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You can gut and dress an animal quickly if you're practiced. Snares and stake traps paired with flushing animals doesn't take a lot of 'intensive labor.' We e

You can gut and dress an animal quickly if you're practiced. Snares and stake traps paired with flushing animals doesn't take a lot of 'intensive labor.' We even have the ruins of catch traps in central Asia and other places that would have industrialized animal slaughter before agriculture was ever a thing. Agriculture was likely a required response to human degradation of formerly productive areas for hunter-gatherers due to over-taking of natural resources.

civilitty 8y ago
Hunting was a predominantly male activity, though. If tribal structures got more efficient at child rearing "at scale" over time, more and more labor could be invested by the rest of the tribe into making food stuffs, tools, etc. beyond the usual options necessary for survival. This would allow them, for example, to develop food that lasts longer and makes it less risky for the hunters to go out longer - a helpful trait to survive natural variability in animal supply but one that requires free resources for experimentation and production.
- justinator 8y ago
  > Hunting was a predominantly male activity, though. Oh?
  - King-Aaron 8y ago
    > Oh? If you have any information that goes against civilitty's comment there, I'd be interested to read it. I was always under the impression that in most hunter/gatherer cultures the men were primarily involved in the hunting.
    - lucideer 8y ago
      The answer is we don't know (and I'd suspect the tendency to believe it was men is simply a result of assumption based on modern gender roles) but there is some research pointing to both sexes being initially involved in early hunting and the division of roles emerging later (possibly with agriculture, possibly before). From a study[0][1] of contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes: > In the Philippines population, women are involved in hunting and honey collecting and while there is still a division of labour, overall men and women contribute a similar number of calories to the camp. In both groups, monogamy is the norm and men are active in childcare. From another study[2][3] on the emergence of division of labour: > We argue that the typical patterns of labor division emerged relatively recently in human evolutionary history [...] > gender roles were not always the same in early-human cultures, and there's nothing that predisposes either sex toward certain kinds of work. > "That women sometimes become successful hunters and men become gatherers means that the universal tendency to divide subsistence labor be gender is not solely the result of innate physical or psychological differences between the sexes; much of it has to be learned," [0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/14/early-men-women-equal-scientists https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/14/early-men-wo... [1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6236/796 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6236/796 [2] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/12/061207-sex-humans.html https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/12/061207-sex-... [3] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/507197 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/507197
      - King-Aaron 8y ago
        Thanks for that!
      - flukus 8y ago
        > gender roles were not always the same in early-human cultures, and there's nothing that predisposes either sex toward certain kinds of work. Except the biological differences in strength, speed, etc. Unless they're arguing that these came about after agriculture, but a look at our close relatives would suggest it's always been there. > In the Philippines population Correct me if I'm wrong but I didn't think the Philippines had much in the way of large game, this and the general geography (mountainous rain-forest) could be negating the advantages men had in other parts of the world. > and I'd suspect the tendency to believe it was men is simply a result of assumption based on modern gender roles I'd suspect it's based on the belief that you'd want the stronger, taller, faster people doing the work the involve strength and speed. This won't always be men, but usually it will be. We are a sexually dimorphic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_dimorphism#Humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_dimorphism#Humans) species, it shouldn't be at all surprising that we divided labor based on these obvious physical differences.
        dogma1138 8y ago
        Even without sexual dimorphism in regards to strength it’s not hard to understand why. 14,000 years ago most people didn’t live pass 30-40, pregnancy takes you out of commission as far as hunting goes for at least a year for population growth it means that a woman had to successfully give birth to more than 2 children that would manage to survive till purberty on average, there are no indications that puberty was any different than it is today which would mean that essentially they only had 10-15 or so years to pop out 3-4 kids if not more considering the child mortality rates of the era.
        cimmanom 8y ago
        That's been debunked. The low average life expectancy was not because adults died young but because child mortality (especially for children under 5) was sky-high. There was also an article on here just yesterday about how we list ancient skeletons as "50+" instead of "75" years old because we can't distinguish ages of skeletons above 50, which also contributes to that misconception. Long story short: a prehistoric human who made it to puberty had a pretty good chance of living to be 60-80, well past menopause.
yesiamyourdad 8y ago
I promise you that if you actually hunted and trapped/caught/killed your meal for the day, you'd be way too tired to log onto Hacker News and comment.

