Hunting Women of hunter-gatherer societies

[Swank]

Women do not best men in marathons, but recently have beat men in ultramarathons.

So is hunting like running 26 miles, or 260 miles?

 

[Montero]

One - depends on what you are hunting and how far you go. Humans were/are often persistence hunters and just keep on running after the animal until it is so exhausted it stops - and that can go on for a lot of miles.
Two - a group of hunter gatherers will surely vary in ability - so while marathons will have the top runners of both genders from the country, the world, the group of hunter gatherers will not. So in a given group at any point, depending on the spread of abilities, ages, injuries etc, the person with the longest distance and endurance, could be a woman.

Other than that, the ultramarathon thing is about extreme endurance, rather than speed over a relatively shorter distance, so that is interesting that it ties into the research about eostrogen.

 

[Yozh]

There are theories that at least in some environments and circumstances humans actually ran prey into exhaustion; though it seems doubtful to me that this was the primary means of hunting.

However, endurance would be important for a hunting expedition because it is often truly a multi-day expedition. Hunters need to travel far in harsh weather with little food or water, and still have the strength to bring home the meat. And the party will need some members who walk even further than all the others; scouts make forays to look for signs of prey.

In true endurance races (by which I mean they are measuring endurance not speed) women do win coed competitions out of proportion to their representation in the field: A Woman Endurance Runner Won the World's Most Diabolical Race

Wit’s any modern sports data, though, we do need to take into account that sports are primarily a leisure activity with a selection bias towards those with the time, resourcesm and encouragement.

 

[Swank]

In true endurance races (by which I mean they are measuring endurance not speed) women do win coed competitions out of proportion to their representation in the field: A Woman Endurance Runner Won the World's Most Diabolical Race

The woman won with the fastest course time. That is speed.

 

[Brian G Turner]

The woman won with the fastest course time. That is speed.

Didn't she win because she had the best endurance?

 

[Swank]

Didn't she win because she had the best endurance?

Wouldn't that be measured by the total distance traveled? If you bought a car with the best endurance, it would go 25 miles further than the next car before it was depleted.

The runners aren't going until they have to stop. They are going a fixed distance and their success is measured by how fast they do so. The second place runner went just as far, but did so with less speed.

All of this is related because we understand that speed comes at the sacrifice of endurance. But the race result is a speed result, just like shorter races are.

 

[Yozh]

Wouldn't that be measured by the total distance traveled? If you bought a car with the best endurance, it would go 25 miles further than the next car before it was depleted.

The runners aren't going until they have to stop. They are going a fixed distance and their success is measured by how fast they do so. The second place runner went just as far, but did so with less speed.

All of this is related because we understand that speed comes at the sacrifice of endurance. But the race result is a speed result, just like shorter races are.

It’s not who finishes first or fastest in the race in question, it’s who completes the most reps within the parameters set. One rep is a four-mile run, one of the parameters is that each rep is done in less than an hour. It’s not that she ran the whole race, or even that one rep faster than a competitor it’s that competitors all dropped out or DQed.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

If your endurance is up it would seem that you could accomplish some short term events with less effort.

 

[Swank]

It’s not who finishes first or fastest in the race in question, it’s who completes the most reps within the parameters set. One rep is a four-mile run, one of the parameters is that each rep is done in less than an hour. It’s not that she ran the whole race, or even that one rep faster than a competitor it’s that competitors all dropped out or DQed.

I was reading about a different race that just had a fixed length course. Sorry, I didn't read the wired article and thought we were talking about the same thing.

Yes, the winner went further, therefore had the most endurance.

 

[Cthulhu.Science]

scitechdaily article about​

Reference: “Woman the hunter: The archaeological evidence” by Sarah Lacy and Cara Ocobock, 4 September 2023, American Anthropologist.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.13914

Excerpt from the Scitechdaily article:​

Debunking Myths: Women Were Prehistoric Hunters, Not Just Gatherers​

Origin of the Gendered Theory​

The theory of men as hunters and women as gatherers first gained notoriety in 1968, when anthropologists Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore published Man the Hunter, a collection of scholarly papers presented at a symposium in 1966. The authors made the case that hunting advanced human evolution by adding meat to prehistoric diets, contributing to the growth of bigger brains, compared to our primate cousins. The authors assumed all hunters were male.

Lacy points to that gender bias by previous scholars as a reason why the concept became widely accepted in academia, eventually spreading to popular culture. Television cartoons, feature films, museum exhibits, and textbooks reinforced the idea. When female scholars published research to the contrary, their work was largely ignored or devalued.

