Women gather, men hunt?

Posted Wed, 09/01/2010 - 09:45 by Melissa

Recently Overcoming Bias had a post about how men are evolved to hunt, women to gather. It then went on to speculate about how most sports are based on hunting instincts:

"Now sports let us show off many kinds of physically-expressed abilities. But it seems to me that most sports emphasize hunting skills, such as chasing, evading, throwing, and hitting, far more than gathering skills, such as visual search and fine finger control. Now it makes sense for men to prefer hunting sports, but oddly females also seem to prefer them; pretty much all sports emphasize hunting more than gathering skills. Why don’t women prefer sports designed to show off the skills for which female bodies were designed?

Sorry, but there is a "sport" that uses exactly these "gather" skills--it's called hunting! Perhaps our ancestors did persistence hunt and our most popular sports are based on those skills, but the persistence hunt only works in certain environments.

Modern hunting really isn't much like persistence hunting, even when practiced in open plain environments that would be suited to persistence hunting using ancient methods. There isn't much chasing, that's for sure, in waiting all day in a tree blind for a deer to walk by. Visual search and fine finger control are extremely important in modern hunting.

Besides that, I think anthropological studies have been heavily clouded by modern ideas of "the hunt" that are only relevant to academics who have probably never hunted themselves. They seem to think that all hunting involves chasing animals around. For example, in some ethnographies, net hunting, trapping, and spear fishing are counted as "gathering." This has led to two erroneous ideas now embedded in pop culture: that women squatted around gathering leaves all day, and that such leaves made up most of the diet.

The real truth about the study posted on Overcoming Bias that showed that women in rural Mexico are better foragers for mushrooms is that mushrooms aren't exactly the most important food in the world. They are of very little food value, but have high culinary value, and the more hours you put into learning to forage for them, the better yields you get. I have zero experience with this myself, and in Sweden I got zero mushrooms, while my male Swedish roommate got several bucketloads.

But this is not all to throw away the idea of gender roles in evolution. A recent NYTimes article about the challenge of building a decent sports bra reminded me of the biggest foil to the "born to run" idea of human locamotion. Maybe men are born to run, but women happen to have breasts: jiggly protusions that are often quite large. When running they can be rather painful. Modern women get around this obstacle by using sports bras, but when was the last time you saw a hunter-gatherer with a bra? This explains quite well to me why women who hunt in those tribes utilize traps, nets, and bows. But maybe women get used to the "bounce" after awhile?

Elite female runners often experience amenorrhea which can lead to infertility and low bone density (and it's not associated with low body fat, it's associated with running). Do male elite runners experience such reductions in reproductive "fitness?" 

But it is an interesting question: what do you think? Were all humans born to run? Or just men?

Comments

Everything about the framing

by Wayne - 09/22/2010 - 22:56

Everything about the framing of sports in terms of hunting or gathering seems wrong-headed, as you and your commenters are, um, gathering. I spent two rather lengthy posts on the Overcoming Bias question on my philosophy-and-sport blog, This Sporting Life. If anyone needs to catalogue ALL of the ways that way of thinking about sports breaks down, the first post is here:

http://thissportinglife.net/2010/09/04/why-no-gatherer-sports/

In modern hunter forager

by RafeK - 09/07/2010 - 22:41

In modern hunter forager tribes hunting is predominately an activity pursued by men so the theory is not baseless, theres pretty substantial differences in male and female physical capacities that seem to be related to hunting and warfare. This depends on the area of course and gathering does not have to be calorie poor, one can gather things like muscles, oyster, clams, starchy tubers, fruits, etc which are quite calorically dense.

The persistence hunting hypothesis is pretty week, its uncommon stragety practiced by a handful of tribes in specific enviroments an only occasionally. I think the evidence humans are born to run is pretty limited.

I've never really understood

by Sarah - 09/04/2010 - 15:25

I've never really understood where the idea that the "women stayed at home, men went hunting" mantra came from. I mean, if we look to animals, the lioness does all the hunting! I wonder if it's a bit of the Judeo-Christian bias that most Americans have. "Women are weak & must be protected." Why couldn't the girls be taught to hunt alongside their brothers? They'd be just as fast at ten years old!

Great post. The point about

by Jeff - 09/01/2010 - 21:55

Great post. The point about the sports bra is a good one, but something else comes to mind. Us men have some jiggly bits as well. We get around this somewhat with tighty whities or banana hammocks, but they are about as modern as the bra. I don't think they are in the same category as breasts, but can be awkward enough to not want to be doing ultra marathons.