civilitty 8y ago

Hunting was a predominantly male activity, though. If tribal structures got more efficient at child rearing "at scale" over time, more and more labor could be invested by the rest of the tribe into making food stuffs, tools, etc. beyond the usual options necessary for survival. This would allow them, for example, to develop food that lasts longer and makes it less risky for the hunters to go out longer - a helpful trait to survive natural variability in animal supply but one that requires free resources for experimentation and production.

justinator 8y ago
> Hunting was a predominantly male activity, though. Oh?
- King-Aaron 8y ago
  > Oh? If you have any information that goes against civilitty's comment there, I'd be interested to read it. I was always under the impression that in most hunter/gatherer cultures the men were primarily involved in the hunting.
  - lucideer 8y ago
    The answer is we don't know (and I'd suspect the tendency to believe it was men is simply a result of assumption based on modern gender roles) but there is some research pointing to both sexes being initially involved in early hunting and the division of roles emerging later (possibly with agriculture, possibly before). From a study[0][1] of contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes: > In the Philippines population, women are involved in hunting and honey collecting and while there is still a division of labour, overall men and women contribute a similar number of calories to the camp. In both groups, monogamy is the norm and men are active in childcare. From another study[2][3] on the emergence of division of labour: > We argue that the typical patterns of labor division emerged relatively recently in human evolutionary history [...] > gender roles were not always the same in early-human cultures, and there's nothing that predisposes either sex toward certain kinds of work. > "That women sometimes become successful hunters and men become gatherers means that the universal tendency to divide subsistence labor be gender is not solely the result of innate physical or psychological differences between the sexes; much of it has to be learned," [0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/14/early-men-women-equal-scientists https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/14/early-men-wo... [1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6236/796 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6236/796 [2] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/12/061207-sex-humans.html https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/12/061207-sex-... [3] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/507197 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/507197
    - King-Aaron 8y ago
      Thanks for that!
    - flukus 8y ago
      > gender roles were not always the same in early-human cultures, and there's nothing that predisposes either sex toward certain kinds of work. Except the biological differences in strength, speed, etc. Unless they're arguing that these came about after agriculture, but a look at our close relatives would suggest it's always been there. > In the Philippines population Correct me if I'm wrong but I didn't think the Philippines had much in the way of large game, this and the general geography (mountainous rain-forest) could be negating the advantages men had in other parts of the world. > and I'd suspect the tendency to believe it was men is simply a result of assumption based on modern gender roles I'd suspect it's based on the belief that you'd want the stronger, taller, faster people doing the work the involve strength and speed. This won't always be men, but usually it will be. We are a sexually dimorphic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_dimorphism#Humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_dimorphism#Humans) species, it shouldn't be at all surprising that we divided labor based on these obvious physical differences.
      - dogma1138 8y ago
        Even without sexual dimorphism in regards to strength it’s not hard to understand why. 14,000 years ago most people didn’t live pass 30-40, pregnancy takes you out of commission as far as hunting goes for at least a year for population growth it means that a woman had to successfully give birth to more than 2 children that would manage to survive till purberty on average, there are no indications that puberty was any different than it is today which would mean that essentially they only had 10-15 or so years to pop out 3-4 kids if not more considering the child mortality rates of the era.
        cimmanom 8y ago
        That's been debunked. The low average life expectancy was not because adults died young but because child mortality (especially for children under 5) was sky-high. There was also an article on here just yesterday about how we list ancient skeletons as "50+" instead of "75" years old because we can't distinguish ages of skeletons above 50, which also contributes to that misconception. Long story short: a prehistoric human who made it to puberty had a pretty good chance of living to be 60-80, well past menopause.

yesiamyourdad 8y ago

I promise you that if you actually hunted and trapped/caught/killed your meal for the day, you'd be way too tired to log onto Hacker News and comment.