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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   27276 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-theory-that-men-evolved-to-hunt-and-women-evolved-to-gather-is-wrong1/

It's hard to trust Scientific American when they mix communicating real, good science with blatant contradictory nonsense. Their article on Man the Hunter being inaccurate makes great points about how women can be excellent endurance runners, outpacing men over long distances. But then it also has a this paragraph about gender vs sex.

Before getting into the evidence, we need to first talk about sex and gender. "Sex" typically refers to biological sex, which can be defined by myriad characteristics such as chromosomes, hormone levels, gonads, external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics. The terms "female" and "male" are often used in relation to biological sex. "Gender" refers to how an individual identifies—woman, man, nonbinary, and so forth. Much of the scientific literature confuses and conflates female/male and woman/man terminology without providing definitions to clarify what it is referring to and why those terms were chosen. For the purpose of describing anatomical and physiological evidence, most of the literature uses "female" and "male," so we use those words here when discussing the results of such studies. For ethnographic and archaeological evidence, we are attempting to reconstruct social roles, for which the terms "woman" and "man" are usually used. Unfortunately, both these word sets assume a binary, which does not exist biologically, psychologically or socially. Sex and gender both exist as a spectrum, but it is difficult to add that nuance when citing the work of others.

How many pre-historic humans would actually have any seperation between the concept of a "female" and a "woman"? Not to mention they way they actually bring up "women in social roles" doesn't acknowledge their own distinction- you're never going to get a pregnant trans women, but you could get a pregnant trans men. We don't know anything about "gender" as progressives view it in pre-historic societies- we only know about sex, what we observe through things like skeletal remains and inferences from behaviour of human-like animals. The article would've done better to solely use female and male the whole way through and not try to seperate sex and gender.

Later, there's a paragraph about how athletic studies don't do enough research on females that wasn't relevant to anything else in the article. A non-sequitor that wasn't relevant to the article since we do know enough about female biology to determine their relative advantages and weaknesses at physical activities compared to men.

The article does have some good informative material in it.

Important for the purposes of this discussion, estrogen also improves fat metabolism. During exercise, estrogen seems to encourage the body to use stored fat for energy before stored carbohydrates. Fat contains more calories per gram than carbohydrates do, so it burns more slowly, which can delay fatigue during endurance activity. Not only does estrogen encourage fat burning, but it also promotes greater fat storage within muscles—marbling if you will—which makes that fat's energy more readily available. Adiponectin, another hormone that is typically present in higher amounts in females than in males, further enhances fat metabolism while sparing carbohydrates for future use, and it protects muscle from breakdown. Anne Friedlander of Stanford University and her colleagues found that females use as much as 70 percent more fat for energy during exercise than males.

Correspondingly, the muscle fibers of females differ from those of males. Females have more type I, or "slow-twitch," muscle fibers than males do. These fibers generate energy slowly by using fat. They are not all that powerful, but they take a long time to become fatigued. They are the endurance muscle fibers. Males, in contrast, typically have more type II ("fast-twitch") fibers, which use carbohydrates to provide quick energy and a great deal of power but tire rapidly.

Females also tend to have a greater number of estrogen receptors on their skeletal muscles compared with males. This arrangement makes these muscles more sensitive to estrogen, including to its protective effect after physical activity. Estrogen's ability to increase fat metabolism and regulate the body's response to the hormone insulin can help prevent muscle breakdown during intense exercise. Furthermore, estrogen appears to have a stabilizing effect on cell membranes that might otherwise rupture from acute stress brought on by heat and exercise. Ruptured cells release enzymes called creatine kinases, which can damage tissues.

But then later it had this infamous paragraph:

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. As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best. Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women's events because of the belief that they will make the women "artificially faster," as though women were not actually doing the running themselves."

