Paleontologists are trying to understand why the fossil record is mostly males
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
But I can also totally buy that it’s mostly a function of where they die. Like dying in a bog might preserve the bones differently than dying in a forest or by a lake or whatever.
Maybe that sort of thing played a role in various big game species extinction in many places. They seemed scarier, and/or actually were more aggressive during certain phases like Musking.
Another interesting fact about musth is it seems to effect elephant society. When young males reach adulthood and leave the herd of females, they tend to form small “bachelor herds” consisting of a few other young males and an older male, who “shows them the ropes”. And one of the things the older male teaches them is self control during musth. The Wikipedia article, and a story a guide told me, mention that young males in musth without an older male presence to help guide them (teach them?) will be more aggressive.
the question is why males seem to become fossilized more often than females. Uneven distributions of recklessness while alive are irrelevant
Of course, there could be more than one selection effect at work.
>They figured it was more probable that young male mammoths were much more likely to travel solo, away from the wisdom and protection of matriarchal herds, similar to the way elephant societies function today. In other words, these male mammoths—young, reckless, foolhardy—were just more likely to get into some kind of trouble and die, from getting stuck in a pit to running afoul of hunting humans. Luckily for paleontologists, some of these death sites—bogs, crevices, lakes—are pretty good at preserving remains. “They were more likely to do silly things, like die in tar pits,” Gower says.
Running afoul of hunting humans should leave fewer remains than, for instance, an elephant graveyard. Now it's possible mammoths didn't do the graveyard thing, but the point is the humans would have left far less of the animal than an elephant grave or a bog.
They might not have graveyards, but they do appear to have some concept of mortality.
From this great article [1] on elephants:
> Even bare, bleached old elephant bones will stop a group if they have not seen them before. It is so predictable that filmmakers have been able to get shots of elephants inspecting skeletons by bringing the bones from one place and putting them in a new spot near an elephant pathway or a water hole. Inevitably the living elephants will feel and move the bones around, sometimes picking them up and carrying them away for quite some distance before dropping them. It is a haunting and touching sight and I have no idea why they do it.
[1]: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/do-elephants-hav...
If they're truly reacting with similar emotions as when a human stumbles across a human corpse or skeleton, this seems kind of cruel to deliberately do just to get a compelling film shot.
> 25,000-Year-Old Structure Built of the Bones of 60 Mammoths
According to the article, similar albeit smaller structures have also been found across Eastern Europe.
I love this article because it provides scientific evidence for something I already knew or suspected: males take more risks.
I also think this video helps illustrate why fossils are mostly male: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=674IFkAj_1s
On Land of the Lost "Grumpy" was called he and "Alice" was called she, but I don't think anyone knew their sex for sure. "Alice" was an Allosaurus.
Well, the dinosaurs that are alive today do, at least. For other dinosaurs, we've only fairly recently realized we have soft tissue and maybe DNA in lots of fossils. So, maybe, but we don't know yet.
You can't change the hypothesis to match data. We try to avoid doing that in science ;)
Does anybody know why it's so close to 1:1 instead of women outnumbering men? Specifically in non-pair-bonding species?
It's always weirded me out for harem species in particular... the odds of producing a male that is competitive enough to be a harem leader seems pretty low.
The only species where the ratio is different are those where sex is determined with different genetic mechanisms. For example, in hymenoptera (ants and wasps), males are born from unfertilized eggs, which results in a 1:3 ratio between females and males.
I guess the difference between lottery tickets and genetics is that one is compulsory, with no benefit whatsoever for not playing.
Under those circumstances, if you have a mutation that causes you to produce all male offspring, you will have many more grandchildren than average.
This pressure will always favor producing whatever sex is in short supply, pushing sex ratios to 50%.
At home with the compost vs out on the dusty cementicious steppe.
>” This has less to do with misogyny than with prehistoric herd distributions...”
It’s like stating that water is fat free. It kind of spoils the article.
