507
The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong
(www.scientificamerican.com)
this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
507 points (83.1% liked)
News
23367 readers
3112 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If this village is made up of 8 people, then 4 male hunters not returning also means the village dies.
You need...err...two to tango.
This is an incredibly simplistic take. Yes, if all the men die and none of the women are pregnant and they don't survive until some of the children reach sexual maturity (why would there be no children before the men went out to hunt?) then yes, the tribe would die. Doubtless small groups died out this way on occasion, among others. None of that has any bearing on fewer men being needed to keep a population growing because it does, in fact, take only two to tango, and both men and women can tango with multiple partners.
Yeah well, I was replying to someone who also wrote an incredibly simplistic take
Thanks for the serious answer but this comment was meant sarcastically, so sorry if you took it too seriously because I can see you wrote a serious answer.
Edit: okay looks like this is turning into a longass discussion. Next time, I'll /s.
The tribe was certainly larger than 8 people, but the tribe would also require regular births to growing. And in prehistoric times there was a very high mortality rate for children. And the only two ways to combat that is a)provide safer environments for the children or b)have more kids.
A) wasn't an option since they didnt have the means to, but b) was so long as you had enough fertile women. So losing 4 men is a serious blow into the productivity of the tribe, losing 4 women to a tribe struggling already means 4 less potential births next year. You have 20 men and 1 woman, you only have 1 potential birth in the next 9 months. 20 women and 1 man, you have 20 potential births over.
Child rearing was the only thing women could do, but it was easily the most important thing to the future of the tribe. All other things being equal, the men were more expendable than the women.
Impregnable the women, THEN get eaten by a saber tooth tiger.
Yeah. If even only one comes back, he might be the strongest or whatever, but he might also be weak. You'd probably also want to keep weaker men back at the village rather than on the hunt because they have the lowest chances of survival (thought I think that might be kind of overstated, I think it's kind of unlikely that everyone randomly dying on a hunt was some sort of common enough occurrence, I think individual instances of tragedies or freak accidents are more likely). If you're keeping back the weakest men, you're also going to have weaker men going forward, which then leads to the village dying out in the long term. You also see less genetic variance if all the strong men die and the weak men are left reproducing, which is also bad, yadda yadda.
So I'm not sure I buy the whole like, men are expendable, which is why they're stronger, or why they're hunters more commonly, or both. That kind of at face value reads as a kind of macho posturing sort of idealism.
Yeah but it could just be that the weaker men don't have "weaker genes" but simply got injured beyond what medicine could do, in this example. It wouldn't necessarily mean the whole village becomes made up of weaker men. After all, the weaker ones are less likely to survive to start with.
Eh, putting aside that parts of the article were not supported by citations, I would say the view in it for me is much more balanced. It would also fit better in the idea of brains evolving (to hunt, we would need more than just physical power, like focus, agility, being smart enough to trap animals, etc). I would be surprised if women, who are still capable of hunting, and maybe hunting some types of animals more efficiently than others, were just kept in the village when the reality is that they all live "in the wild", and where starvation is a big threat. That would be mismanagement. If you want a good survival rate for a village, you would probably need to send a mixed group to hunt.
Women didn't just "sit there and evolve alongside the men", I don't think we'd have the same intellectual abilities if this was the case. Reminds me of a good book that I need to finish called The Mating Mind, which goes through the evolution of the human brain as a sexual trait.
Yeah. I think the only way someone would sway my mind one way or the other would be on the basis of serious historical evidence, which is somewhat unlikely to come up, since you can sort of speculate any direction as being the correct one. I think it's also kind of stupid how people like, use this sort of historical anecdote as evidence for structuring society in one way or another, which is kind of some 1800's style bullshit. We'd be much better off just using modern medicine to make the distinctions, if that was the case, but the vote's still pretty split as far as that goes and it's pretty hard to structure those studies in a way where they actually prove anything comprehensively, so I think it's probably just in the best interest to occupy whichever position is the least dickish.