As an indigenous Canadian I can confirm this.
Both of my parents were born and raised in the wilderness. I don’t mean that they were born in a modern hospital and later raised in the bush. They were born in the 40s in a teepee with the help of traditional midwives.
Dad was a great hunter and trapper and did all the things you could imagine a hunter and gatherer could do.
Mom did the same as well, not as much or as well as dad but good enough to survive on her own or with children. She hunted birds, fished and could bring down gut clean prepare butcher moose, caribou, bear, wolf, lynx and any other large animal if she had to … when she was a young woman that is. She could also travel, walk, snowshoe, use dog team, paddle a canoe, portage, sail, and survive alone in the bush for weeks or months on her own. In her prime, she was a far better hunter and gatherer than most men I know now including myself.
It only makes sense … prehistoric hunters and gatherers didn’t sit around and relegate women to only do certain things. Everyone no matter what gender had to be capable of doing everything in order to ensure and secure the survival of everyone.
Early enough in human history we weren’t even relying on weapons to hunt as much as the fact that despite not having as high of a top speed as our prey, we could literally chase them until they died of exhaustion, that doesn’t seem like gender would make too much of a difference in it. We all get out ran by prey in the short term, and we all have the stamina and speed to catch up.
Stamina and precision are universal human traits, yep. Nobody can toss a rock and then run a marathon like an angry hairless ape
Literally just walk down animals and eat them, like a paleolithic terminator. We could carry water and possibly some jerry/nuts, so could literally go for days without stopping.
Horses can gallop for like a mile or two and maybe go for like 20 without stopping.
And we have tracking abilities. There was some meme about that paleolithic terminator thing. Like an animal would see these weird naked apes in the distance and that’s it, they’re done. Doesn’t matter if they run or not, death is coming.
And we definitely still have that ability, physically.
Check this out.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Young_(athlete)
Albert Ernest Clifford Young OAM (8 February 1922[1] – 2 November 2003[2]) was an Australian[2] athlete from Beech Forest, Victoria. A farmer, he became notable for his unexpected win of the inaugural Sydney to Melbourne Ultramarathon in 1983 at 61 years of age.[3][4]
In 1983, now aged 61 years old, Young won the inaugural Westfield Sydney to Melbourne Ultramarathon, a distance of 875 kilometres (544 mi). The race was run between what were then Australia’s two largest Westfield shopping centres: Westfield Parramatta in Sydney and Westfield Doncaster in Melbourne.[8] Young arrived to compete in overalls and work boots, without his dentures (later saying that they rattled when he ran).[9] He ran at a slow and loping pace and trailed the pack by a large margin at the end of the first day. While the other competitors stopped to sleep for six hours, Young kept running. He ran continuously for five days, taking the lead during the first night and eventually winning by 10 hours. Before running the race, he had told the press that he had previously run for two to three days straight rounding up sheep in gumboots.[10] He said afterwards that during the race he imagined he was running after sheep trying to outrun a storm. The Westfield run took him five days, fifteen hours and four minutes,[1] almost two days faster than the previous record for any run between Sydney and Melbourne, at an average speed of 6.5 kilometres per hour (4.0 mph).
And what a sportsman:
All six competitors who finished the race broke the old record. Upon being awarded the prize of A$10,000 (equivalent to $36,011 in 2022), Young said that he did not know there was a prize and that he felt bad accepting it, as each of the other five runners who finished had worked as hard as he did—so he split the money equally between them, keeping none.[11] Despite attempting the event again in later years, Young was unable to repeat this performance or claim victory again.
All thanks to the wonderful muscles of the human ass. I can’t help but laugh sometimes.
I think this is just whitewashing history… Even if you look to the ancient Western world, they had goddesses like Artemis
Generally, men fought wars. Like a lion pride - the males are the defenders because they’re bigger and stronger. Hunting doesn’t require raw strength - it requires diligence, patience, and/or endurance
But they all hunt. Lionesses are known for it, but lions do it too. Complete division of responsibilities is an insect thing
This study this meme is based on is completely incorrect and should be retracted. Here’s a lay summary of its issues:
And the published article detailing the problems with that study’s issues:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513824000497
I remember reading this simply terrible article in Scientific American; the entire article was based on this research paper referred to the meme above.
The paper was a complete fraud, and people just guzzled the cool-aid. He’ll they still do, looking at this thread.
I refuted this article when it was published based on their incredibly biased and cherry picked data sources which were entirely baseless.
I wish more people were willing to apply critical thinking and analysis to such claims. All falsified claims are a setback and detriment to humankind’s comprehension of the universe.
To say it’s “completely incorrect” is an exaggeration at best. The paper you cited is far more nuanced than that.
A bit of an exaggeration, sure. But only a bit. The lay summary of the article I referenced states the following:
Venkataraman et al. find that the paper commits every error that it was possible to make in the paper: leaving out important papers, including irrelevant papers, using duplicate papers, mis-coding their societies, getting the wrong values for “big” versus “small” game, and many others.
“commits every error that it was possible to make in the paper,” and, “completely incorrect,” aren’t very different.
So you’re saying women are capable of taking out the garbage and recycling?
I hate to break it to you, but She-Ra is less about hunter gatherers and more about interstellar empires with magitech
anyone who tries to claim there was any absolute standard of behavior for pre-industrial tribes like that is just doing fantasy worldbuilding
Every social organization you can think of was probably the way of life for someone out there, from patriarchy to matriarchy, communal to hierarchical
I wonder whether there was an infantarchal society where they took direction from toddlers. I suppose they wouldn’t have lasted very long if they did exist…
Pharaoh Tut was nine when he ascended to the throne, I’m sure it’s happened to younger people.
Edit: John I of France reined from his birth until his death five days later. Bummer.
