this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2025
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Yeah, millennia of oppression does wonders for your genetics favoring hypervigilance in your gender, down the line...
Not how evolution works, and not how oppression works either.
One might guess men would have better hearing as they were often the hunters in our evolutionary history. But maybe women who would take care of children and the camp needed to be more aware of incoming dangers, for which good hearing would be an advantage.
As you've spotted, good hearing is advantageous to everyone.
However the men hunting/women gathering stereotype is increasingly regarded as wrong or at least simplistic.
https://phys.org/news/2023-10-prehistoric-gender-roles-women-hunters.html
https://www.runnersworld.com/races-places/a20823734/these-are-the-worlds-fastest-marathoners-and-marathon-courses/
This apparent advantage doesn’t seem to play out in the real world.
I’ve criticised several similar papers in the last few years, one of which was retracted. So far I have seen flawed methodology, cherry picking evidence and ignoring widely available data on uncontacted hunter gatherer societies.
This doesn’t seem like quality research and that’s just at a glance.
That's a you problem. As it turns out, science isn't based on glances and vibes.
It's plainly evident that taking any person with high testosterone and getting them to train at a physical activity will almost always result in better performance than training a person in the same way with lower testosterone.
The papers talk about the evidence based on ordinary, presumably nonspecialised individuals, not cherry-picking a few thousand people who have trained in such a way that testosterone can make its difference over time.
It's not a me problem just a statement of fact that I haven't spent hours going over the paper and its references yet.
You think that people who were living in hunter gatherer societies didn't experience enough physical exertion for testosterone to play a signficant role in their physical performance?
Otherwise you're just talking completely out of context... which is what the authors did in the paper you linked.