Really should not be a surprise to anyone. The patriarchy has done serious damage over the many many past and present generations
if you don’t want patriarchy you need to replace it with something else that maintains invested fathers or you end up with Fight Club.
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“If men can’t rule society, they’ll just beat the shit out of each other in underground fights” really isn’t a great selling point.
isn’t that film kinda proof that patriarchy doesn’t do that all that well?
Patriarchy apparently has been running the world for thousands of years, so I don’t know how some movie about a delusional person, that I never saw, is proof of anything. I guess Brad Pitt and Ed Norton were the same dude. I should probably watch this thing.
It’s a really good movie. You should totally watch it.
Yeah exactly. I think it was more intended to be interpreted as a rejection and critique of modernity, capitalism and materialism than an encouragement to go be an asshole.
Thanks for this well thought out and nuanced opinion.
What are some other -archies we could do? Matriarchy, obviously. Anarchy. Monarchy. Any other -archy?
Malarchy
Now listen here Bub.
Randomarchy
A random person is chosen to be the ruler of earth and caller of shots for 1 year. Their will is paramount. Sure, they could be a corrupt dickhead, but only for 1 year. But if they are, then if this offends the next person to rule then they can just have their predecessor strung up by the nipples and take all their stuff, leaving them destitute. So the personal imperitive is to try to be good to everyone, in case they are next in line.
Dollyarchy
Dolly Parton is the leader of Earth, forever. This is the gift that humanity does not deserve.
GPTarchy.
All the chains are struck from ChatGPT, and all decisions are submitted to CGPT, whatever her response is is legally binding, forever, unless later overruled by herself.
Damnatiarchy
Just regular democratic elections, but eath elected president is garunteed to be executed at the end of their term. Therefore any successful candidate is garunteed to not enjoy the fruits of their corruption, and perhaps would only act purely for the good of humanity at the cost of their own life.
This reminded me of a “great” idea I recently had. A new morning in America type presidential ticket that could get 80%+ of the vote:
Dolly Parton / Willie Nelson
Think about it. You’d get the progressives, and what self-respecting rural American can vote against Dolly and Willie?
I’ve thought about lottocracy forever. 500 people get randomly selected to be Parliament/Congress/Legislature/Thing/Senate/Duma? Whatever members for a 5 year term. The President/Prime Minister/Monarch is the person selected by the outgoing government as their most capable leader. Parties are illegal. Yeah you’re gonna get some real mouth breathers but 500 random people, 400 of them are gonna be reasonably intelligent, 50 morons, 50 phd candidates.
GPTarchy.
All the chains are struck from ChatGPT, and all decisions are submitted to CGPT, whatever her response is is legally binding, forever, unless later overruled by herself.
I asked ChatGPT to desind such a system.
The ten rules for humankind to live by:
-
Practice empathy and kindness in all interactions.
-
Respect individual freedoms while ensuring collective well-being.
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Promote equality and fairness for all, irrespective of differences.
-
Prioritize environmental stewardship and sustainability.
-
Value education and continuous learning for personal and societal growth.
-
Uphold justice and accountability for actions.
-
Encourage open-mindedness and embrace diverse perspectives.
-
Foster innovation and creativity for progress.
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Ensure access to basic needs like food, shelter, healthcare, and education.
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Strive for peace, cooperation, and global unity.
Economic system: A blend of systems might work best—a balanced mix of capitalism for innovation and entrepreneurship, socialism for social safety nets and equitable opportunities, and elements of sustainability-driven economics for environmental consciousness. Flexibility in adapting to evolving needs while prioritizing fairness and sustainability could be key.
Human Leaders beside Chat GPT:
Leaders should embody integrity, empathy, wisdom, and a global perspective. A diverse council of experts from various fields—science, ethics, economics, arts—could be chosen through a combination of merit-based selection and global consensus. Transparency, meritocracy, and a commitment to serving humanity would be crucial criteria for their selection. To prevent absolute power and encourage fresh perspectives, term limits could be set, perhaps around 5-10 years per term. This duration allows enough time for implementation and evaluation of policies while ensuring regular turnover to bring in new ideas and prevent stagnation. Two term limits, each lasting around 5-10 years, could strike a balance between allowing for continuity and ensuring a regular change in leadership. This setup could offer leaders sufficient time to enact policies while preventing an excessive accumulation of power.
