Mounting evidence from exercise science indicates that women are physiologically better suited than men to endurance efforts such as running marathons.
We have a lot of marathon data. There is a large, consistent difference showing the opposite. This article is horrendously unscientific, so many claims, assumptions, and over summarizing and simplifying
Author does address this, btw. I still think it’s a bad argument. I just couldn’t fathom that they would say this and not further clarify.
they make claims and assumptions to address it, they dont really cite anything. Shit like this “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.” is a hypothesis, but it is not being stated as one, it’s being stated as fact. It’s a testable hypothesis, they could have controlled for the variable of pace setting runners that they bring up by only looking at statistics of running events that do not have this variable.
And like, the whole premise could be true, that women were also hunters, modern runners with modern sports medicine arent ideal evidence, that kind of endurance might not have been needed for their hunting, women are still humans and humans have the greatest running stamina of any animal. But besides capability, ancient humans also could have had roles determined by sex, it’s at least prevalent in other apes like gorillas. Either way is possible without more solid evidence and it’s pretty crazy to say one way or another is scientifically true.
I actually dont think testing this hypothesis is as easy as you think. You can’t just control for social biases when analyzing marathon data because these social biases are longitudinal. At a young age, women quickly learn from modern society that they are physically inferior to men. Because of this, the best bet for testing this hypothesis is to look at ancient societies, because these societies are largely independent from our modern society.
They point to women’s impressive performance in extreme distance events, like 100+ mile ultra marathons.
But that runs head long into the question of “How far do you have to actually chase an animal for it to collapse from exhaustion?” I’m having a hard time finding hard numbers but I don’t think gazelle have the endurance to run 10+ miles before collapsing. So women may be biologically equipped for ultra-long distances, but I don’t see how this correlates to endurance hunting as that advantage doesn’t play out hunting game.
That’s not to say the basis for the theory on male hunters/female gatherers is not without flaw, but the arguments being made against it don’t seem to really be citing evidence that backs up women being significant, let alone dominant, in that role either.
It took me literally less than a minute to google and disprove that claim in this ‘article’:
The Olympic records for the event are 2:06:32 hours for men, set by Samuel Wanjiru in 2008, and 2:23:07 hours for women, set by Tiki Gelana in 2012.
This article is not scientific, its simply an opinion piece and should be treated as such. And honestly I don’t even think it was a good opinion piece. And why is it hosted on Scientific American?
It took me literally less than a minute to google and disprove that claim in this ‘article’:
The Olympic records for the event are 2:06:32 hours for men, set by Samuel Wanjiru in 2008, and 2:23:07 hours for women, set by Tiki Gelana in 2012.
1.Wikipedia is not a scientific source.
- You are, if anything, showing that men are faster than woman. The claim the authors make is about endurance.
I found this study that seems to support their point.
“Men Are More Likely than Women to Slow in the Marathon”
This article is not scientific, its simply an opinion piece and should be treated as such. And honestly I don’t even think it was a good opinion piece. And why is it hosted on Scientific American?
I can’t read the article so unfortunately don’t have the grounds to agree or disagree with you. But I’d be carefull voicing my option like this when your only source is Wikipedia and isn’t speaking about the claim you are trying to disprove.
Edit: incase anybody is interested in reading some more real evidence instead of Wikipedia, this study goed deep into mens vs womans endurance and highlights a few problems with research focusing on males as the baseline.
Sex Differences in VO2max and the Impact on Endurance-Exercise Performance
Lmao, that wikipedia article has better listed sources than this so called ‘scientific article’ which, incidentally, has none…
Men are faster than women in a marathon because they can maintain a pace for longer without slowing, that’s called endurance.
I can’t believe the superior endurance of men can even be up for debate, but clearly no one does enough exercise anymore for the self evident to reveal itself.
In the longest ultramarathon, which is 3,100 miles, men have beaten women by days every single year: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Transcendence_3100_Mile_Race
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.
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.
How can you comment and criticise an article that you haven’t read thoroughly?
The idea that ‘males hunted because they were stronger, etc’ was cope to rationalize the fact they are less reproductively valuable than females. Four males don’t come back from a hunt, village mourns- Four females don’t come the village dies.
I’m willing to believe that men hunted more frequently for this reason alone. Women are simply too valuable. I wonder if this is the origin of a dowry as well. Compensation for the tribe or family losing the ability to expand.
I think you mean bride price. A dowry is something the woman’s family gives to the husband’s family.
Men were more expendable but the more important issue at hand was continued survival of the tribe. If we don’t have children we die out in 20-40 years. If we don’t have food, we die out in 2-4 weeks. If a woman was physically capable, she was likely going to be sent out on a hunt, more so if her family were hunters too.
You’re willing to believe that despite complete lack of any evidence for that?
I would never quote it as scientific fact without scientific evidence, but it does withstand some scrutiny. Hunting is dangerous.
10 alive men + 5 alive women + 5 dead women = 0-5 babies
10 alive women + 5 alive men + 5 dead men = 0-10 babies
If that isn’t evolutionary pressure, I don’t know what is
Why would anyone need to cope with the value of individuals in pre-civilization society? These things are not relevant anymore, an individual’s value to society is mostly determined through productivity and wealth now.
Right? It’s bullshit. The comment is half right, but the part about “cope” and rationalization is psuedo-scientific projection.
Never met an incel huh? If you aren’t wealthy or productive then you need to make up a reason for why you have value to society, assuming you buy into the idea of assigning value to life in the first place - which lots of people do.
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.
This is an incredibly simplistic take
Yeah well, I was replying to someone who also wrote an incredibly simplistic take
Four males don’t come back from a hunt, village mourns- Four females don’t come the village dies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think this might be the reason for the strength disparity. Tasks that require strong people tend to be more dangerous but a sensible tribe leader would send the strongest to do these tasks whether they are male or female. A tribe where the strength balance leans female will grow slower than a tribe where there is equal distribution which will grow slower than one with male balance. This selection effect would cause evolution in that direction.
Male/female size differences would have evolved prior to humans as a recognizable species evolving - and the fossil record of pre-humans supports this.
Humans have never self-selected for physical fitness with any regularity, throughout the historical record. We primarily mate for social reasons.
If this is true wouldn’t that be a reason for a village to send only the men on hunts?
You have to eat, so if a woman was your best hunter you’re sending her out. Young men were almost certainly encouraged if not pushed into being hunters if they showed any aptitude for it, but before agriculture became common, most of the tribe had to dedicate a lot of time to gathering food.
This explains why my legs get tired when my wife drags me out shopping…
“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.”
