It’s a familiar story to many of us: In prehistoric times, men were hunters and women were gatherers. Women were not physically capable of hunting because their anatomy was different from men.
It seems that this article is arguing against a strawman. The common understanding is not that women never hunted, it’s just that it was less common than men hunting.
And because men were hunters, they drove human evolution.
What does that even mean? 🤔
The team also looked at female physiology and found that women were not only physically capable of being hunters, but that there is little evidence to support that they were not hunting.
Well, there is a long list of sex differences that sure look like adaptations to different roles. Do the authors have alternative explanations for them? Do they see them as contradictions to their findings?
I’d like to read the paper to understand what their actual findings and methodolgy was, but I couldn’t find it anywhere.
To give a brief run of what stuck in my head, reading about it. Essentially the common day beliefs were projected when examining the past findings, so when they found a man buried with an arrow head = hunter. A woman buried with an arrow… Not. They found women hunted differently, in packs and with dogs. And now thought to be just as frequently, if not, possibly, more frequently than men.
“but that women have an advantage over men in activities requiring endurance, such as running” is about where I found out that this was complete horseshit lmao. Like I was following along and suspending my disbelief until this line. Unless somewhere along the line human physiology experienced a truly dramatic paradyme shift this is simply false.
