i thought the same thing, but these people persistence hunt today for over 8 hours. no mention of total distance but 8 hours is no joke.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=826HMLoi…

The top of this comment thread is a person claiming that men do all the hunting in every primitive society, not just hunting based on long distance running.

You came into the thread to criticise a paper that showed that women hunt in 50 different societies around the world. Even your estimate of 50% is plenty enough examples to debunk the "all the hunting" claim.

Women are perfectly capable of drawing a bow that is suitable to hunt monkeys, rabbits, squirrels, small birds, etc. Accuracy is more important than power.

If your strategy for hunting mammoths involves your physical strength, you're gonna have a bad time.

Better doesn't always equal faster.

Better can equal going further.

Better can equal being more efficient.

Efficient means using less calories to do the same thing.

Persistence hunters today do track their prey, and often have to guess where the prey may have gone when the tracks are lost.

youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&…

I wouldn’t consider 9% to be that large in this context. Certainly a difference that would be overshadowed by individual variation.

Even if we assume women are physiologically 9% slower at persistence hunting (which that statistic is far from proving) it still suggests they could and likely were successful at it, albeit maybe not the very best.

The fastest marathon time for men is 2 hours 1 minute and for women it is 2 hours 14 minutes.

"Fastest" does not mean the best endurance. You would be looking at the "longest".

Naked and Afraid and Women Who Hunt

Sounds like a very ...interesting show.

Meh...call me when a woman holds the world record for a marathon. It might happen in the next 100 years, but I strongly doubt it.

What bugs the shit out of me about all this...of course women hunted in times of need. They also hunted small game to help the tribe as needed.

I don't think that disrupts the overarching narrative of the male hunter and female gatherer. It's a general rule rather than a law.

There will certainly be areas where the trail disappears, but tracking isn’t necessarily about locating every individual footfall.

With an understanding of movement and behavior, one can make inferences about where the animal went to find and follow the next sign.

Even moving over rock or packed soil, sign is left. You may not be able to perceive it yourself, but to someone who spends hours a day reading and studying the ground over the span of years, those subtle differences are perceptible.

An animal will eventually reach a place to stop and rest, but with repeated interruption that rest won’t count for much.

Women were first allowed to compete in marathons in 1972. In 1972 the men's record was 2:10:30. The current record is 2:00:35 which is about an 8% difference. Pretty close to the difference between men and women currently.

The first women's record was 3:40:22 and the current women's record is 2:11:53.11 which is 40% faster.

Once funding for women's athletics reaches parity and once girls are encouraged into athletics as much as boys, then we will see if the ladies catch up. So far they're doing a pretty good job catching up, and you can't look at one current window in time and say you have the answer, you need to look at trends.

The fastest marathon time for men is 2 hours 1 minute and for women it is 2 hours 14 minutes.

It's an unacceptable leap in logic to infer (from that statement) anything about populations of men and women. You've picked only a single sample from each population and chosen that highly biased representative.

Maybe women hunted, probably they did, maybe they didn't. Being able to run 100+ miles is freaking cool and great.

You DONT ENDURANCE HUNT into the next state. This is shit "evidence" of anything. It does not matter if you can lift 25% of not very much 2000% more than someone else can lift 25% of a lot, or if you can walk until 8 days from now and be less tired than someone else.

The premise is probably true that men and women both hunted, but endurance++ isn't a cut and dry argument for being a good huntress.

Well.. many of the younger women would be constantly pregnant back then, and engaged in communal child rearing. So they are going to be spending less time on mammoth hunts.

Ancient people's also worked way less than we do now.

It seems obvious that some of the women would be better hunters than some of the men. But that only suggests that too much specialization was bad, not that there wasn't any specialization at all. So headline seems wrong.

Also persistent hunting seems like the most inefficient type of hunting. You exhaust yourself and the prey and loose calories, the time it takes, traveling far over unknown terrain and then having to carry it all the way back and beware other predators. Is the argument that women are best at "shitty hunting"?

I imagine you'd track an animal, get close, throw spear, miss, keep tracking the animal. And if they haven't invented the spear yet, can they even be called human?

Can you please show us what connects your data to being a success as an endurance hunter? Because "men hold more records running a specific distance faster than women do" is not in any way an indication of hunting success.

Do you think Olympic target shooters make the best hunters when it comes to guns and bows?

How many marathons are run in a weaving path on uneven ground full of underbrush while trying to keep up with an animal that could potentially go in any direction at any time in the hopes that it will get tired before you do?

Because otherwise this marathon measurement is silly.

We have these things called binoculars, telescopes, cameras and drones. All of which are able to observe subjects from a safe distance.

Binoculars, telescopes and cameras will tell you little about what islanders are doing inside the forest where they hunt if you are using them from the ocean. Drones flying over Sentinel Island would violate Indian law and whoever did it would be in huge trouble. Their data would likely be disregarded due to the ethical issues.

On top of that, if they heard a drone coming, they might just change what they normally do.

Like these people. Hunting becomes less of an issue suddenly when there's a flying threat.

telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews…

A marathon is not a speed race. It is a 42 km endurance race, similar to endurance hunters would have done on, say, the plains of Africa.

The vast majority of people today would be unable to finish even a half marathon without collapsing due to utter and complete exhaustion.

Another factor is, with endurance hunting, you will need to carry the carcass back to home base. So let's take am antelope, which weighs 125 kg. You need the hunters to bring that all back to base, AFTER the multi kilometer hunt is over.

However, as far as portaging, women are very adept at that:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-c…

Olympic shooters would make the absolute worst hunters, have you actually seen them shoot? It's a test of hand eye coordination to hit a paper target.