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Paleontologists are trying to understand why the fossil record is mostly males
- jjtheblunt 6y agoSince fossils are largely bone, is it related to osteoporosis being more prominent in females (usually)?
- bigbubba 6y agoAFAIK bone loss occurs with age in both men and women, but accelerates for women after menopause. But did female dinosaurs have something like menopause?
- simonh 6y agoThe article is about mammals, not dinosaurs.
- ska 6y agoDo we know much about osteoporosis outside of humans, let alone dinosaurs? Seems to be a bit of a jump.
- giantrobot 6y agoFossils aren't bone. They're mineral deposits in the space the bone used to be. In rare cases there might be some original tissue but for the most part fossils are formed from sediment(?) infill. Preserved bones are...bones and not fossils. Think of fossilization like lost-wax casting.
- jjtheblunt 6y agoExcellent point. I hadn't thought of it, but knew it as a kid, when I read your comment.
- kazinator 6y ago> fossil record is mostly males tyrannosaurus, mammoth, ... da Vinci, Bach, Newton, Euler, Maxwell, ... :)
- sturza 6y agofossil record not fossil fuel
- sillyquiet 6y agoThis phenomena was covered by the excellent pop sci channel PBS Eons a while back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr0Ifw8TJVw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr0Ifw8TJVw
- fedxc 6y agoThe article was written in Sep 2019 while the video was uploaded Nov 2019. I love this article because it provides scientific evidence for something I already knew or suspected: males take more risks. I also think this video helps illustrate why fossils are mostly male: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=674IFkAj_1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=674IFkAj_1s
- mc32 6y agoWhy do they even have to say this: >” This has less to do with misogyny than with prehistoric herd distributions...” It’s like stating that water is fat free. It kind of spoils the article.
- progval 6y agoThey probably meant misogyny from today's archeologists rather than from bisons and mammoths. There are known instances of gender stereotypes influencing archeological discovery. For example: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/09/viking-warrior-woman-archaeology-spd/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/09/viking-warri... > Since the remains were found alongside swords, arrowheads, a spear, and two sacrificed horses, archaeologists had considered it a warrior’s grave—and, thus, a man’s.
- mc32 6y agoEven with that possibility it’s ridiculous. It would require a conspiracy by archeologists (of both sexes) to only find male specimens (as if there are so many that they’d ignore female specimens just to be misogynistic. How realistic is that? It also primes the reader to think “aha misogyny!” where it isn’t. Just as saying fat free water!
- progval 6y agoRead the quote. It doesn't have to be intentional, they may assume some bodies are male when they aren't
- mc32 6y agoYes that was an _exception_ unless you believe all (or most) of the sex identity assignments of historical human skeletons are suspect.
- progval 6y agoThere are other examples of this. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/11/prehistoric-female-hunter-discovery-upends-gender-role-assumptions/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/11/prehistor... > it revealed that between 30 and 50 percent of big game hunters could have been biologically female. > This new study is the latest twist in a decades-long debate about gender roles among early hunter-gather societies. The common assumption was that prehistoric men hunted while women gathered and reared their young. But for decades, some scholars have argued that these “traditional” roles—documented by anthropologists studying hunter-gatherer groups across the globe since the 19th century—don’t necessarily stretch into our deep past. And that's just looking at the first hits on a search engine. Whether or not there is indeed a systemic bias in archeology, this makes it worth mentioning that in that case, we're sure it's not bias.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoOr, do they have it wrong, sexing creatures? Seems the far simpler explanation. Further the 'explanation' that males might have taken more risks, explains nothing. The one common denominator between every single mammal from ancient times is, they are all dead. It doesn't matter how; all their skeletons should be somewhere in the fossil record. A disparity would have to explain how male skeletons died in precisely the right way to be preserved more often. Which seems like nonsense.
- daenz 6y ago>Further the 'explanation' that males might have taken more risks, explains nothing. It does though: >Luckily for paleontologists, some of these death sites—bogs, crevices, lakes—are pretty good at preserving remains.
- sieabahlpark 6y agoIt's just some armchair redditor trying to gloat about how scientists are incapable of sexing animals and doesn't consider the chance that behavior can lead to death that preserves the body.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoAnd how about the locations female Mastadons choose for giving birth, raising calves - do they preserve remains? The OP seems a careless off-hand analysis, if it doesn't go more than skin-deep into behavior differences.
- metalliqaz 6y ago> "It doesn't matter how; all their skeletons should be somewhere in the fossil record." This is false. Most skeletons decompose. Only some happen to end up in the right spot to remain intact long enough to become fossils. Also, these mammoth remains aren't fossilized, they aren't old enough. These are just remains that have been preserved.
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
- daenz 6y agoTL;DR The current best hypothesis: >They figured it was more probable that young male mammoths were much more likely to travel solo, away from the wisdom and protection of matriarchal herds, similar to the way elephant societies function today. In other words, these male mammoths—young, reckless, foolhardy—were just more likely to get into some kind of trouble and die, from getting stuck in a pit to running afoul of hunting humans. Luckily for paleontologists, some of these death sites—bogs, crevices, lakes—are pretty good at preserving remains. “They were more likely to do silly things, like die in tar pits,” Gower says.