I had never seen that paragraph in context before. Knowing the context, that they just explained the inherent biological differences, then denied them right after, makes it worse! Right after they broke down in detail how females have hormones and muscles built for stamina over power! The reason why male pacesetters aren't allowed for women's endurance running is because the male pacesetter would be setting the pace too fast for the women, who are built for going a longer distance at a slower pace than men, as they had literally just explained earlier in the article.

They also downplay the evidence that "Man the Hunter" was accurate, but at least they include it.

Males living in the Upper Paleolithic—the cultural period between roughly 45,000 and 10,000 years ago, when early modern humans entered Europe—do show higher rates of a set of injuries to the right elbow region known as thrower's elbow, which could mean they were more likely than females to throw spears. But it does not mean women were not hunting, because this period is also when people invented the bow and arrow, hunting nets and fishing hooks. These more sophisticated tools enabled humans to catch a wider variety of animals; they were also easier on hunters' bodies. Women may have favored hunting tactics that took advantage of these new technologies.

In conclusion, their own conclusion perfectly demonstrates their own double think:

Female physiology is optimized for exactly the kinds of endurance activities involved in procuring game animals for food. And ancient women and men appear to have engaged in the same foraging activities rather than upholding a sex-based division of labor. It was the arrival some 10,000 years ago of agriculture, with its intensive investment in land, population growth and resultant clumped resources, that led to rigid gendered roles and economic inequality.

They claim at the same time that females are biologically optimized to perform certain activities better than males, but also that females and males performed the exact same activities in an egalitarian society.

A lot of old anthropology like the original "Man the Hunter" article this article is a response to, is flawed. But at the same time, modern anthropology is just as if not more biased than the anthropology of the 60s. Their intro has a line saying,

Bystanders might be left wondering whether portrayals of women hunters are trying to make the past more inclusive than it really was—or whether Man the Hunter-style assumptions about the past are attempts to project sexism backward in time.

The reason why bystanders are so confused is because that's exactly what organizations like Scientific American are trying to do. If they really were just trying to correct a mistaken historical record, bystanders who don't do deep dives into human pre-history could safely trust pop sci and wouldn't be so skeptical. But when Scientific American blatantly tries to push an agenda, bystanders rightly grow skeptical.

A recent study of ethnographic data spanning the past 100 years—much of which was ignored by Man the Hunter contributors—found that women from a wide range of cultures hunt animals for food. Abigail Anderson and Cara Wall-Scheffler, both then at Seattle Pacific University, and their colleagues reported that 79 percent of the 63 foraging societies with clear descriptions of their hunting strategies feature women hunters.

An article from 2020 about that:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/early-women-were-hunters-not-just-gatherers-study-suggests-180982459/

Their analysis revealed that regardless of maternal status, women hunted in 50 of these societies—or about 79 percent. And more than 70 percent of female hunting appeared to be intentional—rather than opportunistically killing animals while doing other activities, per the study. In societies where hunting was the most important activity for subsistence, women participated in hunting 100 percent of the time.

“The hunting was purposeful,” Wall-Scheffler tells NPR. “Women had their own tool kit. They had favorite weapons. Grandmas were the best hunters of the village.”

The researchers also found that women played an active role in teaching hunting, and they used a wider variety of weapons and hunting strategies than men did. For example, while men tended to hunt alone or in pairs, women hunted alone, with a man or with groups of women, children or dogs. Women hunted small game in 46 percent of the studied societies and took down medium or large game in 48 percent of them. In 4 percent of societies, they hunted game of all sizes.

I mean, Artemis is after all a female goddess: (2nd century statue copied from a Greek original dating to 330 BCE). And as Thomas Carlyle meant to say, the real use of bow & arrow is to make all humans tall.
https://www.worldhistory.org/uploads/images/10157.jpg

Plus the easiest way of hunting animals is trapping. You don't need to be strong or athletic endurance to catch squirrels and rabbits with snares. Look at this boy trapping birds, which is so stupidly easy probably even a girl could do it as long as she isn't vegan and doesn't mind being cruel:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapping#/media/File:34-caccia_tortore,Taccuino_Sanitatis,_Casanatense_4182..jpg

