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The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong
(www.scientificamerican.com)
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this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2024
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Yeah this article is almost a year old and it got torn up when published last year. People already knew women helped hunt. But acting like that was a primary role without evidence because of modern sports science is silly.
I'm also curious about the role pregnancy plays into all of this. Obviously everyone back then would need to help out in any way they could back then, but without contraceptives how frequently would women be pregnant? It seems like that would play the largest contributing factor into roles/responsibilities and the article seems to ignore that issue.
While today you could breastfeed while running a marathon, there wouldn't be a way to keep the baby close by back then. Additionally, while for the first couple months a pregnancy might not impact your ability to hunt, eventually it certainly would.
Pregnancy had a major impact on women's roles throughout history, all the way up until the invention of the birth control pill in the 1950's. To a lesser degree, menstruation did as well, especially in societies which viewed that period as unclean.