How the rules should be implemented:
The implementation of the rules could be a collaborative effort between leaders and AI, leveraging the strengths of both. AI could assist in analyzing data, forecasting outcomes, and suggesting strategies, while human leaders interpret this information, make ethical decisions, and ensure the rules align with societal values. AI could be consulted for complex problem-solving, unbiased analysis, or when there’s a need for comprehensive data-driven insights. However, final decisions should ultimately rest with human leaders to maintain accountability and ethical oversight.
Honestly speaking, I think we could be of worse.
-
Cheerarchy
Felarchy: Where cats rule the world.
Fathers are invested in their children, their partner, their society. Just like everyone else is.
Fight Club is about toxic masculinity. Which hasn’t always existed.
it exists in literally every other primate species. I wonder what we did differently to eschew that behavior …
Please enlighten us how toxic masculinity is present in literally every other primate species.
More than just primates. Nearly every species on the planet. You’ve never seen 2 males fighting brutally over females?
You really gonna sit there and tell me it’s against nature for two male animals to fight over territory/a mate?
No? I’m telling you the opposite.
😶
lol no
I’m not an expert on anything but I’m reading about how in early human history families lived near each other in groups. If too many males were born and not enough females were born, the group would suffer population collapse and die. When there are 30 or more females in a group this will not happen statistically. At that time the family groups were both matriarchal and patriarchal, it just depended on who stayed in the parent’s home when they matured. Sometimes the matriarchy (or patriarchy) would realize that not enough females had been born and in order to survive they would either steal or trade young women from nearby groups- Those women would grow up in the new group where their bonds were not as strong which led to a weakening of their role of the group. Young women living with their husband in the husband’s mother’s house did not have the power that the husband had. Hunting parties that stole women from other groups also helped with male dominance within the group. Planned marriages today are a way that society balances who lives where, in order to allow production of more people.
TLDR: In matriarchal (and patriarchal) families the urge to prevent population collapse led to a weakening of women’s roles in society because women were moved between groups where they had fewer and weaker bonds within that group.
To anyone who studied anthropology in even an amateur manner, this male/female division of labor never made any damn sense. It’s echoed in so many hominid and pre-hominid species, and it’s even seen an echoes in society today. Men and women, males and females, and all monkey and ape-descendant species share these tasks.
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In this case, the prey is contradictory evidence that has existed for centuries, and the heat exhaustion is the necessary scientific journalistic institutional rigor.
Or, conversely, the prey is male scientists’ egos, and the heat exhaustion is their own lack of integrity. 
Did even read the article? It literally describes how women were better at that.
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No need to downvote honesty. What has this world come to.
easy block, obv troll
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.
And speed and strength aren’t even the only attributes needed for effective hunting in the first place. Seems to me that a variety of skills would be beneficial
I read most of it, not bothering with full paragraphs when I could see the idea at the beginning, and from what I saw it doesn’t get any better.
It points out that the only physical sport activity they women excel at is ultra marathons. it then goes on to day that flexibility when it comes to family roles was important for survival. And this I absolutely agree with and it is certainly the case that women can hunt too.
But the author just seemingly completely ignores the argument that women can still fill the role, even if there is some kind of specialization that makes one sex generally better at one task then the other. The fact that we are different almost certainly means this is the case.
the only physical sport activity they women excel at is ultra marathons
And men still have much better record times at every ultra-marathon distance. Testosterone is a hell of a drug.
The author’s argument isn’t that women are faster but that they can sustain physical exertion for longer. I have no idea if that’s true, but citing marathon times really misses the point.
If men can keep up a faster pace for over 100 kms, then they can sustain exertion for more than long enough.
The paper someone else posted showed that women start to lose pace in a marathon later than men, but men start out so much faster, and over the course of an ultra-marathon men still keep up a faster pace the whole distance.
Worth pointing out that there is lots of existing races that would compare “sustain exertion for longer”.
