Busting the Myth of "Men Hunt, Women Gather"
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- čas přidán 12. 11. 2020
- We used to believe that our ancestors had clear roles: Men hunt, women gather. But new evidence suggests that some of the earliest big game hunters were women.
Thumbnail image credit: MATT VERDOLIVO, © 2020 THE REGENTS OF UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA DAVIS
Hosted by: Hank Green
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Sources:
www.eurekalert.org/pub_releas...
advances.sciencemag.org/conte...
www.nature.com/articles/s4159...
www.sciencedirect.com/science...
www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/sc...
Paranthropus:
www.eurekalert.org/emb_releas...
source.wustl.edu/2020/04/foss...
www.nature.com/scitable/knowl...
Images
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pu...
www.eurekalert.org/multimedia...
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Thanks to Dr. Haas et al. and David Strait / Washington University in St. Louis
It's almost like life was very very difficult, and men and women worked together for thousands of years because if not everyone would die....strange...
Its almost like, it didn't matter to the cavemen what gender you were. You had to pitch in for the group to survive.
@@LazyLifeIFreak cavePEOPLE
This video triggered so many incels lol
@@elvalight2135 SciShow should make a video like: "debunking the myth that cavemen just clubbed women over their heads and dragged them away if they wanted sex" to REALLY trigger them.
It’s really not a big deal. Most modern ape groups have female hunters. Most mammal packs include female hunters. It should almost be expected that with early humans females participated in the hunting. But that just shows how many of these incels and “bro’s” are so easily triggered and feel everybody’s trying to invalidate their “manhood”. It’s pathetic.
At first i was like "why's hank wearing a hoodie over a hoodie?" But them i remembered I'm currently stuck sitting at a truck stop waiting for the mountain pass into Montana to stop being an icy snow covered death trap and i was like "oh right. Montana."
My favorite place in all of North America, the foothills of the Rockies.
@Mihir Vasave it'll clear up eventually. I could try to push through but there were three semi jackknifes on that pass today and I'm not interested in making a fourth so I'll just wait a bit.
I thought he just got a little fatter the past few months?
@@Yeitsjames bulking up for Winter, or do a Hansel and Gretel thing? Though I think the witch might keep him alive to help her with problems that her magic can't fix.
@@Sovereignty3 I’ll pretend to understand what you’re saying 👍🏽
Hank, is that sweater as nice as it looks? It looks like it's like wearing a hug
Hmm, it looks itchy
Looks comfy
It reminds me a little bit of a stoner sweater but grown up and I'm here for it lol
I need to know
i need this
Early humans thoughts on gender and gender roles, "gee whiz I sure hope I don't die today"
Or more rather, "Gee whiz I would rather I die than my child bearing wife. I'll go fight an animal so we don't starve.".
@@zachgullerman3183 chances are the man had no clue whose kid it was, and the gatherers which also included men and children gathered most of the food in the tribe since hunting was much more hit and miss than gathering
Gather around kids,@@SuicidalLaughter look at the Clown! Mammal males always make sure the baby is THEIRS and if it isn't, they kill it! You think Human Males can't figure out something Male Lions&Elephants can!? You maybe an exception to the rule but humans are a very intelligent species!
@@விஷ்ணு_கார்த்திக் lmao yeah I'm sure early humans just went around committing infanticide every time they suspected their partners were unfaithful, tooooootally 🤣
@@விஷ்ணு_கார்த்திக் that is so demonstrably not true it's not even funny...even in humans.
One would assume when talking about a society mostly focused on survival and their surroundings that it would be less "Men this, Women that.", and more "If you're able bodied you do some work."
That's just my guess based on my understanding of individuals.
When it’s on the line, It’s all hands on deck.
yeah buff chick is more useful in a hunt than a scrawny dude
You would think so but when you look at modern hunter gatherers around the world it doesn't work like that...
@@SueMyChin Yeah, look at the fossils of female hunters... they died at a young age... HMMMMMM
HMMMMMMMM why is that so
@@anthonywoodward2027 Gotta be honest, buff chicks are pretty good
Always figured that the more we found out about our ancestors, the more we find out how utilitarian a lot of their lives were.
I guess that hungry don't cares about sex or age.
nah,patriarchy is their natural gender roles in their mind
@@ManlyServant Assuming you're not a troll, I see you haven't really gotten that good at English yet. Because of this I wanted to inform you that what you're saying (I've looked at your other comments,) is just completely and absolutely outrageous.
In the U.S. and UK, you would be fired from your job for what you're saying.
Even highly conservative and extreme English speaking people wouldn't even like you anymore after you told them these things. They would see you as an awful, irredeemable person. I hope that's not your intention, and you're just accidentally using English wrong.
You really, really, need to reevaluate what is polite and impolite to say, especially when you tackle sensitive topics such as this.
@@ManlyServantyou are against facts and logic
@@coreblaster6809 what the
Hey if my girl can take out a bear or elk...I'm sticking with her. I can pick berries.
That surely explains the Neanderthal admixture episode. ;)
She can't accept anything weaker though, hypergamy
Jesus man a shotgun ain’t that hard on the shoulder 🤣
@@1wun1 Given the number of women doctors I know, I can assure you not everyone abide by "hypergamy."
@@voidvector sure exceptions do exist, but as a man you can't be broke and ugly at the same time
it's almost like you can't generalize about a swath of human existence that was much longer than we could even fully understand, I'm sure that there have been populations of people who have had all kinds of gender roles and conventions that either do or don't match our modern, western concepts. To me it has always been way too big of a generalization to say "ancient males did this and ancient females did this" it makes it way too easy to glaze over nuance
it just makes more sense for men to do the things that would be more risky. just form an evoloutionary standpoint, when it comes to ensuring the survival of a population men are plain and simply more disposable. assuming you have about equal numbers of men and women in your society and assuming that theres enough people left to have a healthy gene pool in the first place, if for some reason you lose 75% of your men but but only 25% of your woman, your population can recover way faster then if you lose 75% of your woman and only 25% of their men, the latter also requireing a larger number of survivors to ensure a healtyh gene pool or heaving recovery hampered even more or being flatout impossible.
@@Orteiga I agree if you look at trends and try to make "evolutionary logic" but reality doesn't map perfectly to human logic and reasoning. Just right now there are countless cultures on this planet, with so many different customs and traditions, some seeming fitting or contradictory to what would be "logical" and when you factor in the vast majority of humanity lived before us, there are unimaginable ways in which these societies acted, and to say something so generalized as "women gathered men hunted" is prescriptive of anthropology, not descriptive, and not very useful in actually understanding our past and ancestors.
@@zacnizib the statment in a vacuum is a generalisation, yes, but so is every statment on any "non-monochromatic" (english is not my first language, i know that word doesnt nessesarely fit here but i think you can infer what im refering to) subject group ever made (e.g. "christians belive that...", "in [insert country here] culture...", etc.) .
The fact that men are less important in keeping a population is, to my knowlage, one, if not the major core reasons on why there is sexual dimorphism in humans in the way it is and pretending its not there doesnt make it go away. like, theres a reason why for example men and womens sports are seperated in most physical disciplines. sure there might be individuals from either gender in certain fields that excelles in an activity that the other gender tends to be more successfull at but just generally and broadly speaking, the average man will likely make a better hunter then the average woman just simply because they are preset by evolution to be more naturally adapted to the skills needed to hunt, because from the getgo it is more likely that a tribe that has men hunt and women gether has a higher female to male ratio and therefore an easier time to not die out and pass on their genes (assuming more people die hunting then gathering and they have the luxury of being able to devide their duties).
i might have gone off a bit on a tangent there and please dont get me wrong. i dont think women are in any way an inferior being to men or anything like that, thats a stupid notion that i dont agree with in any way. im just saying the game was rigged from the getgo and each gender developed more towards the skillsets that where most helpfull to survive together as a species and therefore we tend to have different base interests and it anoyes me that people go arround pretending these dont exist and claiming """its just a social construct""". im not talking about you here btw, i dont realy dissagree with anything you saied so far, im just ranting.
@@Orteiga your arguments are very clear and understandable, and your English is great, I don't disagree with you either when thinking about averages and the evolutionary basis of sexual dimorphism, but the whole argument that I am making is that when people focus too much on those averages, they miss how nuanced reality is. Actual human biology defies averages, I know countless men that would make awful hunters and I know women that would suck at child rearing, people did what they could to help the family survive. I'm sure a Neolithic society values survival over maintaining gender roles, because even though biological sex does exist, the meaning and responsibilities of each sex is defined by an individuals culture, which makes it a social construct. I'm not saying that makes it meaningless, culture is another method in which humans are able to adapt, it's part of the reason we are so successful as a species and can live in so many different environments. At this point though I'm just ranting as well, thank you for shouting into the void with me.
you can to an extent. sexual dimorphism and division of labor is noted even in the earliest finds
A person's material condition really does shape their perception of gender roles and society. In a hunter-gatherer society, it's all hands on deck get the resources you can get regardless of who you were.
