Comment by skew-aberration
4 hours ago
> Mounting evidence from exercise science indicates that women are physiologically better suited than men to endurance efforts such as running marathons. This advantage bears on questions about hunting because a prominent hypothesis contends that early humans are thought to have pursued prey on foot over long distances until the animals were exhausted. Furthermore, 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.
Emphasis mine.
> Overall, females are metabolically better suited for endurance activities, whereas males excel at short, powerful burst-type activities. You can think of it as marathoners (females) versus powerlifters (males). Much of this difference seems to be driven by the powers of the hormone estrogen.
There are some pretty wild claims but overall, a fairly interesting article. I think they've just exaggerated an otherwise interesting point - that gender differences in hunting are not explained by differences in long-distance running aptitude (which are very small).
The examples of extant hunting techniques they themselves cited are not related to (ultra) long distance running anyway, so the connection between hunting and running is tenuous.
Jasmin Paris has won a fair number of extremely difficult ultras in mixed company, for example. Really long ultras are not an exclusively male domain. The marathon is if anything too short.
(Have a read about persistence hunting).
The article’s point is that the assumption that “men evolved to hunt” is unsupported by the evidence and therefore implicitly sexist. This is a defensible position.
Persistence hunting is speculative as a guiding force in evolution. It is a very rare practice amongst modern hunter/gatherer and there's no archaeological evidence that it was common enough historically to be important.
Compare this to game drives/trapping which are both mentioned in this article and have significant archaeological and anthropological evidence.