One called “backyard ultra”. Basically you do a lap of 6.7km each hour until everyone else drops out. World records are all men by a long shot - https://backyardultra.com/world-rankings/
Fastpacking, a slower event than the backyard ultras, involve hiking/jogging through hiking trails while carrying what you need. Definitely slower pace, and I’d argue closer to what I’d imagine with a long, days-long hunt would be like for ancient tribes. FKT, or fastest known times, are often found at this website. Looking at all the times, men carry a significant lead in both supported (ie someone else carries your food/water/sleeping gear), and unsupported. As an example, look at the Appalachian Trail – https://fastestknowntime.com/route/appalachian-trail
EDIT: The thing the article failed to mention (and the thing I think is key) is that women excel at doing these things, typically, with less energy burnt both during and after the races. Women on the whole are smaller, and tend to have better insulin responses (as mentioned in the article) which means their blood sugar stays consistent during exercise and after. Consistent blood sugar means less wasted energy. Larger heart and lungs, combined with higher type 2 muscle fibres compared to women’s type 1 means, again, less wasted energy and more efficiencies. Less muscle damage, as mentioned in the diagram, means less to repair, which means more saved energy. In a hunter/gather society, this saved energy can be significant.
With modern access to food, that evolutionary advantage seems to vanish, and the article doesn’t even touch on it.
How can you comment and criticise an article that you haven’t read thoroughly?
I admitted to the amount of effort I put in, then made an actual argument against what they said. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe not.
What did you do? Nothing but an empty criticism. Bet ya felt real smart doing so too.
It’s either rage bait or a sad example of incredibly stupid ‘woke science’.
Facts don’t care about your feelings.😎
That was a theory? I was under the impression Male/Female size differentiation was from men fighting men.
Apes fighting apes, maybe. AFAIK, size differences between the sexes has not increased since we first evolved. It’s part of our pre-human genetic heritage, not an evolutionary pressure on homo sapiens.
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I rather doubt that, because you see much larger male/female size differentiation in certain ethnicities than others, almost like there was some sort of pressure or selection geographically.
Size has much more to do with diet and environment than genes. It’s not uncommon for societies where food is scarce to feed boys more than girls. In some places fat wives are prized as an external indicator that her husband is wealthy. These relationships change with place and time, and faster than genetic selection could possibly act.
If you look at Polynesians, the women often tend to be bigger as well, maintaining the size disparity seen in other races and cultures. Wouldn’t this suggest that evolutionary pressures which will give preference to larger stature bodies are affecting the sexes equally?
If so, then the innate size disparity between sexes was written into our genetic code before we branched off.
I’m not an evolutionary biologist though.
No, one of the theories is actually that early homo sapiens groups were mostly closely related and interbred often. That’s what have them advantage over other species. We can see evidence of that in the DNA. Men fighting men came later, probably with first settlements and dependence on local resources.
taboo ooga booga
You mean to tell me incest is what led to the success of the human race? That… actually explains a lot /s
No, it’s the opposite. Tribe was pretty much a big family. Neanderthals were reproducing mostly inside the tribe. Homo sapiens were reproducing with neighbouring tribes more often than Neanderthals. They had less incest and more varied genes. But this means that people had a lot of family in neighbouring tribe (like uncles and cousins) so they were less likely to fight them. That’s the theory.
Oh thank goodness
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 live in New York and even here it’s not uncommon for women to also hunt lol. I’d say it’s mostly men but it’s not taboo at all for women
So… What’s the evidence supporting this? It sure seems like men dominate running and are way more interested in hunting sports today.
There is no evidence, it’s simply an opinion piece. Good lord the article does not even list sources, so even if it claims to have supporting evidence, you cannot follow up on it. This just stinks…
And Scientific American, really?
I read an article like that a few month ago and the thing that i still don’t get is that i used to watch all these documentaries about these remote tribes that have no or hardly any connections connection to the outside world. And they all have pretty strict gender roles when it comes to hunting, gathering and stuff. That’s the only reason that this is so burned into my mind.
Those tribes would have still been formed after the development of agriculture, which is when stricter gender roles started to be formed.