@@EWKification That's one of the bigger flaws in this video and that "study".
@@EWKification That's one of the things about science. there's only so much hard facts you can use before you wander into the world of assumption and deduction, both of which are based on individual perception and opinion
Almost as if it's about ability, not genitals
@@kingsavage2272 Seeing as how your genitals determine if you can create human beings, it actually *is* about genitals!
@@kingsavage2272 you’re grossly oversimplifying it to make ur point sound more smarter
I just want to let you guys know that having the Thumbnail border be red on the bottom is going to make a lot of people think they've already watched the video, since fully watching a video adds a red bar along the bottom of the video thumbnail in the web browser
Isn't the bottom border green?
The bottom border is def green.
color blind maybe?
Looks red to me too although I'm colorblind. I would have trouble telling difference
LOL, check your vision, man: it's bright green (and I know for sure I'm not color blind).
Busting the myth of "Station wagons never went off road, only off road vehicles did"
Please let there be a term for the “projecting modern understanding of gender roles onto the past”...because I still love the term “ethnocentrism” (projecting your own culture standards onto other peoples’ and their culture)
Absolutely but sometimes a cultural can be so wrong
@@demikava6663 I think you forgot a word or two.
Agreed on there needing to be a term though. There seems to be a pervading idea that new or current day is always better.
From Wikipedia, "presentism" and "chronocentrism" seem close
Ethnocentism is a great term i use alot and try not to be, cause every culture is different, even down to diet
Don't forget heteronormativity.
It was my understanding that part of the consideration was that men were more expendable and thus put in more dangerous professions. If a population loses most of their men, the population can still recover easily. The same is not true for a population losing most of the women simply because there's a limit to how many children each woman can bare in a generation.
Hmmm
Hmmm
Early man wouldn't really make that calculation. Nobody could be disposable because losing anyone would be a major loss to the groups survival. Our only strength at the time was coordination and communication so it would be silly trying to hunt with only half of the able bodied when doubling it massively increase the odds of success
But women are much more picky. They dont go with every man so maybe they would have more babies if theres more choise in men.
@@endaohalloran6649 Something like that isn't cognatively considered by the individual.
Early humans didn't hold a commitie to decide things like women are gonna have baby food processors on their chests, etc.
In other words, early man didn't make this calculation, it was the result of millions of years of natural selection, toward optimal proliferation.
To understand natural selection, you have to look at things from the perspective of the proliferation of our species.
From that perspective, the animal called male humans are expendible. While fertile female humans are the most valuable and indispendible members of our species.
If you have 200 humans left on earth, 100 men and 100 women, our species would be screwed if 99 of those women died.
But, if 99 men died instead, there'd be way more hope, because one man can impregnate 100 women, simultaneously. But not visa versa.
Fertile women being more valuable then men is one of the things that is at the root of all the other biological differences that evolved to make men and women different, physically and behaviorally.
The other root factor is because nurture (development, through teaching, feeding, protecting, etc), and the fact nurture in humans is a huge long term investment that's so great that both parents evolved to participate in nurture, plays a significant role in the optimal proliferation of our species (which is what natural selection in all life that ever existed on earth, is evolving toward).
All mammals employ nurturing to what ever degreee, evolved to specialize in the traits to successfully nurture offspring, through natural selection(if a species' proliferation is dependent on certain behavior, they're gonna evolve to become better at it). In humans, males also have a specialized role in the nurture of offspring.
And this is why humans have two types of attraction. Sexual and romantic attraction.
Romantic attraction is simply how our biology selects for the traits required to to fill the specialized gender role of raising offspring. And this is why human females evolved to be highly selective.
E.g. In cattle nurture is insignificant in comparison to humans, so female bovines are not romantically selective at all. They'll willingly mate with any male, and selection happens via males physically chasing away competitors (some males still sneak back and mate and the female just goes with the flow.)
The other factor, is the fact that human babies are completely dependent for a long period. Human babies cant walk, run away from threats, or talk (these things require lots of investment in terms of nurture), or even dispose of excrement or urine themselves. And aren't adapted to surviving the elements, the sun, wind, rain, etc. And like all mammals can only consume processed food, processed by the female body. Even a a human pregnancy is a huge investment. Which makes human babies extremely reliant on on nurture, especially in the first few years. And the human female evolved to provide most of the direct nurture, while the male has mostly a supporting role in this task (e.g. He doesn't have baby food processors on his chest, so he supports the feeding of the baby by providing food to the mother).
For millions of years this was the most optimal way to split the task of feeding a human baby, so each evolved to specialize in their portion of this task...and the same for all other tasks related to raising offspring.
Which is why the sexes of the human species, just like virtually all other species on earth, evolved different physical and behavioral traits. Each specializing in a different role meant to compliment each other in the task of raising offspring.
It's why men on average are naturally taller, stronger, have faster reflexes, more assertive, confident, ambitious, stoic, etc. It's because for millions of years, these were the traits females selected in partners, because these were the traits that were optimal for the male's role in the most optimal proliferation of our species.
While men prioritized the selection of different traits in females over the millions of years (traits focused more on nurture and navigating society...it's why women are way better than men at reading social queues, etc they needed these abilities more to survive and thrive, than other abilities.)
Women play the main role in raising offspring, while men play the supporting role. These are different roles. And it's why men and women's DNA are different in the ways that it is presently different.
Btw, most behavior is genetic. This a scientifically verified fact from a field of study called Behioral Genetics. Some more behavior is more genetic than other. E.g. Sexual and romantically influenced behavior (which is more broad than people realize...e.g. It's why humans gather resources, build homes, find mates, have offspring, keep things clean, keep ourselves clean, etc... this behavior is influenced by the type of sexual and romantic attraction that is specific to our species.)
And it's why some birds gather resources, build homes, find mates, have offspring, keep things clean etc. It's genetically induced behavior.
And it's induced via impulses and emotion. Humans can't cognatively and directly choose what we feel, what we feel we want, what we are attracted to, etc. It's chosen for us by the biological mechanisms that guides our behavior toward proliferation.
This doesn't surprise me. I assume hunting was, at that time, would've been a common skill for survival.
Why would women, who care for children, be hunting?
@@Aden_III It's possible some men participated in childcare, or other members from a close group, if one of those women was fit for hunting. Roles are rarely strictly binary, depending on individuals.
@@Aden_III
Dunno
Have you considered the idea that in some situations strict role assignment is not possible
@@kiraleshoth I doubt the non binary nature of most ancient peoples.
@@Katzelle3 Except strict role assignment isn’t only possible but sometimes the only possible solution. You’re not going to have your women out hunting, full stop. Just didn’t happen
My only critique is the woman in the thumbnail looks like she picked out her clothes from The Gap
I seem to remember a viking era burial from Sweden containing a female skeleton with a sort of strategic planning tool, armour, horses, a sword and other stuff related to military commanders. Viking women also supposedly held the keys to the house, though this was possibly because men tended to go out on the sea for fishing or trading.
The viking lady has been debunked
@urachulnan ur mom Do you mean as in Vikings were specifically seaborne nordic raiders, and that many nordic sailors were out to trade, or do you mean something else?
It would make sense for fit healthy women in their primes to resume physically demanding tasks necessary for the survival of the group once their kids were past breastfeeding stage. In most species that form tight-knit social groups, all of the youngsters typically get watched over by a few baby sitters while everyone else goes off to hunt. Why not just have them supervised by a grandma or grandpa who can no longer run or hunt? Prehistoric grandparents were probably just as happy to care for and share their precious knowledge with the youngsters.
In shitty third-world countries I know where people live lives worse than my dogs I observed that they can't stop breeding, and women are pregnant all the time - The shittier their lives are the more they breed! - This is just my observation from working in sub-Saharan Africa. It must have been the same in the past, I know at least in my own family before WWI they all bred like rabbits and had lots of babies dying too.
I mean if u rlly thinked u would've noticed that back in the days we didnt even live to the age 80 or even 50
@@withyx9424 No some people did reach ripe old ages... we have the bones to prove it! It just would not have been nearly as prevalent as today. Heck some people were severely crippled and could not have survived on their own... but went on to live long lives. Meaning they were cared for despite being disabled.
Btw human women ceasing to be fertile in their 40's despite being biologically able to live into their 80's and 90's? You can count on one hand the species that experience menopause. Orcas, pilot whales, false killer whales and humans. Menopause would not be a thing in humans if going past 40 was barely ever heard of.
