Comment by mindlesscrollyparrot@discuss.tchncs.de on The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong

You think they should have surveyed the uncontacted people?

Uncontacted peoples are groups of Indigenous peoplesliving without sustained contact with neighbouring communities and the world community.

It’s right there in the link I provided, so yes, because infrequent contact and observation is possible.

You explicitly mentioned the Sentinelese. Exactly how would you go about this infrequent contact and observation with them?

In any case, let’s assume that hunting is exclusively performed by males in all of those peoples. How much would that change the statistic and the overall conclusion? 79% would be 72%

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

I suspect that the number would be around a 50% split, what would then be interesting is determining which group has a better diet and survival rate to determine which tactic is superior.

I suspect not. To get to 50%, they would need to study an additional 37 societies, and every single one would have to have only males doing the hunting.

but estimates from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in the UN and the nonprofit group Survival International point to between 100 and 200 uncontacted tribes

We’re in luck, there are more than enough to bring the sample size to a reasonable quantity.

You would need to be in luck. Let’s assume that they studied all 200 uncontacted tribes. To bring the overall rate to 50%, you would need 119 out of the 200 to be exclusively males hunting - 60% of those societies. The researchers studied 63 societies and found that 20% of them were exclusively males hunting.

But what’s the point anyway? The hypothesis is that males evolved to be bigger for hunting, even 50% of societies where women hunt is enough to make it implausible. In those societies, women are hunting in spite of their apparent size disadvantage.

I think you should ask yourself whether size is actually important for hunting. We don’t wrestle our prey. Size doesn’t matter if you’re bringing down monkeys from the trees with a bow and arrow, and size doesn’t matter if you’re trying to bring down a mammoth.

I look forward to reading your study.

Not having the time or funding to perform my own study does not invalidate my criticism that the authors used an incomplete and flawed data set.

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.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/brazil/2049750/Uncontacted-Amazonian-tribe-photographed.html

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2024-11-11

The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong(www.scientificamerican.com)

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