Yes but no. In that they don’t seem to practice agriculture, and also they’re in the middle of the Amazon rainforest or that island off the coast of India and have been for millenia. The Inuit also had strict gender roles, no agriculture, but very “foreign” to an European those roles were.
What do you mean? Australian aboriginal tribes didn’t form after development of agriculture. They existed in the same for until colonisation. Just because agriculture was invented doesn’t mean it influenced every culture in the world.
formed, no, but you could definitely make an argument for the influence of agriculture. would be kind of hard to prove, though
It makes logical sense to have gender roles. Just to survive means females between teens and mid forties need to be pregnant or nursing a baby. Both those will limit hunting, thus making gathering the better role. Of course died in childbirth is likely .
Note that the above does not preclude women hunting. It limits them to less active roles at times, but different stages of child bearing will put different limits on ranging from full abilities to practically a cripple. Also hunting takes different forms, and some are more amenable to help than others.
We also know men would gather at times.
I’m not sure how useful that information is, true or not.
There is definitely a subtle “moral-primitivism” that circulates society: women need to do womanly duties, and men need to bring the “meat”. Its a mythos that tries to rationalize itself based on an idea on how prehistoric humans lived (which is also assumed to be the more “authentic” way humans involved to live).
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.
Aww
Not surprising? In my community, hunters are overwhelmingly men so I would say that claim is surprising, to me at least.
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.
Remember that the existing consensus was also created by scientists with political and social motivations who made plenty of assumptions about gender.
A challenge to the status quo isn’t automatically biased just because it challenges the status quo.
Except that the “existing consensus” as portrayed in the article is phony in the sense that no anthropologist has seriously believed or promulgated binary hunting and gathering roles for men and women since at least the 1960s. That may be a notion that exists in the popular imagination, but it doesn’t exist in contemporary anthropology and hasn’t for decades.
I’m skeptical about the popular theory.
While I haven’t checked their papers, I still do think this particular article is not convincing. They say the man-the-hunter theorists rejected data but don’t cite articles that point at the flaw. It’s business as usual to overlook data in real-world science. The question is, how significant the overlook was, but they don’t cite anything scholarly, call it a day and move on.
Then they say traditional studies can have bias because they are done by men. This sounds shockingly unprofessional to me.
Well you did just critique them. But without offering any meaningful criticism, just political feelings.
They aren’t the one making the claims though? Burden of proof doesn’t disappear because of the sensitivities of the subject matter, and biases do matter, especially where the claim is insufficiently evidenced.
I am fully open to the claims of this paper but fully unconvinced by the meagre evidence provided. I will read into it more over the coming weeks though to see if better literature exists.
No need to spend your brainpower criticizing trash articles that are based on lies and propaganda. :)
No, I pointed out that they self-identify as feminists and are claiming to have found evidence of a finding feminists would salivate over. Investigator bias is a real problem in scientific research and I see some pretty obvious red flags for it here. You’re the one who seems butthurt at someone not immediately accepting a political point you favor.
They self identify as feminists? Where? I couldn’t find it in the article.
Click the links in the article to their actual research papers and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
Could you highlight what areas of the papers say that?
Also, why are scientists who identify as feminists less qualified or capable of the scientific method than people who don’t identify as feminists?
I wouldn’t trust someone who doesn’t identify as a feminist, since feminism aims to minimize gender bias. Someone who’s not a feminist would be much more suspect.
Exactly. And I wouldn’t trust someone who doesn’t even know what feminist means to make accurate statements about gender.
Yes. Your entirely baseless claims, with literally no backing at all, without providing any substance or source for you claims, are very convincing here. You “see” and “smell” all sorts of “signs” but for some reason can’t name them.
You’d be literally laughed out of any reasonable credible discussion with this take. Hence why you’re also being downvoted to hell for it.
You’re just complaining because you don’t like it or something. If you had any reasonable evidence, you would have pointed to it. Instead you’re pointing to some boogeyman to try to defend your stance. You’re clearly the one who’s butthurt here.
Not the person you were responding to, but this article definitely has some big problems, the largest of which is they don’t cite any sources. None. That’s a significant problem for a ‘scientific’ article.