The point of menopause is to create doting grandmothers. The aging females hold the most valuable knowledge and survival skills, and by switching their focus from producing new children of their own to being devoted to their adult children and grandchildren, they greatly increase the overall survival and success of their families as a whole.
This is a misrepresentation, if you survived passed 10 you were likely to grow old in ancient times.
I don’t believe people lived till they couldn’t run or hunt
Damn dude, that's an usually low like to dislike ratio
@@Wert-eo7sz That's on scishow for lying in the title then.
@@Wert-eo7sz I'd say most of the people here this early are from notifications and they just don't like what they're pushing. Just dropping a dislike so they don't keep going this way.
@@EWKification social justice is sex and gender and the more sex and gender the more social justicer it is amirite?
@@EWKification politics is science. No scientific discovery worth making was uncontroversial. If your beliefs are not confronted by scientific discovery, you're not looking wide enough. You'd be assuming your worldview is correct and no new science could ever change it. This is antithetical to discovery.
Because rational people have long left SciShow. Otherwise, it would be mostly dislikes.
I have heard this before, the theory stated that girls after reaching a certain age would go on hunts with their brothers, fathers, cousins, ect. Under the idea that girls would want to go exploring/hunting as much as boys did. Also there were necessary skills both boys and girls needed to learn on the hunt for their own survival and for the survival of the tribe. Though as females got older and mated, once they had children it became impractical to hunt with the men. Though again, if the female was pretty good or great help on the hunts, then other females would take care of her children when she was on the hunt. It also stated that some males had to stay with the tribe at all times, incase of accidents, animals, or other human attacks. Though it could also be as simple as men wanting to stay near the children when they are small or some males just didn't have the knack for the hunt.
it is well known in MANY indigenous cultures that still exist today that restrictive and bigoted ideas about sex, gender, and sexuality are more often than not a product of the twisted versions of christianity that spread alongside colonialism as one of its primary moral justifications. a huge amount of the assumptions and attitudes about such things across the world come from that legacy. this kind of research just confirms what native peoples around the world already know. useful i suppose for people who dont listen to or give credence to indigenous history.
I suggest you take a look at 2:42 in the video
😂 I love watching as history is constantly rewritten.
Seriously it's ridiculous
It's not even that conclusive yet. We can still observe actual hunter gatherer communities that employ traditional roles. It's not there because of misogyny but because of convenience.
Evidence suggests that women did indeed provide most of the nutritional content for the family/clan (berries, vegetables, nut, other fruit, and grasses). Men provided most of the protein for the the clans diet through hunting, but of course women would help with that as well as needed though evidence suggest that it wasn't the common practice. Mostly because gathering was less strenuous and was an effort that could be sustained throughout the course of a day whilst hunting was more of a great effort done once daily that one would need rest from once done.
Unless vegetation was scarce, it would hurt more than it would help for both parents to be hunting and gathering, especially if they had children to care for which the vast majority did.
Animal food sources provide more micro- and macro nutrients compared to nuts, berries, etc.
I guess you've never watched the show Naked and afraid. lol!
It gets confusing for people to understand what average means. When science asserts that men were hunters and women were gatherers does not imply that a 100% of men and a 100% of women were one or the other. It means that most of men were hunters and most of women were gatherers. It is obvious that there will be remains of some women being hunters. As well as some men being gatherers.
I have no scientific basis just an intuition but I'm pretty sure in caveman times everyone did everything because there was very little to do.
Very little to do!?
Do you think that the animals just strolled up to them and said "I'm here for dinner" or that they could wander down to the orchards and gardens and pick fruit and vegetables and that their supply of firewood was endless and came pre-cut, split and dried. Their homes built and maintained themselves with hot and cold running water.
You are either totally ignorant or a troll. Perhaps both.
@@MadMulberry i think the person meant "very little to do" *sitting around at home*. You're right, they would be doing all kinds of respurce gathering and such.
Ancient humans just cared about surviving and taking care of their fellow community members.
Yeah, men probably were more prominent in things like war, hunting, fighting, and such.
But women are also capable of doing these things, and i doubt any community in the ancient times would deny any help hunting for the whole community. You would want every ounce of help and strength that you and your community could muster to take down large herbevires because otherwise you’d die.
If you’re skilled with a bow, spear or any form of weapon or tool. I would be glad to have you use it for maximum efficiency if it helps me and others survive.
Men and women compliment each other and thats what made us so succesful.
Some were hunted, some were scavanged and gatherers, some were tool makers and crafters. You did what you were best at to complete and optimize your community.
Because a tribe of exclusivly hunters would quickly fall appart due to not being generalized enough, when pray is scarce, what were they suppose to do then?
Same thing with gatherers and scavangers, when there are too many competing animals and you have no way to gain any advantage in the race for resources, you would be outperformed by other animals.
Relying on each other made us strong because we are not all the same, we are all good at different things and bad at different things.
Doesn’t matter who was the primary hunters of the community, what mattered for the ancient humans was surviving and procreation of the species.
You don't know anything, you're just talking nonsense.
These ancient people had cultures, they had ceremonies and stories and gods and traditions that held the group together. They made jewellery and crafts, you don't last thousands of years without a strong social order.
Hunting involves the taking of life and in all cultures is the subject of spiritual tradition and is never done haphazardly by a random group but always by the initiated always by men.
I can certainly imagine some men being gatherers...
I see what you did here.
As a man who doesn’t like to kill things, I would not mind being a gatherer.
Being a gatherer would be boring
@@demonetizationbutton2388
I’d hunt for you ;)
My ears: wow interesting knowledge
My eyes: *hoodie*
Wait Hank let me grab the popcorn for the comment section first
Yeah a lot of triggered incels boosting SciShow up the algorithm 🤣
@@firstname405 I've seen about 95% reasonable people and at most 5% leaving "leftist agenda" or "next we'll hear they were gender fluid" type comments. But maybe those just got buried over the hours since release.
@@MellonVegan ah that's good! I must have got here too early before the trash was buried under respectable comments
So, 16 of them were male and 11 female. In my mind I never thought "Men Hunt, Women Gather" makes sense: I always thought it meant "Men are more likely to hunt, Women are more likely to gather". If there are berries to collect and no food left, of course everyone would collect the berries. If there is a big animal around and everyone is starving, of course everyone would hunt it. Then, as we saw in later societies, when the food situation gets better, this role gap widens between the genders.
All the above without getting into the physical differences. The genes ended up this way, because it helped the species to survive better.
As hanks puts it, the "men hunt, women gather" is an overly simplified statement. But even so I caught myself believing it until today. I feel stupid but I learnt something new today!
I always thought that women were gatherers since they were the only ones who could feed babies.
You could stop mid gathering to feed the baby.
You probably wouldn't want to stop mid hunting for many reasons.
@@popdogfool you probably wouldn't bring the baby to hunting, even if you were a mother you could have someone else at camp watch over them. Also they could go hunting before they popped out a kid or after the kid is old enough to lookout for itself
I think it depends on how dangerous it is. men are just more disposable from a biological point, so if it's really deadly, you send men first.
Now if it's relatively safe, the more hands the better.
@@sprigganpanda I guess that makes sense.
It seems scientists have to make many of their theories on many prehistoric species using very small sample sizes.
Pretty much. That's why things on ancient history keep changing. They just keep finding new things.
Because there arent large sample sizes, good luck even finding one intact skeleton.
Also saying 11 of 27 is half isnt not math
Kody Wootton They probably calculated std error and from that you can say that as many as half could have been female. So yes, it isn’t not math. It... is math.
These ancient tribes did not have large populations , which is why they needed any able bodied adult to help with hunting.
I really cannot fathom how somebody can hear Hank say the limitations of the study and then repeat them in the comments as if they're finding holes in the video.
The contentious and clickbait headline undermines the limitations cited deep in the video
@@pathologicaldoubt way to judge a book by its cover. Turns out appealing science to a wide audience on youtube is difficult
With a thumbnail like that, the video rating is exactly what I expected.
Thumbnail and title.
Especially on youtube. This is JRE territory lol
Not that it really matters. Nothing worth stating was ever non-contraversial.
Sensationalism sells!
You can tell a skeletons sex by it's teeth?! That's freaking amazing.
It's quite easy. Males have proportionally longer arms, a more volumous rib cage more skeletal outgrowths in the face and are just larger.
@@magnagermania9311 Ok... but the question here was teeth.
