https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12111017/
> There were 6451 men and 6936 women followed for a median of 3.0 years. During this time there were 140 incident limb fractures in men and 391 in women.
Whereas OP's archaeological study had:
> Fractures were more prevalent in males (40%, n = 57/143) than females (26%, n = 25/95).
For instance in Switzerland each year you have 550k non-professional accident (declared one to your employer) for 8.5M inhabitants. (Ref: SUVA annual report but only available in GE and FR)
Lifting weight helps bones get stronger, and Vitamin D is an essential nutrient in proper bone building.
100 years ago even, most people lived and worked on farms in the US (and many other places), now it's single digit percentages - and many of them spend it driving vehicles and similar less physical labor.
Seems an odd thing to mention/focus on. Any specific reason for including this?
At least as of 2007 those industries (and related industries) were 78% male [https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2007/06/art2full.pdf]
There is also a similar visible skew in the power lifting, olympic lifting, or weight lifting communities for those into it recreationally.
It used to be we all spent more time lifting heavy things. However, post WW2 that has rapidly declined.
So one way to reduce or reverse this is if we ALL lifted heavy things more often. From a risk reduction perspective, that seems to be especially valuable for women?
Depends; women might be much more prone to injury from lifting heavy things.
* It's only the last couple of hundred years that a significant body of people doing work that does not have a large physical component - bone density is heavily influenced by stressing the bones regularly through exercise.
* It's only the last hundred years that childbirth-related mortality for women has plummeted. A lot of women would die in childbirth. Early industrial revolution era saw some parts of Europe have 20-25% of women die of childbirth. Now it's an extraordinary event.
* Following from that, menopause dramatically reduces bone density for women; one reason HRT was such a popular thing in the med-to-late 20th century was that it was seen as a panacea for removing the worst effects of menopause. Unfortunately it creates a lot of issues, as well.
* Diets change dramatically. Medieval people ate (generally) much less meat and sugar, but a lot of fresh (when in season) vegetables, some fruit, and a lot of grains. Early industrial food quality plummets as people move to urban areas without the ability to grow their own food. Rickets are a huge, widespread plague on urban poor (places like Glascow had rickets endemic well into the mid 20th century) for most of the modern era.
That's just wopk and diet. Consider that the averge medieval person walked everywhere, early moderns likewise, and only from the 19th century onwards did rail, cars, and so on see people getting about without considerable exercise being involved.
> Men and women aged 50-79 years were recruited from population registers in 31 European centers.
They followed older people for 3 years. It is well-known that menopause causes osteoporosis, which makes women more at risk of bone fractures in older age. And in fact this is a study on osteoporosis...
There isn't enough information to be sure - we need to know more about the life expectancy of the medieval subjects and the likelihood of multiple fractures. Eyeballing it suggests yes, but within a factor of 2 either way.
Note though that the modern study involved older adults (50-79) who I would guess are more likely to get fractures: osteoporosis and weakened joints outweigh the increased risk from physical activity of younger people.
Consider the median of: 2.9, 3.0, 3.1 years.
I assume a pretty good portion of today's population gets a fracture on a limb at some point in their lives.
“Men's higher unintentional injury, suicide, and homicide mortality rates are observed in all age groups in low-, middle-, and high-income countries. The sole exception is for homicide of children under the age of 15 years in low- and high-income countries, where the rates for girls are similar to or higher than those for boys.”
I’m not sure how you would record whether a death was related to protecting a woman?
Things like suffocation, drowning, and fire are a bit harder to understand... but I believe they are derived from a high-risk mentality that men have gained as a result of this protector status.
Ignoring the radical changes that we've seen in the last 50 years, if we sent women to war, we wouldn't have any children. Any nation that did that was wiped off the face of the earth rather quickly.
If gender rolls were reversed wouldn’t be many examples where the death toll was high enough for this to occur.