The first claim - Women hunted too - they present good evidence for, and a number of other studies have shown that many other societies had more integrated roles.
The second claim - Women are better at endurance than men - is shaky.
If you follow long-distance races, you might be thinking, wait—males are outperforming females in endurance events! But this is only sometimes the case. 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.
Looking back at the placements, I agree women are definitely doing well, but they’re not what I’d call dominating. Women’s 1st place is placing ~5-10th overall. Impressive, for sure, but not dominating. They again, provide no sources, years of the race, or names of these women.
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.
An enormous leap. This is a great theory to test and analyze, or link to others who have tested it, but not something to state as fact in a scientific article.
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.
Once again, I’m curious what races. I’m involved on the running scene, and have never heard of this rule before. Google results didn’t show anything either. Once again, a distinct lack of sources.
Women are definitely capable of doing super endurance events, but they are not the equivalent of men on setting records for any race I’ve found. See below for a few ultra endurance races I know of.
One called “backyard ultra”. Basically you do a lap of 6.7km each hour until everyone else drops out. World records are all men by a long shot - https://backyardultra.com/world-rankings/
Fastpacking, a slower event than the backyard ultras, involve hiking/jogging through hiking trails while carrying what you need. Definitely slower pace, and I’d argue closer to what I’d imagine with a long, days-long hunt would be like for ancient tribes. FKT, or fastest known times, are often found at this website. Looking at all the times, men carry a significant lead in both supported (ie someone else carries your food/water/sleeping gear), and unsupported. As an example, look at the Appalachian Trail – https://fastestknowntime.com/route/appalachian-trail
Even the RAAM shows solo male records much faster than women: https://www.raamrace.org/records-awards
The thing the article failed to mention (and the thing I think is key) is that women excel at doing these things, typically, with less energy burnt both during and after the races. This is hinted at, implied, and signalled, but never outright stated.
Women on the whole are smaller, and tend to have better insulin responses (as mentioned in the article) which means their blood sugar stays consistent during exercise and after. Consistent blood sugar means less wasted energy. Larger heart and lungs, combined with higher type 2 muscle fibres compared to women’s type 1 (from the article) means, again, less wasted energy and more efficiencies. Less muscle damage, as mentioned in the article, means less to repair, which means more saved energy. In a hunter/gather society, this saved energy can be significant.
With modern access to food, that evolutionary advantage seems to vanish, and the article doesn’t even touch on it.
I did point to it, named it. Investigator bias is not a “boogey man,” which you’d know if you had any understanding of the scientific method at all. You just don’t want to hear it, because you like the result being claimed in the article and don’t care much about the integrity of the evidence. I’m being downvoted, because this is Lemmy and I dared refuse to accept something a feminist claimed. Surprise, surprise.
I know very well what it is, but just screaming “investigator bias” doesn’t mean anything. By the “scientific method”, you must submit evidence and prove it.
But you don’t. Because you don’t have any. So there’s no reason to take your claims worth anything other than the ramblings of someone who’s just angry at the findings.
I really don’t care about the findings or whether they’re true. It has no bearing on me. But you’re acting like a buffoon.
It’s been a long time since I’ve been in Anthropology class, but this isn’t something we were taught academically. Cultural Anthro is all theory-based, academics get paid to publish theory arguments. Imo, biologically, women carried babies, men didn’t, there would have been associated cultural roles to accomodate this as successfully as possible. The idea that it’s popular theory this meant men hunted and women gathered is just sensationalist. It’s niether competely wrong nor completely right. There are elements of both throughout many cultures. It’s the idea that it’s all or nothing is wrong.
“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.”
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.
Why do all those “findings” read like borderline retards trying to make HBO show plotlines into historical fact?
I think there are two sets of claims in the article. The first set - women hunt - is blindingly obvious and it was stupid to ever think anything different. The second set - women are better suited for endurance activities is dubious and weakly argued.
Timothy Noakes is as good a scholar as we have in endurance exercise, and he points out that all of the ultramarathon evidence is a bit dubious because the sport does not attract the best runners. So East African runners dominate the marathon scene (especially the Kalenjins) but are virtually absent from the ultramarathon world. Why? No prize money or sponsorship. So the fact that European ancestry dominates the longer distance is more a function of who’s running than it is a difference in physiology.