@@squirrelpower1666 I was talking about the rest of the body. Size difference also differs
Yes back then they didn't "identify" lol
In terms of how gendered divisions of labour might have emerged over time, a nice book is Cailin O’Connor’s - The Origins of Unfairness. She has an interesting game theoretical way of showing that even extremely small differences can be used as “symmetry breakers” to coordinate group action where there’s a need for two or more complementary roles to achieve the group goal. Then she goes on to show that those kinds of divisions can lead certain groups to accrue power, which can then be used to influence the outcome of subsequent role divisions, and so a cultural evolutionary dynamic gets launched that can take insignificant differences as input and lead to very large inequalities. Naturally the book isn’t meant to be a justification of just inequality, instead it tries to explain why (e.g., gender) inequality exists and why it’s so persistent so that we can think more clearly about how ameliorate it :)
That's fine but you cannot "accrue power" without property (land or livestock in terms paleohistorical) and that did not happen among hunter-gatherers. Even if HG societies tend to have some gender-based division of labor (very lax anyhow) that does not generate power because the most important "property" they have is their community and that's not something you can "own" except by means of genuine love (cooperation, solidarity, empathy...) In HG societies, especially in the less crowded past, people easily "voted with their feet": don't feel good in this camp?, move to another one... or multiple people have a major conflict with their tribe, they split apart and find new separate hunting grounds, this applies to both men and women. Instead when land or livestock is already consolidated into property of some sort (late in the Neolithic or already in the Metal Ages, when division of labor, classism and sexism become much more apparent, as a male warrior elite takes over), then hierarchies get consolidated: classes, castes often enough, slavery also appears and of course sexism (against women) becomes rather generalized (details vary but the overall trend is what we call Patriarchy -- also children become more abused, another trait of Patriarchy that is often overlooked: children evolve from "hope" and "community's goal" into "commodity" to some extent).
I've been pondering a lot through all my life on these issues and recently it's become clear that Patriarchy is not distinct from the general "landownerist" society that sits between "primitive communism" and Capitalism, it is an aspect (a central one but not the only one) of the (mostly) Metal Ages' hierarchy dominated by warrior elites (which include various less differentiated sub-systems: slavism, feudalism, even forms of class-structured "tribalism" such as the types we find in proto-historical Europe, etc.)
@@LuisAldamiz True true, most of Cailin’s examples include early agriculture because that’s where role differentiation starts giving groups significant power (either personal property or more privileged access to common resources). Maybe you know more than me about this, but at least in some of the anthropology I’ve read there are some halfway houses between a full hunter gatherer lifestyle with no agriculture and full sedentary agriculture: communities which hunt and gather and which have some form of semi-permanent agriculture. I would guess there’s then a gradation of how people can accumulate power. If you throw in non-material ritual forms of power than that could be another avenue for group power accumulation.
Also very interesting stuff about attitudes to children in HG vs agricultural societies: how do people know this?
With regard to private property in HG societies I think you’re right that, as far as we know, it’s much less common than in agricultural societies: ownership is often group or kin based, in those HG societies we have historical record of or that still exist in some form. But there people often share e.g. meat because there are strong norms about how it should be shared. In Henrich’s The Secrets of Our Success he documents some of these norms, and notes how effectively they promote food-sharing and insure group members against starvation, but also how often the actual stated reasons for the norm don’t reference these benefits but are rather ritualistic (I.e., if you, the hunter, eat x part of the animal then you will get sick, because that part of the animal is only proper to eat if you’re an elderly woman). Henrich’s not having a dig at HG societies with this point, instead it’s an example of a general point he makes during the book that many societies tend to develop functional norms and techniques (e.g., for corn detoxification in the Americas) without explicitly understanding why those norms work or acting in such a way because they know those norms or techniques have the desired effect.
@@CC-qh5jm - You say: "there are some halfway houses between a full hunter gatherer lifestyle with no agriculture and full sedentary agriculture"...
Sure but I am pretty sure that they must be treated as "not hunter-gatherers", just as you don't treat wild west trappers (or industrial fishermen) as such. When we talk about hunter-gatherers in these anthropological terms we refer to true hunter-gatherers that have really never transitioned to agriculture and herding. That socio-economic stage is around 99% of Human paleohistory (or 95% if we only consider H. sapiens) and we do observe that even only partial transition to agriculture and herding often changes a lot. For example Khoisan women are losing rights and social status as their society transitions (by political decision) to herding, a type of economy that often leaves women behind, without economic power. Herding is maybe more extreme than farming in this but it also happens in farming (or the much more usual farming with some herding type of economy), in this case it may be delayed until the rise of forms of land property and of warrior elites (i.e. class society) but it happens nevertheless.
Years ago I compared two prehistoric Iberian societies and it's clear that, even in pre-Indoeuropean societies (in the "old Europe" that Gimbutas tended to idealize) both class and gender hierarchies arose with the arrival of metallurgy: forwhattheywereweare.blogspot.com/2011/03/childhood-and-death-in-neolithic-and.html
While here the non-egalitarian data comes from a consolidated Bronze Age society (and a frontier castle on top of that), other evidence strongly points to such type of society coalescing earlier in the period that, in Europe, is often called Chalcolithic (or "Copper Age" but defined by social hierarchies, division of labor and not always by the presence of soft metals' metallurgy, in British archaeology this is muddled with "late Neolithic" and "early Bronze Age", quite confusing, maybe even more than the Imperial metric system). This stage is roughly the one in which the more advanced Native Americans were when Europeans arrived, and again we do see in the most civilized areas classism and sexism, property and warrior elites, but still sometimes mixed with older forms of society in which such structure is less consolidated (and in the vast peripheries we also see a varied array of semi-agrarian peoples with various degrees of social evolution very much worth studying but almost never true hunter-gatherers).
@@CC-qh5jm - "Also very interesting stuff about attitudes to children in HG vs agricultural societies: how do people know this?"
It's hard to pinpoint, sorry, I know from long ago that Patriarchy involves much more than just sexism. The standard patriarchal family (and society), at least in the West, is the classical Roman one (although Greek family was similar anyhow and Celtic family, or the Hebrew family as portrayed in the Bible, etc.) It's not the only form of Patriarchy but it's a very good reference because Romans were quite no-nonsense and the "pater familias" (patriarch) had power of life and death over every single member of his "familia" (literally: group of famuli or house-slaves), including grown-up sons. And a father could even sell his children and wife into slavery and it did happen at least often enough to be eventually declared illegal. The word "proletarian" comes from ancient Roman terminology and it means someone (a man) that has nothing but his children (prole), which he could either sell as slaves or exploit economically in other ways (the latter also happens today and was more common in the recent past). Even the poorest of "patriarchs" still had some economic resource: his family, which were legally barely above the status of slaves.
Of course not all forms of Patriarchy have to adhere exactly to that "Roman standard" but it's also good to have a reference, much as we have a reference for Feudalism in the Carolingian system, etc. I personally tend to make a difference between hard and light forms of Patriarchy, the latter of which tend to more egality between genders and more rights in general, even for children possibly, but are still to some extent trapped in that paradigm of patriarch dominance. For example my own Basque society, sometimes claimed to be "matriarchal", is historically, as far as I can tell, a light quasi-egalitarian type of patriarchy instead. As my dad explained to me once: women are respected and often strong in character but ultimately, in case of dispute, it's "the man of the house" who makes the decision, also it's almost invariably men who inherit with preference, etc.
Interesting. But as others have pointed out, women hunters probably did not wear pink short dresses like the one in the image.
Also, color recognition vs motion tracking.
That isn't true.
@@PlatinumAltaria of course it's true have you ever looked at paint samples with a woman???
@@1simo93521 Even if women could magically see more colours than men (they cannot) that wouldn't translate to any actual advantage, as you clearly already know people's colour vision is perfectly adequate. Even colourblind people don't starve to death.
The problem with this (except that n=27, which is insanely small) is that some of those burials are groups. If it's a single female skeleton with big hunting tools, we can assume they belong to her. If it's a group of mixed sexes, who is to say they didn't belong to the males OR the female alone. I am 100% open to female hunters, but it's a big jump to assume this with n=27 and then predict maybe half (when 11/27 isn't half) could have been. Also, scientists tend to say early man were NOT a patriarchy, nor a matriarchy, so the thumbnail is clickbait.
I think this is the reason for the dislikes. To jump like this to that conclusion make it seems like a "pandering" video.
Let's assume that even sample was representative and big enough. Even if we try to squeeze it in to moulds of modern fads, all it proves is that there had been a... gender hunting gap.
I mean it doesn't really matter if you're male or female if you're hunting in group really.
Which human definitely often do.
yes early man are patriarchy,Man is the natural leader,they have it in their instinct,every single study about paleo society shows that man is the ruler,woman is JUST helper
Archeologists have extremely refined forensic methods to tell which items were buried with which skeletons. You're talking about graveyards, not mass graves.
It's almost like different people do different things...
Science
now there is proove of that.
