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> we spent our nights waiting around the fire in case of tiger I think it's the opposite. During the prehistoric times most food was actually gathered by women

> we spent our nights waiting around the fire in case of tiger I think it's the opposite. During the prehistoric times most food was actually gathered by women IIRC, and both sexes could use fire to scare away predators, so men were relevant for breeding nearly exclusively. Today we have far more risky activities where men dominate, such as high-rise towers construction, firefighting, law enforcement, security, sailing etc etc.

yarg 3y ago
You think that we took equal roles in dealing with threats!? The simple truth is that men handled the vast majority of situations where combat was required - we're bigger, stronger, faster, more aggressive. Our aim is better, and (best of all) if half of us die it doesn't severely impact intergenerational population levels. Women may have gone gathering, but men went hunting. Fire fighting is some scary shit - but our ancestors took on short faced bears with sticks.
- ernst_klim 3y ago
  > The simple truth is that men handled the vast majority of situations where combat was required I think you greatly overestimate how much combat people faced during prehistoric times. Population was distributed sparsely, most food was gathered, not hunted, and was abundant, and you don't fight predators to scare them off. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_warfare#Paleolithic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_warfare#Paleolithi...
  - yarg 3y ago
    And I think that you're severely underestimating the impact of infrequent existential threats, and how that interplays with slight improvements to fitness compounded over hundreds of thousands of years. In fact, I'm damned near certain of it.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      The most existential threat in pre-industrial times was a bad harvest. It meant starvation. That men used their de-facto monopoly on violence to start dominating their communities is a different story.
      - yarg 3y ago
        So agriculture? 10,000 years ago. ~Modern humans have been around 30 times longer than that.

yarg 3y ago

You think that we took equal roles in dealing with threats!? The simple truth is that men handled the vast majority of situations where combat was required - we're bigger, stronger, faster, more aggressive. Our aim is better, and (best of all) if half of us die it doesn't severely impact intergenerational population levels. Women may have gone gathering, but men went hunting. Fire fighting is some scary shit - but our ancestors took on short faced bears with sticks.

ernst_klim 3y ago
> The simple truth is that men handled the vast majority of situations where combat was required I think you greatly overestimate how much combat people faced during prehistoric times. Population was distributed sparsely, most food was gathered, not hunted, and was abundant, and you don't fight predators to scare them off. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_warfare#Paleolithic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_warfare#Paleolithi...
- yarg 3y ago
  And I think that you're severely underestimating the impact of infrequent existential threats, and how that interplays with slight improvements to fitness compounded over hundreds of thousands of years. In fact, I'm damned near certain of it.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    The most existential threat in pre-industrial times was a bad harvest. It meant starvation. That men used their de-facto monopoly on violence to start dominating their communities is a different story.
    - yarg 3y ago
      So agriculture? 10,000 years ago. ~Modern humans have been around 30 times longer than that.