In Britain in the 1921 census there were 1,209 single women aged 25 to 29 for every 1,000 men. In 1931 50% were still single, and 35% of them did not marry while still able to bear children.
After the war there were about 40% fewer single French men for every unmarried woman, compared to before.
Devastating loses but nowhere near enough to threaten the existence of a country. Post WW2 Germany and Russia would also be grim examples. It is of note that the 20th century was the first time that deaths from actual enemy action exceeded deaths from disease during war.
https://qz.com/389781/think-a-good-man-is-hard-to-find-now-t...
After WW1 the average height of a french soldier dropped by an inch or two (don't remember the exact value). This was attributed to the slaughter of the fit men. It also became fashionable to marry old men and foreigners.
I know in Germany after both wars there was the same effect on marriages, but I don't know about the height.
Perhaps we can increase my "50" years to "200" years. For the vast majority of history, having less men was considered eugenic and a good thing.
It wasn't driven by having less men. It was driven by the upper class wanting more sex.
It also turned out to be disastrous for society, and most of the Islamic world has outlawed or severly restricted the practice as it leads to huge social problems.
The fact is that war has never been a large driver of casualties in these societies, outside of WW1 and WW2 which are the two exceptions and really don't prove your point. Wars were never fought to protect women, and most men died of disease and accidents, not war.
My main point of contention was that it wasn't a widespread practice and wasn't motivated by a lack of men.
People fought protecting material resources. Reproductive resources were only useful insofar as they help you produce more subordinates to generate more material resources. In feudalism this meant that reproductive resources were very important, but in slavery and capitalism it isn't really the case.
Given the realities of military engagements in Feudal Europe - and the rather small army sizes - its not true that sending women to war would cause a fatal decrease in the birth rate, at all.
People have fought for a number of reasons, material resources AND reproductive resources are usually key to those. Historically, raiding for woman and resources has been a constant. A big tribe is a safe tribe, more women is key. Even in modern times, you can see the pressure in expensionist/aggressive societies for women to have more children.
Fighting for reproductive resources is, however, an outmoded concern. While some states are fighting falling birthrates, none have went to war to acquire more women in recent times. And the reason why states are pursuing population is, again, material.
Evolutionary biases are also essentially irrelevant in how societies are structured. The structures of societies are very intentional and based on material reality, not mere biases.
Generally, men have mostly done the fighting, especially in wars of aggression. The reasons for these are material, as men are often better at fighting. It's not to protect women. When it's useful and makes sense for women to fight, then women fight.
Evolutionary biases are fundamentally relevant to the way society is structured. Historically more violent behavior in males has always been very adaptive as the rewards are far greater.
Put another way, if you took almost any society today and made everyone women, you would not see a major decrease in violence, as the vast majority of violence done serves structural and material reasons.
I agree with your second point though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_military
And even then, they were support, not infantry.
This generally doesn't happen unless either the society is quite rich but lacks strong men, or cases of emergency, or if there is surplus of land and food, because raising armies is very costly, and as a result it doesn't make sense not to send the strongest fighters possible as it is expensive to outfit them and to maintain production at home.
Nowadays, women are proving extremely competent as fighter pilots as their bodies are better at withstanding G-Forces, but in classical infantry where there is a large strength requirement again it doesn't make much sense.
Likely coming from being shorter. The heart doesn't have to push the blood as far uphill.
Women do indeed fight, but not until it gets desperate.
It's true that women generally don't fight until it's desperate historically. I explained why in the comment you replied to.
"Protection" that involves attacking others first is pretty questionable from a moral and practical standpoint. "No first strike" policies for nuclear weapons, for instance, would go a long way to making the world safer.
Need to muscle some livestock? Probably mans job.
Need to cut trees? Probably mans job.
Need to stalk wild game through the forest? Probably mans job.
Need to lift heavy things that could injure you? Probably mans job.
A teenager being too aggressive and overdoing some activity? Probably a man.
It's not hard to see all the ways men could be injured by being men, that doesn't involve protecting women from predators.