Science
I mean it only makes sense. I can imagine that the elderly would mostly take care of the children and do the gather stuff while the young and fit men and women would hunt.
Maternal hormones bond mothers to their offspring and didn’t the elderly die before thirty?
@SciFyerGaming As many people did not live through their 20s, no woman would be past child bearing years. When you were strong/ fast enough you worked. As an able bodied woman that would leave late stages of pregnancy/shortly after giving birth.
I can't remember the paper that described different approaches to child rearing, but remember most Australian hunter-gatherer cultures to be 'babysitters'. Some breastfeeding women left behind with the infants and everyone who needs to going off to get food, at times for weeks. Meaning also child rearing was a communal effort.
@@geraldn.6871 It's a partially wrong belief that people died before 30 usually. People back then could become really old sometimes too, but since there was a 50% child mortality for children who were younger than 2, this drags the average down by a lot. If you didn't count the deaths of young children in, the average would be higher. I don't know by how much, though.
Women usually got pregnant between the age of 14 and 25 which is generally a bad condition to hunt (people didn't get much older than 30-40 years).
A male could be rather replaced after he fertilized a woman, because male sperm cells are biologically cheaper than female egg cells. The woman needs to at least survive 9 months of pregnancy and then feed the newborn. During this time all females could participate in was gathering and hunting small animals such as rabbits.
Also testosterone causes a body develop more muscle mass, more red bloodcells and faster metabolism. Why do men naturally have higher levels of testosterone?
@@dreamyrhodes That is the modern narrative and as shown often too simplistic. A lot of hunting was done by chasing animals for long periods of time. No difficulties there.
Other studies showed that the separation of work was not as simple either. Inuit hunters had to know how to cook and mend clothes, where as the ones left in the village had to be able to get their food/ hunt/ fish themselves.
Also there were some interesting studies of testosterone levels and child rearing. Men with higher levels of testosterone were most likely earlier fathers. But in later stages hormone levels were predicted by how much time they spend with (their) children. So hormone levels change according to behaviour. There is a lot we don't know, yet. But a lot of the current explanations are assumptions of how we understand gender. As I grew up with a very different narrative of what women do, it is obvious to me. Not to say that genders were treated equally, but gender stereotypes were quite different.
Hot take: Both can do both roles if they have to, but I think even in prehistoric times they just opted to play to their strengths.
Vikings
Celts
Quite a few African tribes
Ancient China and ancient Japan
And others I cannot recall off the top of my head. Just do a Google search
@@elgatochurro
Depends on the woman, or the man.
Everything with asterisks, after all.
That's not really a hot take, more like the most logical and obvious take.
@@elgatochurro meanwhile my 12 yr old niece shot her first deer on the start of hunting season last weekend. Do you even think before you write a comment?
@@elgatochurro (looks at methane emissions from cattle and other farm animals, looks at the horrible conditions the animals are kept in, looks at how if we use the amount of food to feed people instead of the animals people would be a lot less hungry, and looks at the intelligence of the animals humans are treating this way) yep totally just about not wanting to kill an animal yeah that's totally it, they're couldn't possibly be other factors at play that could possibly explain why I wouldn't want to eat meat.
So maybe it's that extroverts hunted and introverts gathered.
@rrobertt13 No we did not die, we just went inside.
Or it could've been that the cool tough people hunted and the sissy weaklings gathered :o
Introverts hung back being doctors, making clothes, training good doggos
An introvert is someone who just spends more time honing their craft over socializing. A hunter can be an introvert. A toolsmith can be an introvert. A farmer can be an introvert
@rrobertt13 People didn't leave the sick and elderly to die. Taking care of the vulnerable members of the community was part of what strengthened tribes. Communities and families that only cared about what you could do and obsessed over individualism did not stick together during times of crisis.
And that's even before you factor in the rich religious and ceremonial practices that often depended enturely on the elderly's extensive experiences
Humans have always been a social animal.
New title: Some Women Hunted
@@MaoRatto Or they done it to eat
They are running up to us all frantic "NOT ALL! NOT ALL!"
@@MaoRatto you mean Social Justice Points?;)
New title : Mostly half of the hunting population were female.
Found the incels 🤭
Headline: “WAHMYN HUNTED!”
Artemis: I mean, yeah, what about it?
This guy gathers
sick burn loooool
:oooof:
good for him
I doubt there was much to gather in that environment
Which is why "all hands on deck to find the food stuff" was so important.
Yeah, because all of those berries, mushrooms, roots, fruit, leaves, insects, and other edible non-game food sources don't exist.
@@Chromia1 that's pretty much the point I sought to expound...and which I did expound with such glorious brevity:-)
@@tjpprojects7192 not so much high up in the mountains, champ
You know that corn, potatoes and tomatoes are all food crops whose original wild counterpart are native to Peru. People in Peru would’ve been gathering those plants for a very long time before the development of agriculture and domestication of those three very important food crops.
are you ignoring modern day hunter gatherer societies who live basically unchanged since the time of their ancestors?
Came for the science
Stayed for the comment section
A moment for the male paranthropus who was "much smaller than expected." I feel your pain, bro. I feel your pain.
I find Pfizer's announcement shady when the CEO sold off all this stock immediately after the stock rose.
Buy low, sell high.
@@hoovdaddy0505 well yeah, he did it right as the US gov said they'd investigate their Chinese ties. To me that means CEO knows Pfizer is gunna get fined for 'something'. Something worth just selling his shares off for, then rebuying when the stock drops. Helloo~ insider trading.
@The Iguana ... The first 25 seconds of the video?
All the links for the sources in the description are broken
It would have been interesting if they could or did examine the shoulder bones and back vertebra. If she had shown a distinct adaption to throwing and carrying compared to other females.
That!!
They're homo sapiens and their direct decedents are still alive today, so it's highly unlikely any unknown major adaptions would've occurred.
I never got this idea because usually people base it on "Men are stronger so they must do the physical labor throughout time" but the thing is, in all cases of animals I can think of showing dimorphism in physical strength, it isn't for doing physical labor- it's for competing for mates. Have you seen how beefy bucks are compared to does? Yet, they don't help the mother to raise the fawns. No, they just use this strength to compete with other bucks. And wolves. The males are slightly bigger and stronger (not by a lot, really,) yet both male and female hunt equally. And everyone helps out with the pups.
Men aren't deers nor canines.
@@siyacer Yes, but if it's a consistent thing throughout nature for muscles to exist for the purpose of finding a mate, you can assume that it probably ISN'T there for men to work for some reason.
@@catpoke9557 What? Muscles are attractive because they signify a tough and strong potential mate that can protect their tribe. They're not there simply for sexual attraction.
I'd like to point out that "hunting" in many of these studies are for "Big Game": species that are approximately the same size or larger than the hunter. Small game species, fishing and even scavenging comprise activities under "Gathering" or "foraging" done by Women and children
Where did you get your sweater?
I like all the comments talking about spear hunting in paleolithic era as if most hunting isn't just running an animal to exhaustion first, chasing it over a cliff edge, or chasing it towards a trap/ambush. Real high strength adventures those are indeed . . . . Anyway, all hail the algorithm.
Well then, the fact that, on average, men's cardiovasular and respiratory systems have ~50% higher capacity for their body mass than a woman's would ALSO imply that most hunting was done by men then wouldn't it?
@@rsrt6910 lol, I think you are missing the point. The difference between men and women don't really matter in the context of hunting because you are comparing humans to animals. The thing about running an animal to death isn't about pure cardio - its about heat dumping better than other mammals and being able to communicate to take turns running. Chasing an animal over a cliff isn't about raw speed, its about being able to move as a functional group that can control other animal's perception of space. Chasing an animal into a trap/ambush doesn't really have much to do with physical or cardiovascular strength if you are the one waiting there and just have to roll/throw some rocks down a hill or throw a net.
This is exactly the mentality of assumptions I find hilarious. Having people with greater sprint speeds on the edges of your driving group is beneficial since they can hem in the edges better, but the bulk of people just jogging in a straight line don't need to be all dudes running full bore. The resources you have available dictate your strategy, so yeah, if you have a ton of dudes because you live in a large tribe - sure . . . but actual paleolithic era tribes would likely not be that large that creating gender roles would be significant or smart.
@@Dontreallycare5 so you’re saying that running for hours waiting for a gazelle to pass out from heat exhaustion wouldn’t favor men??
Also only some cultures used cliffs to hunt
animals and the ones that did (prairie Indians in Wyoming) most certainly had men do the brunt of work.
It is absolutely ridiculous to assert that women and men would be interchangeable because “chasing and animal into a trap doesn’t have much to do with cardiovascular strength” -what part of chasing do you not understand? “Chasing” an animal into trap could mean hours of herding or pursuit.