“There were women who were publishing about this in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, but their work kept getting relegated to, ‘Oh, that’s a feminist critique or a feminist approach,’” Lacy said. “This was before any of the work on genetics and a lot of the work on physiology and the role of estrogen had come out. We wanted to both lift back up the arguments that they had already made and add to it all the new stuff.”

Debunking Myths: Women Were Prehistoric Hunters, Not Just Gatherers

Team discovered little evidence to support the idea that roles were assigned specifically to each sex. It’s a familiar story to many of us: In prehistoric times, men were hunters and women were gatherers. Women were not physically capable of hunting because their anatomy was different from men. A

scitechdaily.com

 

[Swank]

It is amazing that humans display the degree of sexual dimorphism they do.

 

[CupofJoe]

scitechdaily article about​

Reference: “Woman the hunter: The archaeological evidence” by Sarah Lacy and Cara Ocobock, 4 September 2023, American Anthropologist.
DOI: 10.1111/aman.13914

Excerpt from the Scitechdaily article:​

Debunking Myths: Women Were Prehistoric Hunters, Not Just Gatherers​

Origin of the Gendered Theory​

The theory of men as hunters and women as gatherers first gained notoriety in 1968, when anthropologists Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore published Man the Hunter, a collection of scholarly papers presented at a symposium in 1966. The authors made the case that hunting advanced human evolution by adding meat to prehistoric diets, contributing to the growth of bigger brains, compared to our primate cousins. The authors assumed all hunters were male.

Lacy points to that gender bias by previous scholars as a reason why the concept became widely accepted in academia, eventually spreading to popular culture. Television cartoons, feature films, museum exhibits, and textbooks reinforced the idea. When female scholars published research to the contrary, their work was largely ignored or devalued.

“There were women who were publishing about this in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, but their work kept getting relegated to, ‘Oh, that’s a feminist critique or a feminist approach,’” Lacy said. “This was before any of the work on genetics and a lot of the work on physiology and the role of estrogen had come out. We wanted to both lift back up the arguments that they had already made and add to it all the new stuff.”

Debunking Myths: Women Were Prehistoric Hunters, Not Just Gatherers

Team discovered little evidence to support the idea that roles were assigned specifically to each sex. It’s a familiar story to many of us: In prehistoric times, men were hunters and women were gatherers. Women were not physically capable of hunting because their anatomy was different from men. A

scitechdaily.com

I think this pretty much the same but from The conversation.
Forget ‘Man the Hunter’ – physiological and archaeological evidence rewrites assumptions about a gendered division of labor in prehistoric times

 

[Brian G Turner]

I think this pretty much the same but from The conversation.
Forget ‘Man the Hunter’ – physiological and archaeological evidence rewrites assumptions about a gendered division of labor in prehistoric times

I've just read the reprint of this on phys.org, and what stands out to me is that we're talking about small groups travelling around, which would not have had the luxury of being able to specialize the division of labour because of their group size.

 

[Yozh]

I think this pretty much the same but from The conversation.
Forget ‘Man the Hunter’ – physiological and archaeological evidence rewrites assumptions about a gendered division of labor in prehistoric times

I read the article that CupofJoe posted, and what struck me in the description of modern hunting societies is the diversity of hunting methods employed by people who hunt for sustenance rather than sport.

As a person living in a present-day commercialized agrarian society, when I hear "prehistoric hunters" I have this picture in my mind of a fur-clad spear thrower chasing down bison or mammoths. This prototypical "hunter" image conjures up an idea of a dangerous activity requiring strength and skill with sharp weapons.

But hunting, as the article reminds us, also includes methods like flushing wild fowl into nets or startling herds or packs of animals and driving them towards pitfalls. And of course all sorts of snares and traps. These hunters do not need to be especially strong or fast or large, they just need to be observant, stealthy, and work cooperatively. As the article points out, a lot of hunting is even done with babies and kids in tow. Modern day sport hunters follow all sorts of artificial rules that proscribe many traditional methods, but prehistoric sustenance hunters would more likely have chosen the easiest method to get the most food, and the chosen methods would often not require any special physical attributes.

 

[Montero]

Very good point indeed.

(I am reminded of one of Lois McMaster Bujold's books, Memory, when Miles Vorkosigan and Simon Illyan are out on the lake at Vorkosigan Surleau, fishing and are catching nothing and so switch to dropping an energy pack in the water, rigged to explode, with Miles commenting that angling was for those with leisure, those without, the ordinary working man, wanted dinner now.)