- bilbo0s 6y agoI don't know man? Running afoul of hunting humans should leave fewer remains than, for instance, an elephant graveyard. Now it's possible mammoths didn't do the graveyard thing, but the point is the humans would have left far less of the animal than an elephant grave or a bog.
- coliveira 6y agoElephants and other animals don't leave graves. They just die and decompose on the surface. That's why you won't easily find a graveyard for animals, unless they happen to be buried by some accident.
- gen220 6y agoA little bit off topic, but as I understand it, Elephants are known to carry the bones of deceased elephants with them, and otherwise move them around. They might not have graveyards, but they do appear to have some concept of mortality. From this great article [1] on elephants: > Even bare, bleached old elephant bones will stop a group if they have not seen them before. It is so predictable that filmmakers have been able to get shots of elephants inspecting skeletons by bringing the bones from one place and putting them in a new spot near an elephant pathway or a water hole. Inevitably the living elephants will feel and move the bones around, sometimes picking them up and carrying them away for quite some distance before dropping them. It is a haunting and touching sight and I have no idea why they do it. [1]: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/do-elephants-have-souls https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/do-elephants-hav...
- astrophysics 6y agoThe white, male patriarchy!
- ajkjk 6y agoIs it possible there were just a lot more males?
- seph-reed 6y agoSeems unlikely. Honestly, I'm surprised that the male to female ratio is anywhere near 1:1. Every male baby is one less womb, and one less branch on the evolutionary tree. Does anybody know why it's so close to 1:1 instead of women outnumbering men? Specifically in non-pair-bonding species?
- ludston 6y agoThere is some sort of math behind why a 1:1 ratio is almost always selected for. It intuits like, if all of the other elephants are breeding 1:2, and you breed 2:1, you will be significantly more likely to spread your genes.
- staticman2 6y agoI just googled it out of curiosity and I gather from Wikipedia, if a species has more females, the families with male children will reproduce more than the families with female children, and the give birth to male genes will then rise up to 50 percent of the population. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_principle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_principle
- seph-reed 6y agoWeird. It seems like the female children would almost always propagate their genes, while the male children would either rise to the top and have many children or lose the competition and have very few or none. It's always weirded me out for harem species in particular... the odds of producing a male that is competitive enough to be a harem leader seems pretty low.
- tomtomtom777 6y agoEven in harem species, on average, each male gets exactly the same number of offspring as a female. If say 75% of the specimen would be female, being a male would yield on average thrice as much children compared to a female, so it would be evolutionary beneficial to be male. The only species where the ratio is different are those where sex is determined with different genetic mechanisms. For example, in hymenoptera (ants and wasps), males are born from unfertilized eggs, which results in a 1:3 ratio between females and males.
- jtlienwis 6y agoI saw a program once about elephants that showed that they carried around the bones of the revered loved ones in their mouths. Maybe the males were not as revered or maybe they tended to die in spots that it was dangerous to get to carry away their bones.
- bkb 6y agoDudes rock
- seph-reed 6y agodudes become rocks might be more accurate
- MadSudaca 6y agoWhat I’m reading here is feminine good, masculine bad. Seems fair since we need to balance it against the title which implies masculine more, feminine less.
- nobody9999 6y ago>What I’m reading here is feminine good, masculine bad. I think that's an oversimplification. Males of most mammal species are more aggressive than females. As David Eagleman[0] points out (WRT to one mammal species): "Many of us like to believe that all adults possess the same capacity to make sound choices. It’s a nice idea, but it’s wrong… Who you even have the possibility to be starts well before your childhood — it starts at conception. If you think genes don’t matter for how people behave, consider this amazing fact: if you are a carrier of a particular set of genes, your probability of committing a violent crime goes up by eight hundred and eighty-two percent. Here are statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice, which I’ve broken down into two groups: crimes committed by the population that carries this specific set of genes and by the population that does not: Average Number of Violent Crimes Committed Annually in the United States Offense Carrying the genes Not carrying the genes Aggravated assault 3,419,000 435,000 Homicide 14,196 1,468 Armed robbery 2,051,000 157,000 Sexual assault 442,000 10,000 In other words, if you carry these genes, you’re eight times more likely to commit aggravated assault, ten times more likely to commit murder, thirteen times more likely to commit armed robbery and forty-four times more likely to commit sexual assault. About one half of the human population carries these genes, while the other half does not, making the first half much more dangerous indeed. It’s not even a contest. The overwhelming majority of prisoners carry these genes, as do 98.4 percent of those on death row. It seems clear enough that the carriers are strongly predisposed to a different type of behavior – and everyone is coming to the table equally equipped in terms of drives and behavior. We’ll return to these genes in a moment, but first I want to tie the issue back to the main point we’ve seen throughout this book: we are not the ones driving the boat of our behavior, at least not nearly as much as we believe. Who we are runs well below the surface of our conscious access, and the details reach back in time to before our birth, when the meeting of a sperm and egg granted us with certain attributes and not others. Who we can be begins with our molecular blueprints – a series of alien codes penned in invisibly small strings of amino acids – well before we have anything to do with it. We are a product of our inaccessible, microscopic history. By the way, as regards that dangerous set of genes, you’ve probably heard of them. They are summarized as the Y chromosome. If you’re a carrier, we call you a male." [0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307389928/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0307389928&linkCode=as2&tag=wwwjrbenjamin-20&linkId=QWIJGN4LNY3JQUYF https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307389928/ref=as_li_tl?ie...
