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I meant the presumption there always has been a (male) sex associated with hunting thousands of years ago. This sex based role attribution would be necessary for sexual selection.

However, there is quite a bit of archeological evidence which suggests gender role inequality first started with human settlement and agriculture practice. The presumption of sexual divide in these activities in hunter gather societies may be anachronistic.

Eg.:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/women...

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/early-women-were-h...



We're currently in a local max on topics related to identity politics, so I'd take any such publications with extreme skepticism. For instance your first article casually makes the rather extreme claim that women were more suited for endurance activity, by citing physiological differences, critically - which still exist, like wider hips and vastly higher estrogen levels. They then claim such things would enable women to run further and faster than men. This is contradicted by marathon (and all other forms of running) records since they've ever been kept. Furthermore I'd observe that they have gotten closer in modern times largely due to a greater ability to find women with genetic abnormalities bringing them closer to being genetically male that, in some cases (such as Caster Semenya) has even required sex testing to ensure they "really" were female.

There are also countless other issues that make all of this highly improbable. For instance people often frame these things like you just run towards an animal, it runs away, eventually passes out, you bop it, and you win - like a video game. In reality animals fight back. And, to this very day, animals like elk manage to kill hunters, using modern weapons and knowledge, with some degree of regularity. And elk are child's play relative to things like the mammoths and other animals our distant ancestors were hunting - with primitive weapons! This makes other issues like raw strength critically important - if that arrow or spear isn't going extremely deep - it could well be the last thing you ever do. Heck, even for much smaller game like boars - they've killed enough famous people (almost invariably during hunts) that Wiki has an entire category dedicated to it. [1] And then there are the countless societal factors.

Getting injured and even killed on hunts would not have been especially irregular. Yet in society men are vastly more replaceable than women. A single man can father tens of children in a year, yet a woman can only give birth to one. Lactating women are absolutely critical for the health of young children and are completely irreplaceable in that role. Similarly, in the past infant mortality rates were extremely high. We compensated for this by having large numbers of children. So women being regularly pregnant or breastfeeding is very much a reality. And going on a hunt in this scenario is obviously completely out of the question. And there's so much more one could write about the inanity and nonsensicalness of all of this, but this post is already far longer than intended - just to scratch the basics of it all!

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Deaths_due_to_boar_at...


No point to argue, if your world view dismisses every contrary argument upfront as fake, a result of the political climate.


No, you. And I'm not saying it's fake. I'm appealing to an overwhelming amount of falsifiable evidence. You are appealing to random articles in pop media which are hyperbolizing fringe studies that are aiming to create sensationalist generalizations based on scant evidence that is exceptional (as in being the exception) relative to the vastly overwhelming amount of what is available.

This is then taken to the next level to make broad statements like wide hips and estrogen would make somebody a physically superior runner in both terms of speed and endurance while ignoring the fact that females still have wider hips and higher estrogen than males, yet clearly are not superior runners in any way, shape, or fashion. Such arguments can only be made in the complete and utter absence of skepticism.

It's akin to phrenology, astrology (which was indeed a science at one time), and every other pop-sci phase that society has gone through only to look back a half century later wondering 'wtf were they even thinking?' The evidence at large just does not support the stated claims in any way, shape, or fashion, and relies exclusively on trying to turn the exception into the rule, to satisfy whatever's trending at this time or that.




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