Worldwide survey kills the myth of ‘Man the Hunter’ | Hacker News Reader

Worldwide survey kills the myth of ‘Man the Hunter’

science.org

14 pointsgumby20 comments

This is counting any % at all of female hunting as hunting.

So men are doing 99% of the hunting and women are doing 1%, it’s counted the same as if it were 50/50. Turns out that in most societies women do engage in hunting, but only a tiny percent of the time.

Sources:

https://twitter.com/ed_hagen/status/1674761975673532416

https://twitter.com/datepsych/status/1675080665413369861

>“I had a sneaking suspicion that women were going to be regular hunters,” Wall-Scheffler says. What surprised her was the intentionality: Among the societies with women hunters, 87% did so deliberately rather than opportunistically happening upon prey by chance. “When they get up at the beginning of the day, they’re heading out” to hunt.

This seems to broadly disagree with your claim that "Turns out that in most societies women do engage in hunting, but only a tiny percent of the time." Do you have a source for that claim?

I think you have misunderstood either OPs claim or that stat. That stat just says "among the societies with women hunters". So there could be almost no women hunters as long as 87% of the tiny number were doing so deliberately...

I edited my comment to add sources.

Wow, we've reached the day when academic papers are more accessible than tweets.

Yea that’s why I hesitated to add them

I can't wait to show my wife this survey and explain how I do 50% of the housework

The paper actually makes no claim about the percentage of time that women hunt relative to men.

So I’m not sure where you got the data for your last sentence

if they told you that men hunt 350 times more by volume (see first source) it would make their thesis sound irrelevant

I edited my comment to add sources

The first source (which you're citing for the volume number) warns against making this sort of volume estimate and inferring differences between men and women hunting, in part because of the small sample size of women hunters and because women tended to hunt in pooled/group settings.

The pooled/group setting difference is something that the original paper also calls out.

The paper reviews other papers about various societies and reports the percentage of them in which women hunt in various way (e.g. broken down by size of game). It reports no data on male hunting. So I think it's dishonest of science.org to say the following.

> These data flatly reject a long-standing myth that men hunt, women gather, and that this division runs deep in human history.

It could easily be consistent with these data that men usually hunt much more than women.

The paper doesn’t make a statement about the frequency or prevalence of women hunting, and it does describe different hunting behaviors and patterns between men and women in the discussion.

I think the paper’s goal is not to say women hunted as frequently as men, but to disprove the idea that there was a sharp and rigid division of labor in subsistence societies.

Yeah, I'm disageeing with the reporting of it more than the paper itself.

"The thinking was that only men could be hunters because of their supposedly superior strength, says Sang-Hee Lee, a biological anthropologist"

Men's strength is only supposedly superior? I'd be interested in seeing Sang-Hee Lee's study data....

Also, why would anyone suggest that men's superior strength would completely prevent women from hunting? Lots of game animals are weaker than all humans. It feels like a strawman set up to make the paper sound more significant.

I'm sure any tribe would have been delighted if any man, woman or child helped hunting small game. However, the dynamic may have been different if the hunting party were kilometers away and hunting elk. It's a lot of dead weight that has to be hauled back to camp.

The political agenda is I guess take over as many legacy academic institutions and flood them with nonsense science so that societal gender gets deprecated and we can live in new age where woman work as much as men for we assume progressive reasons but actually thinly veiled corporatism.

ie De-mother and de-secretary the woman.

You need to argue why this is nonsense science, unless you want to contribute to flooding the discussion with nonsense.

Is this a reputable science outlet?

Not any more.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com