I want to weigh in on the current conversation whether paleolithic women would have engaged in hunting, bc I think it would benefit from incorporating a main tenet of human behavioural ecology: that human behaviour is diverse and adapted to local socio-ecology 1/9 https://twitter.com/HollyDunsworth/status/1352627930715795458

Hunting can come in many forms. If you're harpooning wales or hunting mammoths with spears, men have an advantage in the form of greater upper body strength which allows for higher projectile speed and force. 2/9

If you’re using blow-darts or bows and arrows to hunt smaller game, that advantage is not so clear. 3/9

If hunts require days or weeks of tracking away from base camp, that can make it harder for women with breastfeeding children, or any children if there is not a robust system of allocare – which there could be! 4/9

But if you’re, say, ice-fishing near your igloo and plan on returning home in the evening anyway, then it’s a lot easier to leave your kids with someone else for a few hours. 5/9

Of course, pre- and post-reproductive women don’t have this problem, so they can engage in hunts, although if your hunting style is highly skill-dependent, years taken off hunting due to childcare may be costly to effective calorie production relative to e.g gathering tubers 6/9

But if there is no consistent source of calories that can be gathered, hunting might still be the optimal foraging strategy for women. Not all hunter-gatherers are the Hadza! 7/9

Are men always hunters? Absolutely not. But when they are, there are generally reasons related to the optimal calorie-production strategy of that population in that ecology. 8/9

And we should welcome and be excited by research that points out different or unexpected patterns of calorie-production, because it tells us something about how humans engage with their environments to have the most productive lives that they can. 9/9