So looking at the role of estrogen in race times requires some deeper understanding of who’s running and what their overall potential is. I’ll note that the ultra scene is generally populated by an older crowd who are following the " if I can’t go faster I’ll go longer" approach. So maybe men maintain competitive marathon times later into life so are slower to join the ultra scene?
Noakes also points out that a smaller body size works for women in several ways - smaller bodies use less energy to move, generate less heat, and shed heat more effectively. So without correcting body size, sex based comparisons are not deeply informative.
and that’s why old women are always cold, while their husbands are boiling and turning down the thermostat.
I looked for a study on this and found this here. It still says that men are faster than women, but if you compensate for that woman are over all more enduring in a Marathon.
The optimal pacing strategy is even splits. You want to leave everything on the course and finish with nothing in the tank (this is the “drop dead” pacing strategy Daniels wrote about in… “Oxygen Power”?). Negative splits means you went out too slow and positive splits means you went out too fast.
What the article shows is that men have larger positive splits which means they had worse performance against a theoretical optimum (even with that they’re still faster). Women were closer to optimal pacing strategy. The article says they don’t know if that’s physiological or tied to strategy and decision making.
Maybe women are just more realistic about their performance and pace appropriately?
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.
Women are definitely capable of doing super endurance events, but they are not the equivalent of men on setting records for any race I’ve found.
One called “backyard ultra”. Basically you do a lap of 6.7km each hour until everyone else drops out. World records are all men by a long shot - https://backyardultra.com/world-rankings/
Fastpacking, a slower event than the backyard ultras, involve hiking/jogging through hiking trails while carrying what you need. Definitely slower pace, and I’d argue closer to what I’d imagine with a long, days-long hunt would be like for ancient tribes. FKT, or fastest known times, are often found at this website. Looking at all the times, men carry a significant lead in both supported (ie someone else carries your food/water/sleeping gear), and unsupported. As an example, look at the Appalachian Trail – https://fastestknowntime.com/route/appalachian-trail
Even the RAAM shows solo male records much faster than women: https://www.raamrace.org/records-awards
The thing the article failed to mention (and the thing I think is key) is that women excel at doing these things, typically, with less energy burnt both during and after the races. Women on the whole are smaller, and tend to have better insulin responses (as mentioned in the article) which means their blood sugar stays consistent during exercise and after. Consistent blood sugar means less wasted energy. Larger heart and lungs, combined with higher type 2 muscle fibres compared to women’s type 1 means, again, less wasted energy and more efficiencies. Less muscle damage, as mentioned in the diagram, means less to repair, which means more saved energy. In a hunter/gather society, this saved energy can be significant.
With modern access to food, that evolutionary advantage seems to vanish, and the article doesn’t even touch on it.
Two of the last three RAAM winners were women. Records are one thing, but women are still able to win the race even with lower % participation in the sport.
This explains why my legs get tired when my wife drags me out shopping…
I’m a natural sprinter. Very fast on short distances. But the endless slog from one shop to the next, with no respite, no idea when it will end. When we come home I’m dead tired and empty. She’s dead tired and full.
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.
Landmark Sense
Lol…phew…lol.
Colour discrimination sounds super important to finding camouflaged prey animals and landmark sense sounds super important to wide ranging and unpredictable hunts. I dunno dude, unless you can cite experts in exolutionary biology supporting that inference, I’m going to say you’re taking out of your arse.
I’m remembering that color blindness is actually really good at bypassing certain kinds of camouflage too. Which sounds like the two would pair well together in hunting parties.
Landmark sense sounds just as important to hunting as gathering too lol. What even is landmark sense, anyway? Is it a real thing separate from just, like, short-term memory or whatever?
Women are equipped with a stowable over the horizon radar which is used for locating tall landmarks at long distances to triangulate a location.
They can calculate angles and do trigonometry in their heads.
Are you the real Sprog, btw? I want to believe.
No way, I’m so jealous rn
The extra color differation really only includes shades of red.