>> This wasn’t a surprise, based on what Pečnerová had theorized about mammoth herd behavior, since bison social structure similarly isolates young males. “By [the mammoth] anology, some of the male bison are going off and doing stupid things,”
Which could be interpreted as misandry even though they blame the males for their fate in the same sentence. :-)
Unless we know what drove animal behavior, we cannot make such attributions.
It would be like saying dinosaurs raped each other. From a human perspective their mating behavior if we knew it might look negative, but we cannot attribute intent to animals like that.
> Since the remains were found alongside swords, arrowheads, a spear, and two sacrificed horses, archaeologists had considered it a warrior’s grave—and, thus, a man’s.
It also primes the reader to think “aha misogyny!” where it isn’t. Just as saying fat free water!
> it revealed that between 30 and 50 percent of big game hunters could have been biologically female.
> This new study is the latest twist in a decades-long debate about gender roles among early hunter-gather societies. The common assumption was that prehistoric men hunted while women gathered and reared their young. But for decades, some scholars have argued that these “traditional” roles—documented by anthropologists studying hunter-gatherer groups across the globe since the 19th century—don’t necessarily stretch into our deep past.
And that's just looking at the first hits on a search engine.
Whether or not there is indeed a systemic bias in archeology, this makes it worth mentioning that in that case, we're sure it's not bias.
You keep repeating this as if fatty water were an entirely bizare notio. Suppose you heard of... milk? And militant vegans? And soy-milk?
I haven't seen soy-milk claiming to be gluten free, but I have definitely seen many milk products claiming to be lactose free. And I'm bad at drawing analogies, because I don't know what drove the author.
For sake of the argument I'd say that any investigation a male bias could be spun into into an investigation of male surpremacy. So your trying to claim male rhinoceros were better at dying, is it?!?
If milk was a type of water, this comment would make sense.
That being said if you want to take it more seriously sometime sexist bias does taint research in unexpected places, such as expecting that certain tools would've been used by males instead of females for no real reason for instance. It's important to be aware of these biases if you want to do good scientific work I think.
Similar to lets-discover-sexism-everywhere bias in social sciences though. In general soft sciences are prone to the ideology of the day (which is also what gets you grants)...
Man if that spoils an article for you, you must live a pretty miserable life.
Not surprised a comment like this isn't dead on this site. It adds nothing to the discussion, and it seems like OP didn't even read the article and is flame baiting.
tyrannosaurus, mammoth, ... da Vinci, Bach, Newton, Euler, Maxwell, ...
:)
Further the 'explanation' that males might have taken more risks, explains nothing. The one common denominator between every single mammal from ancient times is, they are all dead. It doesn't matter how; all their skeletons should be somewhere in the fossil record. A disparity would have to explain how male skeletons died in precisely the right way to be preserved more often. Which seems like nonsense.
It does though:
>Luckily for paleontologists, some of these death sites—bogs, crevices, lakes—are pretty good at preserving remains.
This is false. Most skeletons decompose. Only some happen to end up in the right spot to remain intact long enough to become fossils. Also, these mammoth remains aren't fossilized, they aren't old enough. These are just remains that have been preserved.
I think it's because of the way they see the problem domain. Both ways of seeing the problem domain look much the same.
I mean, a thoroughly explored domain and an utterly unexplored domain present much the same picture, in that...
There are not many unexplained mysteries hanging around.
Which may be translated to "The problem domain is thoroughly understood".
It's the problem of invisible stuff. You can't measure its extent.
Right, like I said, person with no domain knowledge alleges experts are making “flippant” and “unfounded guesses”.
What exactly were you trying to prove?
Let's be totally honest. Paleontologists have make astronomical errors in interpreting probabilities and statistics in the past.
Why do you think this? It is not a true statement.
Not all skeletons get fossilised - it requires a fairly particular set of conditions. It may be (likely is according to the people studying it) the case that males got into these conditions more frequently than females.
https://socratic.org/questions/what-conditions-increase-the-...