- openasocket 6y agoInteresting fact: there’s actually a specific phenomenon in modern-day elephants that explains the idea of males being more reckless. Modern elephant males periodically go through a process called musth . It’s sort of like the male version of going into heat. Their testosterone goes up like 60x and they become aggressive and even violent. They’ll even attack humans and other animals with little warning. A guide at Kruger national park in South Africa mentioned that they once had a spree of young bull elephants going into musth and attacking and breaking the spines of rhinoceros. I imagine if mammoths also went through musth they wouldn’t be particularly cautious about terrain hazards and the like
- celrod 6y agoThey all died, male and female alike, but a higher percent of the males left behind fossils. Meaning getting yourself killed is only part of the equation. The other part is that the manner in which you get yourself killed has to increase the odds of fossilization. Maybe an elephant in musth chasing rhinos pays less attention to where it's going and accidentally get itself trapped in a tar pit.
- trianglem 6y agoThe females probably all died together in a group and are less dispersed so are harder to find. Obvious conjecture.
- tachyonbeam 6y agoCould also have something to do with age at time of death and bone composition.
- barkingcat 6y agoOr there are biochemical processes that prefer preservation of male specimens, for example the prehistoric version of male hormones acting as a preservative, or perhaps the prehistoric version of the female horomone acting as a cue for insects or decomposers in the ecosystem to consume the carcass etc.
- taphangum 6y agoMales took more risk and therefore died in places that would more likely preserve their fossils?
- swayvil 6y agoThat's my guess too.
- seg_lol 6y agoNot that the places are likely to preserve, but a larger diversity of places.
- jccooper 6y agoThere's probably some of the former. Many fossilizing environments are more dangerous, and sometimes in surprising ways that more cautious--or experienced--individuals would avoid or approach more carefully. Tar pits, caves and crevasses, river banks, wetlands.
- swayvil 6y agoMen were more likely to die in circumstances conducive to corpse-preservation, or the reverse for women. That's my guess. At home with the compost vs out on the dusty cementicious steppe.
- mkl 6y agoThe article is not about humans or our ancestors.
- robotresearcher 6y agoTowards the end of the article they state a second hypothesis that seems to be ignored in these comments but pretty plausible: people kept the larger examples they found, skewing the collections in favor of size, and thus males over females. Of course, there could be more than one selection effect at work.
- jbay808 6y agoHow common is it across species that males are larger? It's definitely not universal.
- trianglem 6y agoIn mammals it’s near universal I think with the exception of whales where the sizes are comparable.
- tachyonbeam 6y agoAFAIK, animals where there is stronger competition among males for females tend to have more of a size difference. Species that are purely pair bonding tend to have animals of similar sizes. Humans have relatively little size difference compared to other mammalian species. There are many spider species where the male is smaller.
- GoblinSlayer 6y agoFemales were eaten, because they are weaker. Would like some data on predators.
- COGlory 6y agoA dead male and a dead female have roughly proportional strength. And seeing as how there's no wooly mammoths walking around anymore, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that all of them died at some point or another
- hawktheslayer 6y agoThe article mentions they use DNA testing to determine the sex and also that it's tough to find usable DNA samples. Could it be possible that male fossils are more likely to have usable DNA and thus bias the results?
- amelius 6y agoAnother wild guess: X chromosomes degrading into Y chromosomes over time?
- vagrantJin 6y agoThat is wild. Too wild. Jesus.
- orthoxerox 6y agoDon't dinosaurs have WZ and ZZ, like birds?
- gweinberg 6y agoLikely they did, but I don't think we have the DNA to know for sure. Even if we did have some trapped in amber inside insects like in Jurassic Park, we couldn't link to bones. On Land of the Lost "Grumpy" was called he and "Alice" was called she, but I don't think anyone knew their sex for sure. "Alice" was an Allosaurus.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Don't dinosaurs have WZ and ZZ, like birds? Well, the dinosaurs that are alive today do, at least. For other dinosaurs, we've only fairly recently realized we have soft tissue and maybe DNA in lots of fossils. So, maybe, but we don't know yet.
- MereInterest 6y agoY chromosomes being male is species-specific, and so that wouldn't generalize across species. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-determination_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-determination_system
- chrisjs95 6y agoI thought gender is not something you're born with? Did the Mammoth herds raise these offspring to be male?
- 5555624 6y agoFrom September 2019, when he article was published, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20995396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20995396