I don't know how to interpret the statement "Grandmas were the best hunters in the village", but I imagine their hunting looks less like battling a grizzly and more like these Aborigines finding a lizard (from 2:50), Also an example for opportunistically killing animals:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=iP7Nn3whUTo&t=160

That said:
I wonder about the math here. If in 46% of foraging societies women hunt small game and in 48% larger game and then 4% all sizes how does that result in 79% of societies with women hunting? And I wonder what the total calories provided are. Was it more a novelty thing women did when they were bored or out of necessity or was hunting their sole profession? I read the book about the Pirahã in the Amazon (who have this strange language without recursion which refutes Noam Chomskys central thesis) and the role of the man was mainly to fish on canoes in the river (protein, every day staple meal) and going into the jungle to hunt was done less often because it was more dangerous and also you could come home empty handed to your disappointed wife and hungry children (but if you brought meat you were the king of the village and shared with everyone) and the women digged for vegetables/tubers (carbohydrates, also everyday staple food).

You Americans have more stories about Native/Indian American tribes, how and what did Native/Indian women hunt?

2024 study critiquing the many methodological errors in that study:

Female Foragers Sometimes Hunt, Yet Gendered Divisions of Labor Are Real: A Comment on Anderson et al. (2023), The Myth of Man the Hunter

We have outlined several conceptual and methodological concerns with the analysis of Anderson et al. (2023). Specifically, the Anderson et al. (2023) analysis is not reproducible because their sampling criteria are not clear and 35% of the societies in their sample do not come from D-PLACE, the database they claim was the source of all the societies in their sample. Moreover, these 35% were heavily biased toward societies that they coded as ones in which women hunt. Many other societies with extensive information on hunting are also not in D-PLACE yet were not included in their analysis, and authoritative sources on hunting in the societies in the Anderson et al. (2023) sample were not consulted. Additionally, there are at least 18 societies in D-PLACE with information on hunting that were inexplicably omitted from their analysis, none of which provide evidence for women hunters.

Finally, there were numerous coding errors. Of the 50/63 (79%) societies that Anderson et al. (2023) coded as ones in which women hunt, for example, our recoding found that women rarely or never hunted in 16/50 (32%); we also found 2 false negatives. Overall, we found evidence in the biased Anderson et al. (2023) data set that in 35/63 (56%) societies, women hunt “Sometimes” or “Frequently”. Moreover, compared to the 17/63 (27%) socie- ties in which women were claimed to hunt big game regularly, our recoding found that this was true for only 9/63 (14%). A precise estimate of women’s hunting in foraging societies must await a future thorough and unbiased analysis of the ethnographic record (see, e.g., Hoffman, Farquharson, & Venkataraman, 2024), but it is certainly far less than the Anderson et al. (2023) estimate and is very unlikely to overturn the current view that it is relatively uncommon.

The fundamental issue is that women’s hunting is not a binary phenomenon, and treating it as such, especially with a very low threshold for classifying a society as one in which women hunt, obfuscates gendered divisions of labor within groups.

Venkataraman also wrote this on his page:

http://www.vivekvenkataraman.com/blog/2023/7/5/debunking-a-debunking

we found that reports of women’s hunting were genuinely rare.

Most reported prey sizes are small- or medium-sized. Of the cases that do involve large-game hunting by women, some pertain to whale hunting; some involve firearms and/or dogs; some occur in the context of husband-wife pairs in which women contribute to hunting success indirectly; some involve cases of women hunting large game alone out after the death of their husbands; other instances of large-game hunting are explicitly stated by the ethnographer to be very rare. This is not to say that these are not cases of large-game hunting, but the broader context of their occurrence casts suspicion on them as cultural regularities. This provides a starkly different picture of women’s hunting in these societies compared to the analysis of Anderson et al (2023).

Shit like this is why I put 0 value on a very large number of humanities fields. They should be told to either clean up their rooms and get in good shape or else we will defund them completely.

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