506
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
506 points (82.9% liked)
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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.