The best way to determine how primitive cultures divided labor is by examining the primitive cultures left around today, and for the most part in Africa and India where tribe with little contact exist, they have males do almost all of the dangerous hunting.
@@dexaphobia8085 Except the differences between men and women's performances drop off more and more over a longer distance. The difference in VO2 max is counter balanced over extreme distances by the smaller caloric requirements of women's bodies. So if you are chasing an animal for hours - it really doesn't matter all that much so long as the individual themselves are conditioned to do it in the first place.
Anyway, pointing to cultures and saying men do dangerous things isn't a commentary on one sex's capabilities over another - its a commentary on the disposable nature of men in the over all health of a reproductive group. That is especially true for smaller groups without advanced medical care - but its really not as much of an issue as groups get larger.
Honestly, I don't really care what past tribes did or didn't do. I care that dumb people take it so seriously as to use it to justify some narrative about how men and women are supposed to live their lives. As someone who goes hunting with a group of friends and family every year, I can tell you that the only real hurdle between genders is just that women aren't expected and trained to go hunting. Once you get over that, a woman is just as capable of hiking a mountain ridge in line with the rest of us to flush out an elk.
Could of been seasonal too like women mostly gathered in summer months and switched to hunting in the winter
"we can't project modern understandings of gender roles into the past, but we're really trying!"
why is that a bad thing
@@moon1474 Thanks for proving his point
@@aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa69 you people keep saying the same thing lol maybe say something meaningful and i'll believe it but no points were made
like are you saying people want today's idea of gender to reflect that of early human society? or that we're trying to see if there was any concept of gender at all and that bothers you
@@moon1474 Because a bunch of people adhering to "modern sensibilities" trying to survival a tribal life in the wilderness would perish pretty quickly.
Thank you so much for that intro.
Dude the fucjin vax pitch at the beginning 😂😂😂 whole video aged like milk hahahhahaha
All of my known female ancestors were tenant farmers before machines were common horses were the thing they were not shrinking violets they were tough ladies!
History has always been blocked to show a specific narrative, this seems more realistic then what I known before, It's so great that new information on history is being found all the time
We are in the middle of our own history. We have our own narrative. We are desperate to find women were big game hunters because this reflects our desire to believe male and females are equals in all respects, and justify our own society.
Women in hunting parties mean nothing about them actually hunting. Women play sport but don’t make it to the super bowl.
@@jeddarcy3465 What makes you think that women being only gatherers is more likely? They were not hunting because they wanted to like in sports, they had to, they did it to survive
We will never know either way but this sounds a lot more likely then women gathering and men hunting to me
@@jeddarcy3465 czcams.com/video/P4SDBVaUboc/video.html
@@jeddarcy3465 And just for nitpicking's sake: there is no female American football league, and consequently there cannot be any super bowl for women to play in. Also, our society as it currently stands is not an egalitarian one lol. We are getting there, but still far from it.
@@JubulusPrimethe critical study showed women only hunted 15% of the time. the new study claimed women hunted 50% of the time but also said that the data present previously was biaased yet they used the same one for their study. but guess what, their own study waa found biased because the article by the name of "debunking a debunking " shows women actually hunted 15% of the time and the reports were quite rare. And biology does make men better hunters. The study saying women hunted as much as men sounds quite biased because of the use of specific language and they lacked evidence so they tried to say more evidence is bad. But this new narrative is not accepted in study of hunter gatherers overall the main literature still shows division of labour. Hadza people are an example!
When i’ll have 5 more cases like that i will believe this isn’t just an exception
Edit:first i wrote coincidence instead of exception my bad
Good idea
All I want for Christmas is a "skip Christmas merch ad" option for these videos.
I got one
AdBlock
It's called CZcams premium
Is it possible that, at least in some societies, hunting vs gathering was more related to age than gender? Perhaps young adults of both genders hunted while older adults and children did more of the gathering and processing.
Yes that sounds very possible. I raise you and say maybe not just age, but also aptitude. You might send young, able-bodied men and women out hunting, but the heavily pregnant women, injured, sick or disabled would probably be gathering, processing, building, toolmaking, carving and painting and weaving.
@@bananewane1402 Another idea came to me. Whether women hunted may have depended, partly at least, on local conditions. Human sexual dimorphism is mostly about size and strength (aside from the reproductive stuff), but hunting is not always a matter of brute strength. Who hunted may have depended on the type of prey and the hunting methods. Also, hunting can be a team activity. In a team, there may be roles that favor size and strength and roles that are either are neutral or even favor smaller stature. Who hunted could also depend on the balance of hunting and gathering in a particular environment. If hunting was more productive than gathering for a particular group of people, then more of the people, including women, may have hunted. If gathering, or early agriculture was more productive, then men may have gathered and grown. We should keep in mind that behavioral flexibility is one of humanity’s greatest evolutionary advantages.
I'm spolied, I grew up with the Museum of Man which has great information on the local native tribes of the area. I'm also a decendant of one of those tribes. This information doesn't. Surprise me at all, just why it took them so long to piece it together.
The Museum of Man in San Diego?
It took them so long to piece it all together because somewhere in the 1950s or 1960s, somebody came up with the idea that men were the hunters, and they ran with it, because it fit their stereotypes based on the gender roles of the time, even evidence debunking that idea was put forth almost immediately, it's being hard to get past it.
"Yu endanger your women yu lose the next war" Sun Tzu
Good to see SciShow pick up on this so promptly!
Related: can we get an ep on the origin of light skin color? Myths about early humans (and other hominids) being light-skinned (“white”) are just as persistent as male supremacist myths. You even use a “white-skinned caveman” illustration early in this video. These illustrations litter textbooks, popular media, and even museum displays, despite the fact that the evidence points to relatively recent mutations.
Thanks!!
If you don't want a light skinned people far north, then you should depict cavemen as dark skinned, deformed victims of vitamin D deficiency. While there may be a grain of truth in to that, in contemporary political climate, that would be even a greater taboo.
The word of the day was caveat
Keep it going Ben ...
Okay but where did Hank get that sweater??
I need it.
Lol, seeing the title I just knew that this video would piss off a lot of people.
This pleases me in more ways than one
Big surprise! Men and women are capable of fulfilling more than one role. Doesn't mean that men don't predominantly hunt, and women predominantly gather. I've hunted, and I've gathered. I'm not a hermaphrodite. "Predominantly" does not mean exclusively. I am partly descended from American Indians. In my tribe, it was in fact men who predominantly hunted. Women predominantly gathered acorns (and other edible vegetation) and prepared them for consumption. But the men could also gather and the women could also hunt. Big whoop.
The species/tribes/groups that generally keep their women safe from serious harm--that is, those who carry new members of the group to term and give birth--is the group that outlasts its competitors in the long run.
@@jonathandorozowsky4005 you’re thinking too small. The tribe that looks after their kids until they are strong enough start learning adult jobs is where it’s at, but any parent, relative, or neighbor can be assigned to that task. I think it depends on how long a hunter/gatherer mother is expected to retain that responsibility, the longer she holds on more likely her tribe will practice gendered divisions of labor.
If she was only expected to stay relatively safe for nine months, then it’s not that unlikely she could drop the kid off with grandma and join her husband and brother and sister and her sister’s husband to hunt big game. If the tribe is heavily reliant on that big game it’s more important to have all hands on deck so we can get that fatty meat and moms won’t be malnourished and she can actually breastfeed when she gets home.
If, OTOH, the tribe isn’t on the brink of starvation and there is a good mix of small and large game, it’s pretty normal to hike your kid over the hill to be with you while you gather. It’s no problem to interrupt digging up a root or stealing bird eggs if you need to tend to the child, and the since small game is not all-or-nothing it’s no big deal if the kid ruins a couple of your catches.
Opportunistic small game hunting done by gatherers is twice as successful as hunting large game, but it only yields half the meat, so if you can afford to let some people hunt and some people gather it’s the most reliable way to keep everyone fed. Ultimately we’re just diversifying our tactics to maximize resources. More diverse tactics tend to allow for specialization and division of labor, and circumstances tend to lead that divide to be somewhat along gender lines.
The mechanics of protecting children are more compatible with gathering than with hunting; whoever does the gathering is most likely taking care of the child, and since the latter job tends to fall on women, the former job tends to go with it as well.
Again there is no rule, mostly just do what you’re best at for the tribe. I’m sure there are plenty of environments and lifestyles that would make the tribe as a whole more or less gendered (even without cultural reenforcement) and these Paleolithic tribes in North America sound like they were in one such situation where gendered division of labor would just be a dumb idea.
*TL;DR* gendered divisions of labor does emerge from natural laws, but they’re contingent on complex circumstances that renders them more like guidelines than actual rules.
