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The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong
(www.scientificamerican.com)
just science related topics. please contribute
note: clickbait sources/headlines aren't liked generally. I've posted crap sources and later deleted or edit to improve after complaints. whoops, sry
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I absolutely agree with the thesis that both men and women hunted, but I think the claims of women's superior endurance are not represented in reality. The fastest marathon time for men is 2 hours 1 minute and for women it is 2 hours 14 minutes. These were in 2023 and 2019 respectively, so it's not like it was years ago with drastically different treatment of the sexes. Both runners were Kenyans too, so that limits non-sex based biological differences.
I don't buy that it is socialization. For one thing, the difference disappears in sports like shooting and horseback riding where physicality is not the determining factor. On top of that, when children compete at sports there are negligible performance differences until after puberty. The article mentions the record a woman holds for swimming across the English Channel. I think that women's higher body fat provides buoyancy that massively reduces the energy required to stay afloat for a prolonged time. We don't see the same supposed superiority in other endurance events.
This link touches on many of the same topics as the main article and adds some more info.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240731-the-sports-where-women-outperform-men
Speed of marathon doesn't necessarily serve as a benchmark for endurance, does it? Endurance is a metric of how tired you get over time, no? A cheetah can run 1km waaaay faster than a human. Doesn't mean that it has better endurance than humans.
What (widely popular) race could possibly be a better metric of endurance than the marathon?