Oh?
If you have any information that goes against civilitty's comment there, I'd be interested to read it. I was always under the impression that in most hunter/gatherer cultures the men were primarily involved in the hunting.
From a study[0][1] of contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes:
> In the Philippines population, women are involved in hunting and honey collecting and while there is still a division of labour, overall men and women contribute a similar number of calories to the camp. In both groups, monogamy is the norm and men are active in childcare.
From another study[2][3] on the emergence of division of labour:
> We argue that the typical patterns of labor division emerged relatively recently in human evolutionary history [...]
> gender roles were not always the same in early-human cultures, and there's nothing that predisposes either sex toward certain kinds of work.
> "That women sometimes become successful hunters and men become gatherers means that the universal tendency to divide subsistence labor be gender is not solely the result of innate physical or psychological differences between the sexes; much of it has to be learned,"
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/14/early-men-wo...
[1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6236/796
[2] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/12/061207-sex-...
[3] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/507197
Evolution isn't goal oriented but the survival bias can shape things in a shockingly strategic way like with lactose tolerance trait/technically a mutation as seen on maps. Traditionally herdsmen regions have it higher and the swiss practically have it ubiquitously. Although with wandering there may be intelligent selection bias where the ones who would be sickened by dairy decide to risk going elsewhere.
The general assumption is that men are more likely to be the hunters: I'm not contradicting this, just pointing out it's not definitive. The previous poster was stating it as fact, and the first commenter was being questioned for daring to question said unverified fact.
Often the assumption is based on the need for speed and strength, but a lot of hunting (even of big game) was trap-aided, and primarily called for practised skill rather than simple strength and speed.
Unless by speed you mean quick reactions. That might help for catching a lizard by stamping on its tail. (I did that as a child: the tail came off so it wouldn't have been many calories.)
I imagine persistence hunting as being a big thing in olden times. You'd need to have a long-distance runner's physique, and ability to follow tracks. Also bow and arrow: skill in moving quietly, and aiming well, obviously.
When it involves mostly running for hours, sex probably matter much less.
Well in a way. "Less" would be accurate than it might matter in contests of strength, but it's still hugely relevant. I think the older races may even be more informative since that would be more of contests of raw athleticism as opposed to the extreme diet/supplemental/developmental process that high level athletics is today.
There's obviously no data, but I would bet any of the top 10000 long distance women runners outruns Usain Bolt in their category. Regarding persitence hunting, it's prohbably easier for humans to hunt cheetas* than to hunt horses.
Except the biological differences in strength, speed, etc. Unless they're arguing that these came about after agriculture, but a look at our close relatives would suggest it's always been there.
> In the Philippines population
Correct me if I'm wrong but I didn't think the Philippines had much in the way of large game, this and the general geography (mountainous rain-forest) could be negating the advantages men had in other parts of the world.
> and I'd suspect the tendency to believe it was men is simply a result of assumption based on modern gender roles
I'd suspect it's based on the belief that you'd want the stronger, taller, faster people doing the work the involve strength and speed. This won't always be men, but usually it will be.
We are a sexually dimorphic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_dimorphism#Humans) species, it shouldn't be at all surprising that we divided labor based on these obvious physical differences.
14,000 years ago most people didn’t live pass 30-40, pregnancy takes you out of commission as far as hunting goes for at least a year for population growth it means that a woman had to successfully give birth to more than 2 children that would manage to survive till purberty on average, there are no indications that puberty was any different than it is today which would mean that essentially they only had 10-15 or so years to pop out 3-4 kids if not more considering the child mortality rates of the era.
The low average life expectancy was not because adults died young but because child mortality (especially for children under 5) was sky-high.
There was also an article on here just yesterday about how we list ancient skeletons as "50+" instead of "75" years old because we can't distinguish ages of skeletons above 50, which also contributes to that misconception.
Long story short: a prehistoric human who made it to puberty had a pretty good chance of living to be 60-80, well past menopause.
Pre-historic humans who made it to puberty didn't live anywhere near 60-80 years on average we have the plenty of skeletons to know that (in fact modern hunter gatherers who do benefit from some levels of outside intervention don't even get to that).
It's also important to note that unlike today or even later in history the age past puberty didn't sky rocket.
Women often died due to child birth, men died hunting dangerous game, and both often died to the elements as at the time we were still migratory and didn't live in settlements.
>Based on Early Neolithic data, total life expectancy at 15 would be 28–33 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy
If you have better data by all means share it.
Are you sure? Life expectency of ~30 doesn't mean people didn't live past that, since that's due mostly to child mortality.
>Based on Early Neolithic data, total life expectancy at 15 would be 28–33 years
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy we have a lot of skeletons.
The fallacy many people tend to fall into is forgetting that while you are quite likely to die at childbirth or early years unless you were extremely privileged you would also be almost as likely to die even when older when every day of your life was a struggle.
Sure the elites that lived lives of relative luxury could live almost as long if they didn't require medical intervention but the plebs? pffttt any accident could be fatal without modern medicine and working hard laboring life without any support structure simply didn't allow people to live that long which caused essentially a pretty big discrepancy in early history and classical times between the life expectancy of the lower and upper classes much more than what we see today.
https://www.brown.edu/academics/economics/sites/brown.edu.ac..., page 32 (the numbers are expectency so for example at 15 if the life expectancyis 14 you get total life expectancy of 29).
In particular the dating of age for ancient skeletons usually comes down to some correlation to tooth and bone growth. You look at their teeth/bone development and approximate the age based on how long it takes modern samples, that we know the age of, to reach a comparable level of development. But at a certain age these all sort to converge to becoming identical meaning we can't really tell the difference between e.g. 50 years old and 80 years old.
And, as mentioned, there's also the issue of representation. Are the measurable samples we have recovered a representative sample or is their some bias or other issue that might be getting in the way? And there's even the problem of assuming identical growth patterns. Did different diets, lifestyles, and even evolutionary changes affect development? Maybe, but we're optimistically hoping the answer is no. All in all the science behind these numbers is just really not all that great, even if it's the best we can do for now.
And in general that's the problem. We have to make a whole lot of optimistic assumptions, but if even one is off then everything is completely thrown off. This is the reason I tend to take pre-historic anthropology with a grain of salt. For that matter even post-historic anthropology tends to often be full of questionable science. For instance one big piece of news was the discovery that a piece of Viking burial cloth, in Sweden, contained Arabic script and references to Allah. The problem is that it was later discovered that the script it was allegedly written in had not yet been invented at the time of the corpse's burial. That such a 'discovery' was not the first thing that was checked before racing to publish seems to be an unfortunately common occurrence in these sort of sciences. It goes without saying that you should try to disprove your hypothesis, not prove it. Only then when you've completely failed to refute your hypothesis should you begin to considering the possibility of its correctness, given available information.