@Mike Clark if I may ask, what tribe are you from? I’d like to try and parse what you told us about your ancestors lifestyle with anything other info I might find about their circumstances: social structure, environment, history, etc.
@@AnkhAnanku - Happy to tell you! We are a rather obscure tribe of northern California, the Konkow (various spellings), which is a branch of the Maidu. There isn't a lot of information out there (compared to better known tribes), but try this to start: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidu
My ancestry is rather diluted, but my father insisted my brother and I know where we came from. Our particular band goes by "KonKow Valley Band of Maidu Indians".
@Mullerornis - actually, I don't believe you're correct, not entirely. For example, my own tribe were not "agriculturalists" in the sense that they planted crops and harvested them. The most they did was to "groom" the naturally occurring oak forests using fire to keep the underbrush down so they could gather acorns freely. Their villages were not permanently occupied, though sites were reused as they moved from site to site (and from low to high levels depending upon the season) as they used up the naturally-occurring berries, roots, deer, fish, and other food items near these sites. They actually did very well doing this.
As far as other indigenous Americans were concerned, the Pacific northwest tribes had similar lifestyles due to similar circumstances. The southwestern tribes had different circumstances, so of course their lifestyles differed somewhat, but they were definitely hunter-gatherers. The Navajo were largely hunter-gatherers until contact with the Pueblos, when they began to include crop farming with the "three sisters", corn (maize), beans, and squash. After further contact with the Spanish they also added goat and sheep herding to the mix.
There's nothing wrong with hunting and gathering, by the way. There's less damage to the ecosystem, people engaging in it are generally healthier, and it actually keeps human populations manageable. Agriculture is what has turned our species into a multi-billion person species. Not that this is necessarily bad.
I have a suspicion that the sources that SciShow is relying upon have some kind of politically correct agenda. The current spate of PC social justice nonsense has been attempting to make male and female essentially the same across as many topics as possible. Disregarding a million years of evolution, which emphasizes rather the levels the differences between men and women, is not wise nor is it natural.
Men and women buried with bows together do not imply they hunted together.
This is interesting and suggests that the male/female division of labour cannot be assumed to be consistent between early cultures and that women may have been more active in hunting in some cultures
Not sure how I feel about the current video title of "Busting the Myth of "Men Hunt, Women Gather" " as the new research suggests some variance in the hunting and gathering gender roles across cultures but also doesn't overturn other existing research regarding the prevalence of male hunting.
At the very least, it does broaden the ways that we should consider past cultures by showing that variances like this exist.
yeah aside from the tittle the video is good , it explains that the early genders norms where not always there , and hank correctly points out that its only in these americans fossils so it migth be the case that they need more hunters do lack of food or any other explinations so yeah good video just clickbait tittle
@rrobertt13 no , he said that maybe in some varainces exist which is an ok hypothesis and theory based on these findings its not a confirmation but its a theory that maybe these american human group for x or y didnt have the gender roles .
@rrobertt13 Thank you for replying.
I'm from Australia and as a result, am familiar with the division of labour known to exist in Aboriginal tribes here.
Australian Aboriginal tribes have remained nomadic for upwards of 40 thousand years and do generally represent the 'male hunter/female gatherer' roles. My prior comment makes no sweeping statements about this new study's implications but considers it an interesting observation which suggests an unknown but present degree of variety in gender roles among different cultures.
I generally dislike the title of the video due to it's suggestion that this study 'debunks' the previous understanding entirely.
Edit:
If your comment was aimed at a general collective of other people you disagree with, I think it would benefit you to engage your discussions with an almost robotic tone.
I.e. "I'm curious as to why you believe this is the case as this other example might be contradictory to your comment."
Else nobody's likely to want to share their views, and if neither party is willing to learn about the other because they're both on the offence, then there's no real benefit to the discussion in my view.
@rrobertt13 Yep. I can agree that the phrasing of the video might imply some political leanings that aren't strictly necessary. I'm thankful that you understand my viewpoint now as well.
@rrobertt13 dude, _every_ academic field with anything to say on the subject rejects the idea of a sex-equivalent gender binary and you're getting upset about a science channel being precise with its language because it upsets your politics. Give it up already.
Phillip DeFranco Credited a tweet you did..
My lil pottery cup overflowed it was the CZcams rewind comment. Love it ⏪❤️
damm go back to reddit woman
I expect a mix of how people are.
I don't know why you would say that lmao
One question. In prehistory women probably must have had a lot of children to make sure that at least two arrived at reproductive age (there is a very high mortality rate for newborns, And pregnancy itself can be fatal to women). If females had to take all that burden, it makes sense that men were more occupied in gathering resources (hunting and warfare).
Take into account that in the first months the newborn needs the female most of the time for breastfeeding, and if she had to have multiple pregnancies from 16 years old until 25 years old she was not available for dangerous and physically stressful activities such as hunting.
I m not saying this is 100% true, but I would like to hear other opinions
If theres not much food you dont have the luxury to sit around and do nothing. Sometimes they had to stalk the prey for 2 weeks or come home with nothing because they ait everything or couldnt kill it.
This video is about hunting big animals. Nowadays the women and children mostly hunt small animals and fish and octopus. In some tribes they hunt monkeys.
If youre not hunting you had to gather food. To gather food people have to walk 10 km or more per day with a child on the back and/or front also when they are pregnant. So even if they didnt hunt they couldnt just relax.
Also, people are meant to walk and do other physical activities even when they are pregnant. Now too many people are sitting on their butt all day.
Here in northeastern Brazil it's SO HOT that it's almost unbearable do watch Hank with such a warm confy sweater. GODDAMM SUN!!!!
What is the current high and low temperatures where you are?
@@ZipplyZane I live next to the sea, so the amplitude is never quite high... These days the temperature is oscilating between 31 and 27ºC.
@@migueldacruzalmeidarocha5855 Here in southeast we have amost 42°C not so long ago.
@@CapitainOne
I love word/poetry fridge magnets. If I ever have money again, I want to buy ones of the regular, SciShow, and Game Grumps variety and mix them all together. 😆
There are groups of people that still live like this. We can see how ancient “gender roles” played out back then by their practices now.
Maybe we should find more “Eurocentric”civilizations for more research but across South America, Africa, Australia, the pacific, and Asia, exist evidence that show what people have been saying: utilitarianism is paramount. But above all, the man is the main hunter, period.
Nope. The Martu group has women do most of the hunting. And there were African Hunter warrior women fighting off the French army.
@@unspeakablegaming1015 And is that all?
@@unspeakablegaming1015 nope your information is based on nothing but mere assumption
Im surprised that people still act like hunting is something special. Its not more important than gathering. A person needs skills and knowledge about what you can eat safely and walk many miles a day. Yet you see never men say but we were gatherers too! While the men also gathered food. Why need to have a special task.
@@unspeakablegaming1015 Martu women procure as much meat as men do. Not more. And it's the only example. One of 391. Less than 0.5%.
In addition to being irritated to realize that so many women's skeletons were misinterpreted (which I already knew),.I've always been irritated that gathering doesn't get the respect it should. Gathering is where you get a range of vitamins and minerals, and is also where you get foodstuffs that can be stored. It's pretty.damn important!
I have a similar issue with how many people overlook the contributions women have made throughout society. Sure, men tended to do the more exciting roles that shake foundations, but I'd argue that women helped maintain society with the smaller but essential tasks. Making clothing, farming, crafting supplies, tending to the sick and injured, carrying water, and other things can be easy to take for granted, but women worked hard to keep society running and helped free up the work load so men could focus on other tasks.
Another big example is during times of war. While there were some men who stayed to maintain settlements, many women had to work hard to keep the settlements running while men were off at campaign. And when seiges happened, many women would help the defenders by making supplies like arrows, help the sick and injured, and other things that freed up the work load for men to focus.
Ironically, both fem!n!$ts and their opponents overlook the contributions women have made in history, which I find disrespectful. As much as people like to proclaim that "men built society", I'd argue that women also helped build through those smaller but essential tasks that maintained society.
And gathering is crazy tough!
@@cadethumann8605 men did build society like why are 90% pf noble prize winners or inventors male?
@@mortenx9781 But from an internal perspective, woman also contributed to that building. Besides rearing and teaching families, many women worked in common but essential jobs like agriculture, embroidery (clothing and other things that kept people warm), and many others. Sure, they weren't exclusive to women but basically, women worked in tasks that freed up labor for more ambitious men to pursue other things.
Even in wartime (including in medieval times), women still had to step up to help contribute to war efforts. In sieges, women would help produce supplies like arrows, help tend to the wounded and sick, reinforce the defenses, keep society running, and other essential things that helped allow fighting men to focus on battle. Women certainly didn't sit around having tea parties.
