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The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong
(www.scientificamerican.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2024
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Huh, I wonder why virtually every uncontacted tribe we've found so far has the men doing all* the hunting?
*I don't consider foraging for clams hunting, but people are free to disagree
Certainly a question for the ages. If only there was some way to learn more about this topic… perhaps some kind of article. Maybe one that even addresses this very point. But alas…
Tap for spoiler
Sigh, taking such claims at face value and not looking into how the underlying data was obtained is how we end up with so many successfully published but false scientific papers.
The paper referenced here is https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0287101
The cultures 'surveyed' are
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0287101.t001
Notice any uncontacted peoples missing from those data points? Here's a quick list of them from Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_peoples
Immediately I can tell you the Sentinelese, Awa, Toromona, Nukak, Tagaeri and the Taromenanepeople are not represented here. It's almost like the societies selected for this paper weren't a complete picture.
I wonder why that would be.... surely not to conform to any biases of the authors.
You think they should have surveyed the uncontacted people?
It’s right there in the link I provided, so yes, because infrequent contact and observation is possible.
You explicitly mentioned the Sentinelese. Exactly how would you go about this infrequent contact and observation with them?
In any case, let's assume that hunting is exclusively performed by males in all of those peoples. How much would that change the statistic and the overall conclusion? 79% would be 72%
We have these things called binoculars, telescopes, cameras and drones. All of which are able to observe subjects from a safe distance.
I suspect that the number would be around a 50% split, what would then be interesting is determining which group has a better diet and survival rate to determine which tactic is superior.
I suspect not. To get to 50%, they would need to study an additional 37 societies, and every single one would have to have only males doing the hunting.
We're in luck, there are more than enough to bring the sample size to a reasonable quantity.
You would need to be in luck. Let's assume that they studied all 200 uncontacted tribes. To bring the overall rate to 50%, you would need 119 out of the 200 to be exclusively males hunting - 60% of those societies. The researchers studied 63 societies and found that 20% of them were exclusively males hunting.
But what's the point anyway? The hypothesis is that males evolved to be bigger for hunting, even 50% of societies where women hunt is enough to make it implausible. In those societies, women are hunting in spite of their apparent size disadvantage.
I think you should ask yourself whether size is actually important for hunting. We don't wrestle our prey. Size doesn't matter if you're bringing down monkeys from the trees with a bow and arrow, and size doesn't matter if you're trying to bring down a mammoth.
Size matters in all these cases. To your point, size matters in long distance running, which is the crux of the articles message.
If you think size doesn't matter when you're bow hunting, you probably haven't taught someone with a significant size difference how to draw a bow.
The top of this comment thread is a person claiming that men do all the hunting in every primitive society, not just hunting based on long distance running.
You came into the thread to criticise a paper that showed that women hunt in 50 different societies around the world. Even your estimate of 50% is plenty enough examples to debunk the "all the hunting" claim.
Women are perfectly capable of drawing a bow that is suitable to hunt monkeys, rabbits, squirrels, small birds, etc. Accuracy is more important than power.
If your strategy for hunting mammoths involves your physical strength, you're gonna have a bad time.
Binoculars, telescopes and cameras will tell you little about what islanders are doing inside the forest where they hunt if you are using them from the ocean. Drones flying over Sentinel Island would violate Indian law and whoever did it would be in huge trouble. Their data would likely be disregarded due to the ethical issues.
On top of that, if they heard a drone coming, they might just change what they normally do.
Like these people. Hunting becomes less of an issue suddenly when there's a flying threat.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/brazil/2049750/Uncontacted-Amazonian-tribe-photographed.html
I look forward to reading your study.
Not having the time or funding to perform my own study does not invalidate my criticism that the authors used an incomplete and flawed data set.