, but everyone with a spear is a more capable unit.

The idea that 'males hunted because they were stronger, etc' was cope to rationalize the fact they are less reproductively valuable than females. Four males don't come back from a hunt, village mourns- Four females don't come the village dies.

This explains why my legs get tired when my wife drags me out shopping...

“Man the Hunter has dominated the study of human evolution for nearly half a century & pervaded popular culture. [But] it was the arrival of agriculture that led to rigid gendered roles & economic inequality. Hunting belonged to everyone.”

So... What's the evidence supporting this? It sure seems like men dominate running and are way more interested in hunting sports today.

That was a theory? I was under the impression Male/Female size differentiation was from men fighting men.

Where's that damn summary bot

Really should not be a surprise to anyone. The patriarchy has done serious damage over the many many past and present generations

I grew up in the rural southern US. I can confirm that women like to hunt. Maybe not as much as the dudes, but enough that I wouldn't call it niche. I could totally see a society which relied on subsistence hunting have a lot of women in hunter role.

I'll wait until there's greater consensus in the field. These papers reek of scientists who have strong political motivations to find the answers they seek, and I'm not expert enough to critique their work.

This is far from the first paper indicating this, despite how the media is framing it. There's been more and more re-investigation of findings from the past century and earlier, with much of it not only finding that a number of the "warrior" skeletons discussed in the past were women, but also a lot of the physical evidence otherwise showing that women were involved in these activities.

Both men and women gathered and both men and women hunted. Often together and they may have had different overall skillsets depending on personal body structure and endurance. But there's often enough of an overlap anyways that everyone could be involved in everything in some fashion.

The long-standing claim that women couldn't be involved in hunting because of biology is like claiming that women can't be muscular or lift weights because of biology. It's a ridiculous claim.

Okay, but it's not just size and strength. Women have better color discrimination, better landmark sense. Men have better time/speed sense. While pregnant the long gestational period makes the woman more at risk.

Women certainly can hunt, men can certainly harvest berries, but these other traits came about for reasons. If we were wrong as to why, that doesn't change the differences.

That men were the hunters and drove humans to intelligence is the biggest bullshit I've heard all year. With the plethora of evidence of female hunters, I reject the premise of this article.

On the other side of the coin, the thoughts on women's endurance ability is super cool and jives with crazy long race results like RAAM.

This doesn’t shock me at all. My wife will hunt with me any day. She’s a champ and I’d be nothing without her.

I'm not sure how useful that information is, true or not.

It's either rage bait or a sad example of incredibly stupid 'woke science'.

Men evolved to relentlessly chase after prey until it literally dies from heat exhaustion.

Lol I can guess who funded this study. It's not even worth calling it a study. It's obvious that men evolved to hunt and women to sit around and twiddle their thumb. Men dominate in every single fields that require hard work while women prefer sitting on their asses and look pretty without putting in actual effort into anything physical, otherwise they might chip a nail.