I've always thought that most

by Chris G - 09/01/2010 - 17:44

I've always thought that most sports were war simulations. They invariably involve fighting over territory, advancing a ball or other object into the other "tribe's" country. Certainly, American Football, soccer, basketball, hockey, rugby, lacrosse, etc, all fit in that category. Baseball, not so much.....

Female hunter here. Chiming

by Tara - 09/01/2010 - 15:52

Female hunter here. Chiming in to say that one does not necessarily sit in a blind all day when hunting. My hubby and I hunt deer, antelope, and moose. I've never even seen the inside of a blind. We get out before the break of dawn and we stalk, and stalk, and stalk. No, it's nothing as rigorous as persistent hunting, but Canadian weather means a lot of heavy equipment on to keep warm, that's a lot of extra weight. That, and a consistently heightened awareness of every noise and movement = tired mama at the end of the day. Then, of course comes the real work when you get something and you have to gut it and get it back to camp. I could tell you the story about walking a little too far and my hubby having to throw a deer over his bag and carry it three kilometers back to camp with blood pouring down his back. Now that's caveman style.

Love your blog.

I don't know about running,

by Rip @ MIPWID - 09/01/2010 - 15:51

I don't know about running, but the hunter/gatherer theory was used to explain a recent theory as to why men's and women's eyesight differ - the way that men focus better on single objects, while women's peripheral vision is much wider. The author said that this evolution occurred due to men needing the eyesight to focus on targets with thrown spears, while women's peripheral vision evolved to help them scout for mushrooms and edible leaves on the floor better, or something. But it makes more sense to me that both genders hunted for animals - if Paleolithic humans were aware of the nutritional value of meat, I don't think that females would have spent so much time exclusively gathering nutrient-light leaves. They'd have gone after meat too, using traps if not spears.

Anybody who thinks that

by fearsclave - 09/01/2010 - 12:36

Anybody who thinks that hunting doesn't involve a lot of fine visual searching has obviously never been small game hunting. I've had patches of snow fifteen feet away, that I'd been looking at repeatedly for minutes as I approached, suddenly turn into snowshoe hares and run for cover. Grouse are amazingly well-camouflaged, and deer? Odds are that if you've spotted one, you're seeing more of them; you just haven't realized it yet.

I saw that post too. To

by NorCal Cazadora - 09/01/2010 - 11:07

I saw that post too. To answer your question, I think all humans were born to run, or more importantly, to hunt. We all have the instinct. We just have to work around different physical attributes and strengths, which is just as much the case among men as it is between men and women.

Well, I know my wife is one

by Ultimate Russell - 09/01/2010 - 10:36

Well, I know my wife is one hell of a good runner (I'm a little faster but she can still run darn fast!) as well as a talented gardener, and preserver. She's also no slouch with a rifle or pistol. However, if you made her run in a t-shirt with no support she'd most likely just jog or walk along. But it's safe to say both the male and female of our species were born to run extremely fast for short distances where adrenaline would balance out the comfort issues. However, in the bigger picture men seem to be more suited to running longer, faster distances. Of course, I say this now and the next interval session we have my wife's really gonna put the challenge to me. Then we'll probably end up sprinting til' we puke. In a hunt/gather situation I could see chasing an animal out of cover so that she could shoot it. Team work.

There was a fascinating

by Geoffrey - 09/01/2010 - 10:20

There was a fascinating article in the Economist back in Summer '07 about mapping and gathering in men and women. The results of the article were that men have better spacial memory and are generally capable of traversing an environment better than women, but women in general were better at finding their way back to a specific point, and when variables with respect to what was at that point were tested, the only change that improved a woman's ability to find her way back to that point was the increased caloric value of what was at that point. Size, shape and color among other things were all shown to not yield statistically significant improvements.

Well I look at predator prey

by Dan - 09/01/2010 - 10:00

Well I look at predator prey interactions in fish, and even in them, I notice that their hunting strategy changes considerably depending on the habitat, prey, prey density etc.

For a very smart generalist pmnivore such as ourselves Im sure there are a HUGE number of ways we used to hunt or gather depending on the environment. Persistence hunting might work in open plains but would be rubbish in a dense jungle where ambush hunting would be far more efficient (prey would be more dense too, so more likely they come into your trap). Coming up with one overall rule for hunting seems a ridiculous concept.

If you want to see a video of the persistence hunt I have posted it here:
http://www.darwinstable.com/2010/02/04/were-humans-persistence-or-ambush...

Good post!