Man the Hunter is False

“Man the Hunter”

“The theory proposes that hunting was a major driver of human evolution and that men carried this activity out to the exclusion of women.”

“It holds that human ancestors had a division of labor, rooted in biological differences between males and females, in which males evolved to hunt and provide, and females tended to children and domestic duties.”

“It assumes that males are physically superior to females and that pregnancy and child-rearing reduce or eliminate a female’s ability to hunt.”

“Mounting evidence from exercise science indicates that women are physiologically better suited than men to endurance efforts such as running marathons.”

“the fossil and archaeological records, as well as ethnographic studies of modern-day hunter-gatherers, indicate that women have a long history of hunting game.”

“The theory rose to prominence in 1968, when anthropologists Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore published Man the Hunter, an edited collection of scholarly papers presented at a 1966 symposium on contemporary hunter-gatherer societies.”

“Overall, females are metabolically better suited for endurance activities, whereas males excel at short, powerful burst-type activities.”

“Much of this difference seems to be driven by the powers of the hormone estrogen.”

“Given the fitness world’s persistent touting of the hormone testosterone for athletic success, you’d be forgiven for not knowing that estrogen, which females typically produce more of than males, plays an incredibly important role in athletic performance.”

“The estrogen receptor—the protein that estrogen binds to in order to do its work—is deeply ancient.”

“Joseph Thornton of the University of Chicago and his colleagues have estimated that it is around 1.2 billion to 600 million years old—roughly twice as old as the testosterone receptor.”

“In addition to helping regulate the reproductive system, estrogen influences fine-motor control and memory, enhances the growth and development of neurons, and helps to prevent hardening of the arteries.”

“estrogen also improves fat metabolism. During exercise, estrogen seems to encourage the body to use stored fat for energy before stored carbohydrates.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“If females are better able to use fat for sustained energy and keep their muscles in better condition during exercise, then they should be able to run greater distances with less fatigue relative to males.”

“an analysis of marathons carried out by Robert Deaner of Grand Valley State University demonstrated that females tend to slow down less as the race progresses compared with males.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The modern physiological evidence, along with historical examples, exposes deep flaws in the idea that physical inferiority prevented females from partaking in hunting during our evolutionary past.”

“Neandertals are the best-studied extinct members of the human family because we have a rich fossil record of their remains. Neandertal females and males do not differ in their trauma patterns, nor do they exhibit sex differences in pathology from repetitive actions. Their skeletons show the same patterns of wear and tear. This finding suggests that they were doing the same things, from ambush-hunting large game animals to processing hides for leather.”

“What is more, females and males were buried in the same way in the Upper Paleolithic. Their bodies were interred with the same kinds of artifacts, or grave goods, suggesting that the groups they lived in did not have social hierarchies based on sex.”

“For those practicing a foraging subsistence strategy in small family groups, flexibility and adaptability are much more important than rigid roles, gendered or otherwise.”

“the idea that in the past men were hunters and women were not is absolutely unsupported by the limited evidence we have.”

“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.”

“Hunting may have been remade as a masculine activity in recent times, but for most of human history, it belonged to everyone.”