The way I see it, even from a traditional gender role perspective, men and women are like a house. The men are the roofs (and walls perhaps, though, I'd like to imagine that's shared with women as well) that protect the house from elements, while women are the stable foundation that help hold up the roofs. Take one thing away, and everything falls apart.
@@mortenx9781 As for Nobel prizes, as much as as I don't want to sound like a feminist or political person making excuses, my research tells me that men (with many of them being caucasian) had the time, resources, and other favorable circumstances that allowed them to pursue high academic fields. All others either did not receive a proper education, were too busy with other tasks, or were held against in bias. It's not simply one $ex being more gifted than the other.
Another perspective I would add to my first response is simply that women (as well as common men) walked so more ambitious men could run.
It might have also been part of a burial ritual
Nonsense, it was clearly a patriarchy-smashing statement madr by women 2 million years ago!
@@raducirstoiu2253 you are right sorry
Another consideration. For ALL OLD AND ANCIENT CULTURES, growing a big population means power. Even today we see cases of women having a 1 year old baby, and another 1-2 years older and another 1-2 oldest.
So if ancient humans wanted to have a big clan, and mortality rate was high, who knows how much frequently the women were pregnant? For most animals females get pregnant AS SOON as they can.
Taking into consideration how long a human baby takes to have some physical independence (2-3?), and how long it takes to learn total independence(15-18?), and women being caring(mothers CARE)... I don't think MOST females had more time to hunt between pregnancy and caring the baby they already had.
Depends on the specific tribe. There were tribes with female hunters and others with not. Just because there is a single burial site for one group of people, it doesnt speak for every group. By enlarge men would take on more dangerous tasks. There is a reason why we have more female ancestors and why there are more women than men in the world. The phrase "Men hunt, woman gathers." isnt false. You have to look at each group of people situationally before you go ahead and say "this is false because single burial site". If a tribe suffered from a battle and didnt have enough men to hunt then some of the women that didnt have children would step in to fill the gap. We dont know anything of the situation about these groups of people appart from if YOU didnt do your part everyone dies or you get booted out from the tribe.
I would suggest watching from 1:38 on. The rest of the section is literally talking about this and the limitations of the analysis.
@@alexs-fo6jz I know that part already. Some people with particular ideaologies come on here and take things out of context and pick and choose parts they want and discard others. The title is missleading. "Men hunted, women gathered" isnt entirely true but its not entirely false either. They should have given it a different title instead of a clickbait.
Cherry picking seems to be the scishow way.
@@itzybitzyspyder ye it kind of garbage most of the time it's hard to put out multiple 3 to 7 min bids and day could do something like pbs eons but they don't
If you think your version of events is correct why are you so afraid of a single piece of evidence that conflicts with it?
Couldn't the skull size difference be due to normal variation in the population or just that particular individual's health and nutrition status at the time?
I know quite a lot of men whose head size might compare to that of the average woman's but on the whole men still have bigger skulls.
Honestly hard to tell if most species yield maybe a skull or two. Palaeontology is a lot of educated guesswork.
That's mostly due to their being less connective neurons between the hemispheres which allow both sides to work more independently and seems to allow them to be more focused on tasks. And anyone who's ever owned a cat knows how important focus is for a hunter.
Also it dose not sound like they have enough skeletal remains to even be sure skull size is diagnostic of total body size. Dimorphism doesn't need (and in Humans is not) uniform across the whole body.
It's all a statistics game. When you only have three specimens, and none of them are complete, you just have to trust they all were proportioned roughly similar, and that they are reasonably typical of their species. Hopefully you'll eventually find a better sample size to work from, but often you never will and just have to live with the giant asterisk hanging over your life's work. Welcome to paleontology!
So, are there any hunter gatherer societies where this is the case? Any at all? Even one?
Some women in some places hunted.
According to a documentary I saw 15 or 20 years ago, some prehistoric human skeletons (I forgot which species) show evidence of broken bones resembling modern rodeo injuries. Does anybody know whether these injuries were evenly distributed among the sexes?
Those were neanderthals.
It wasn't in the documentary?
I believe men were most likely to hunt. But all your saying is that men were more likely to hunt via landing on an animal and trying to simultaneously stab them or stay on them bugging them til they practically die of exhaustion.
I think maybe there were other methods that didn't involve landing on some herbivores back😂
Though that was a beautiful image
Men in paleo era running for their life from predators while thinking how to supress women rights and freedom very insightful 😭😂
hmm Id have to look at the papers but that first section seems pretty sketchy on the face of it. 9k years is really recent, humans were all over the planet except for a few pacific islands by then so there was massive cultural diversity, patterns of behaviour in one place will have been completely different to another place. if this culture was eating mostly animal meat then it makes sense that everyone would be catching the animals, it would be necessary. in places where meat formed a smaller part of the diet a smaller more specialised section of the population probably did the hunting. and the whole thing starts with the assumption that the person was buried with the tools they used. but what if they were buried with the tools they made? maybe she was a toolmaker. or maybe they was buried with the tools they blessed or enchanted? maybe she was a wise woman/priestess etc. wheres the evidence for one or the other?
also I take issue with the implication that runs through this debate suggesting that foraging is somehow a secondary activity to hunting. if youre providing food for your tribe, youre doing the most important single task there is, and foraging can be just as specialised a task as hunting requiring just as extensive a skill set, just a different one. theres no reason it should be seen as a lesser activity in any way.
idk maybe Im wrong but this feels like science that is in part driven by modern social politics and basically thats bad science.
There is a LOT of hostility in the comments today...
I blame the sweater
@@ragdolltrucking i blame the clickbait title and the politics related thumbnail
@@estebanpillado2067
What politics?
@@calebr7199 the concept of patriarchy is a political idea that has no place in science, not saying that i'm against women hunting if they are fit to do so
@@estebanpillado2067
Are you dumb? Patriarchy is the classification of societies dominated by men and was developed by scientists known as anthropologists. Anthropology is a field of science, please stop wanting your politics injected into science. Thank you.
So Men weren't Hunters 100% of the time and Women weren't Gathers 100% of the time...I think we knew that. Not much of a Myth or a surprise.
But...but...muh reddit 100 wholesome moment! kweens slayed!
@@phillycheesetake yeah or maybe this was an ancient feminist who died on the hunt
But still 50-70 percent in all other archeological findings say it's men are mostly hunters so what's the point . hunting is a survival instinct certainly doesn't require a gender
That whole idea was something I never really believed that much. Especially as something universal. Especially as something cut and dry.
In other words, water is wet.
Judging by the comments evidently not all are on board with the wetness of water.
Thing is, hunter-gatherer societies still existed into the early modern era and some still to this day. And there we do see male roles and female roles. If I’m not mistaken in many nomadic Native American plains tribes, the men would hunt and the women would process the carcasses. It would make sense for them to do this on-site for big game, and carry back only what was needed rather than waste the energy and resources to carry or drag a massive carcass all the way back to the village or camp. So it would make sense for women to be present on hunting raids, that doesn’t mean they were doing the hunting.
Compare a small body male to an able bodied female, you'd get the answer. Males generally have to have that aggression and testosterone to handle the spear at the last moment, and women can and do, do it, but the physical strength required precision. More females were trained, but it took twice the energy.
In current uncontacted tribes, the percentage of women hunting is zero, they literally live by the idea that the men hunt, the women gather.
Shush... No facts or truth aloud here!
It’s almost as if humans have learned over time that hunting can be dangerous. And for the survival of the tribe, it’s better that women are protected. Whereas men are more “disposable”, for lack of a better word, in terms of repopulating the tribe. In other words, ten women and two men can repopulate the tribe far faster than ten men and two women.
I don't know why you focus on uncontacted tribes, but I in current hunter-gatherer societies it seems to be norm that men do the hunting, women do the gathering. The interesting question is: What was different a couple of thousand years ago in America? My guess would be: We don't have enough big game to do a lot of big game hunting anymore. When you hunt large herds of liptopterns or butcher giant ground sloths you want to utilize as many people as possible.
@@eljanrimsa5843 when you picture native ameicans hunting, are you just just picturing a hundred people jumping on a woolly mammoth until it falls down? This “all hands on decks” thing in the video does not line up with how humans hunt, we are not lions, 3-5 guys with spears thats it, doesnt matter if its a pig, a moose, or an elephant.
@@ragdolltrucking 3-5 guys with claws is actually how lions hunt. They work together to separate a zebra from the herd before going in for the kill, preferably without getting kicked in the head. And in lions these 3-5 guys are mostly females who have kids at home.
My point is: We do not see this sort of big game hunting in current hunter-gatherers because we do not have this sort of big game anymore.
Hooo boy here we go
I just saw your tiktok sass session on calories. I love you, Hank.