3 comments

[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 15.4 ms ] thread
huh .. Seattle University. So the actual paper is a meta-analysis and you can seed the spreadsheet with all the columns:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

It mixes a ton of different regions ethnic groups, and it's a yes/no binary for "documentation of women hunting" ... I'd be interested in drilling down into the sources for those. Most of the African countries have a yes, and we do see animals like Lions where the female lions do a lot of hunting and the males defend the pride.

Still I have my doubts about the type of hunting for humans. Did women go after both small and big game? How much of the hunting was trapping? It makes sense women would help hunt deer or gazelle, but not necessarily bison or large game.

..so once again, a professor at a Seattle university ... there's going to be bias an motivated reasoning. There just is because that's how bad academia has gotten. Colour me skeptical.

Don't believe the clickbait titles. It's nothing earth shattering or unexpected. From Skepchick: "This study also can’t speak to the frequency of female hunters: “80%” is a binary number, meaning that it only tells us that at some point 80% of these societies showed evidence that yeah, women here actively track, locate, and kill animals for sustenance. It doesn’t mean they did a greater or even equal amount of hunting as men. It only supports what seems to have become a pretty well-accepted fact: many modern hunter-gatherer societies, and probably many ancient ones, don’t or didn’t have strict gender roles that would forbid an able-bodied person from doing whatever they can do to help the health and safety of the larger community. " https://skepchick.org/2023/06/did-a-new-study-debunk-man-the...
Also, that "80%" had a sample size of 63; they had 361 total, but only 63 had information on the hunter's gender.