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2024-11-11

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Slight male navigational advantage likely due to cultural differences, researchers find (phys.org)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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A team of psychologists, social scientists, philosophers and evolutionary researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in the U.S. has found evidence suggesting that the slight advantage males have in navigation ability is likely due to differences in the ways male and female children are raised.

In their paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the group describes how they studied navigational skills in multiple species to find out if there might be an evolutionary basis for one gender or the other having better skills.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Such an advantage, theories suggest, came about due to males having to move around in large tracts of land while hunting, while women stayed closer to home as they foraged.

This is a popular misconception but there's a lot of evidence that shows early human societies were egalitarian and men and women equally participated in hunting and gathering. Especially after tools like the ahtlotl (a spear-throwing device) became common place.

Here's an article from NPR about gender equality in early humans: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/07/01/1184749528/men-are-hunters-women-are-gatherers-that-was-the-assumption-a-new-study-upends-i
And here's a wikipedia article about the ahtlotl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spear-thrower

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

The NPR article says the opposite of the headline.

By contrast, the new study found that in a third of societies for which there is data, the women hunt large game. In other words, they do go after the kind of big mammals associated with the stereotype of male hunters.

Yes, women hunted sometimes, but in 40 of the 60 societies they looked at, women didn't participate in big game hunting at all. In the remaining third, they did find at least one female hunter, but they don't say what the ratio is.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago

No. Women were/are more vauable to society because they can give birth. Males are expendable and encouraged to participate in risky activities. You see it to this day where women are almost always excused from being drafted into the military.