The Wonders of the Male Human Pelvis
nautil.us
nautil.us
> Because our legs are positioned slightly more forward, our quads both absorb the shock of stepping and spring our bodies back upward. This more energy efficient gait may give men an advantage over long distances. Because they were constrained by the demands of childbirth, women’s pelvises weren’t able to develop these modifications, researchers say.
However, the study, available at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-59915-8 only states:
> The shock-absorbing device seems to benefit modern males, mainly in long-distance walking.
followed by:
> Regardless of whether this exchange confers a net advantage in long-distance walking, it requires empirical testing, like everything that we propose here.
So the conclusion seems to be that this may confer advantages in long-distance walking. Long-distance is not explicitly defined either.
Regardless, it's mind-blowing to think that Neanderthal males had the same pelvis bone structure as modern women.
The more reasonable assumption (per Occam) is that H. neanderthalis was also a long-distance hunter.
My guess is any differences are very general and relevant over population, and can be compensated by training.
In persistence hunting, over great distances, humans can outrun game animals as long as they pick one animal and track it. Deer, antelope, etc. all run faster in short bursts, but overheat and reach exhaustion after long distances whereas humans can just keep going. Eventually, the human can just walk up to it and make the kill with a knife or rock.
The hypothesis is really only supported by the fact that we have adaptations that make it theoretically possible, but the times and places those adaptations came about doesn't really match up with the times and places it would have been effective (i.e. woodland where the ground would be too hard for effective tracking [0]).
There are some other things that point away from it, too; it's worth doing some googling.
It's certainly possible that persistence hunting happened to some degree, and it's a fun idea so it really caught on in popular consciousness, but the actual evidence is limited.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
Persistence hunting isn't just running 25km to catch 1 deer.
It may also involve multiple scout runs (perhaps 50km or longer) to find where the deer are after the current local deer supply is exhausted. It may also involve moving the entire tribe unit to a location 100-200km away from the current one, which would involve people less fit than tribe hunters.
> It's certainly possible that persistence hunting happened to some degree, and it's a fun idea so it really caught on in popular consciousness, but the actual evidence is limited.
Well, the problem is that evidence for just about everything related to our existence from before the glacial period ended is very limited due to a population bottleneck.
But there's no reason to assume that our ancestors did not use every tool available at their disposal to survive, one of the tools being persistence hunting, which we are still very good at, despite there not being evolutionary pressure to be selected for for the last 7-8 thousand years.
Speed is mostly a matter of muscle mass and maintaining speed over time and distance is related to lung capacity and ability to manage lactate build up and men usually have more muscle mass, which means they can maintain more speed.
Women usually weigh less, have less muscle and have more bodyfat so they are ultimately more efficient in overall energy use which starts to become more important as the distance and time increases and the outright speed becomes less important.
Ultramarathons are not really like an marathon where everyone is running at their maximum sustainable speed, there are usually rest stops so women being efficient need less time to refuel on calories compared to men can keep or get going quicker. It's like having a more fuel efficient car that doesn't need to stop for fuel as long or as often compared to a faster car that needs to stop more and for longer at refueling stops.