1 hour ago, tadmjones said:
Apparently last year they published an article whose conclusion was that inequities between male a female athletes was not due to biological differences but biases and blah blah blah.
You may be talking about the November, 2023 article “Woman the Hunter” which debunked the long fashionable notion that men evolved to hunt and women evolved to gather. Among the points in the article:
Women are physiologically better suited than men to endurance efforts such a running marathons.
Women did a lot of hunting in prehistoric times.
Estrogen plays a critical role in athletic performance.
Females are more regularly dominating ultraendurance events such as the more than 260-mile Montane Spine foot race through England and Scotland, the 21-mile swim across the English Channel, and the 4,300-mile Trans Am cycling race across the U.S.
As an example of bias in how the sexes are treated in sports, men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many woman’s events because of the belief that they will make the women “artificially faster,” as though women were not actually doing the running themselves.
Modern humans have low sexual size dimorphism compared with the other great apes. The same goes for human ancestors spanning the last two million years, suggesting that the social structure of humans changed from that of our chimpanzee-like ancestors.
The skeletons of Neandertal females and males show the same patterns of wear and tear. This suggests that they were doing the same things.
There is a period in which the evidence indicates that men were more likely than women to throw spears. But it is also the period when people invented the bow and arrow, hunting nets, and fishing hooks. Also, in this period men and women were buried with the same kinds of grave goods.
Thanks to analyses of Y chromosome DNA and mitochondrial DNA, we now know of three Neandertal groups that engaged in patrilocality - wherein males were more likely to stay in the group they were born into and females moved to other groups - although we do not know how widespread this practice was.
In modern times, among the Agta people of the Phillippines, women hunt while menstruating, pregnant, and breastfeeding, and they have the same hunting success as men.
79 percent of the 63 modern foraging societies with clear descriptions of their hunting strategies feature women hunters. The women participate in hunting regardless of their childbearing status.
It was the arrival some 10,000 years ago of agriculture, with its intensive investment in land, population growth, and resultant clumped resources, that led to rigid gendered roles and economic inequality.
