Sometimes, society needs science. And when the craving comes, Scientific American is happy to help. Case in point: The 1845-founded publication presently schools us on historical sexual myths.
Anthropology Professors Cara Ocobock (University of Notre Dame) and Sarah Lacy (University of Delaware) have unearthed a triumphant truth. You may have assumed males are athletically better-abled than females; but in fact, our hunting ancestors were women. Furthermore, now-fossilized men were in touch with their feminine side.
There exists, the academic pair's article notes, an old-fashioned idea:
[The Man the Hunter theory] holds that human ancestors had a division of labor, rooted in biological differences between males and females, in which males evolved to hunt and provide, and females tended to children and domestic duties. It assumes that males are physically superior to females...
The concept's a crock -- ancient times were stuffed to the gills with girlbosses...
[T]he data we...have signal that it is time to bury Man the Hunter for good.
Relatedly, fixation on "male superiority" has oppressed athletes with ovaries. And gals' innards are, you know, precious:
[T]he conventional wisdom (in 1967) was that women were incapable of completing such a physically demanding task (as the Boston Marathon) and that attempting to do so could harm their precious reproductive capacities. Scholars following Man the Hunter dogma relied on this belief in women's limited physical capacities and the assumed burden of pregnancy and lactation to argue that only men hunted. Women had children to rear instead.
But a woman ran the Marathon that year -- because man isn't king of the slow-jog jungle. Tarzan may have testes, but Jane is genetically juiced:
Given the fitness world's persistent touting of the hormone testosterone for athletic success, you'd be forgiven for not knowing that estrogen, which females typically produce more of than males, plays an incredibly important role in athletic performance.
Fibrously, women enjoy more slow-twitch muscle; men are endowed in a fast-twitch fashion. Cue a monumental mounting:
Mounting evidence from exercise science indicates that women are physiologically better suited than men to endurance efforts such as running marathons.
So are birthing persons better at long-distance races? Unquestionably (except sometimes):
If you follow long-distance races, you might be thinking, wait -- males are outperforming females in endurance events! But this is only sometimes the case.
What's the link between hunting and endurance? Well, according to experts, people long ago hunted meat by simply following animals -- until the animals got too tired and the people didn't.
[A] prominent hypothesis contends that early humans are thought to have pursued prey on foot over long distances until the animals were exhausted.
Endurance-advantaged women make great followers. And as it turns out, modern sexual inequity in sports is only due to degenerate treatment of women:
The inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.
Sexism stinks:
[S]ome endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best. Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women's events because of the belief that they will make the women “artificially faster,” as though women were not actually doing the running themselves.
Nonetheless, the past is pro-woman. Prehistotry is packed with predators on their periods:
The modern physiological evidence, along with historical examples, exposes deep flaws in the idea that physical inferiority prevented females from partaking in hunting during our evolutionary past. The evidence from prehistory further undermines this notion.
Indeed, society 400,000 years ago was more evolved than 2023's primitive patriarchy. Not only was Wilma Flintstone Rambo; Captain Caveman was June Cleaver:
Yes, Neanderthal women were spearing woolly rhinoceroses, and Neanderthal men were making clothing.
The world is a wild place, full of colossal coincidence. Wondrously, we find that revolutionary, left-wing feminist dogma just happens to perfectly match what everyone was doing many thousands of years ago. Neanderthals' girlpower was straight fire -- even though they might not have known how to start one. Maybe one day, we'll completely catch up to the progressive pace of woke antiquity.
Meanwhile, don't misunderstand scientists Sarah and Cara -- men and women are merely two of the many sexes:
For ethnographic and archaeological evidence, we are attempting to reconstruct social roles, for which the terms “woman” and “man” are usually used. Unfortunately, both these word sets assume a binary, which does not exist biologically, psychologically or socially.
We're working to overcome that ignorance as well:
'New Scientific Evidence': World Health Organization Discovers There Are More Than Two Sexes
Host of School's Free Speech Event Issues Language Guide Prohibiting 'Man,' 'Woman,' and 'Mother'
University Renames Its Women's Clinic Because 'Women' Was Medically Inaccurate
Professors Insist 'Sex Is Not Binary,' Sex Separation in Sports Is White Supremacy
Texas Democratic Representative Claims There Are Six 'Biological Sexes'
University Schools Midwifery Students on the Handling of the Birthing Penis
New Puberty Book by the American Academy of Pediatrics Teaches Girls About Their Erections
Scientific American is doubly doing its part:
In case you missed it...
— Alex Parker (@alexparker1984) October 28, 2023
Scientific American: The Racist Myth of Binary Sex Wasn't Invented 'Til Nearly 1800https://t.co/p7Wd4yqPzO pic.twitter.com/aywWUL1Z9p
These days, sexual sameness, feminist fact-finding, and binary mythbusting are solidly scientific. And increasingly, they're absolutely American.
-ALEX
See more content from me:
Find all my RedState work here.
Thank you for reading! Please sound off in the Comments section below.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member