• Cypher@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Huh, I wonder why virtually every uncontacted tribe we’ve found so far has the men doing all* the hunting?

    *I don’t consider foraging for clams hunting, but people are free to disagree

    • LibertyLizard@slrpnk.netOP
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      2 months ago

      Certainly a question for the ages. If only there was some way to learn more about this topic… perhaps some kind of article. Maybe one that even addresses this very point. But alas…

      Tap for spoiler

      Abigail Anderson and Cara Wall-Scheffler, both then at Seattle Pacific University, and their colleagues reported that 79 percent of the 63 foraging societies with clear descriptions of their hunting strategies feature women hunters.

      • Cypher@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Sigh, taking such claims at face value and not looking into how the underlying data was obtained is how we end up with so many successfully published but false scientific papers.

        The paper referenced here is https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0287101

        The cultures ‘surveyed’ are

        https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0287101.t001

        Notice any uncontacted peoples missing from those data points? Here’s a quick list of them from Wikipedia

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_peoples

        Immediately I can tell you the Sentinelese, Awa, Toromona, Nukak, Tagaeri and the Taromenanepeople are not represented here. It’s almost like the societies selected for this paper weren’t a complete picture.

        I wonder why that would be… surely not to conform to any biases of the authors.

          • Cypher@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            Uncontacted peoples are groups of Indigenous peoplesliving without sustained contact with neighbouring communities and the world community.

            It’s right there in the link I provided, so yes, because infrequent contact and observation is possible.

            • mindlesscrollyparrot@discuss.tchncs.de
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              2 months ago

              You explicitly mentioned the Sentinelese. Exactly how would you go about this infrequent contact and observation with them?

              In any case, let’s assume that hunting is exclusively performed by males in all of those peoples. How much would that change the statistic and the overall conclusion? 79% would be 72%

              • Cypher@lemmy.world
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                2 months ago

                We have these things called binoculars, telescopes, cameras and drones. All of which are able to observe subjects from a safe distance.

                I suspect that the number would be around a 50% split, what would then be interesting is determining which group has a better diet and survival rate to determine which tactic is superior.

                  • Cypher@lemmy.world
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                    2 months ago

                    but estimates from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in the UN and the nonprofit group Survival International point to between 100 and 200 uncontacted tribes

                    We’re in luck, there are more than enough to bring the sample size to a reasonable quantity.

                • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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                  2 months ago

                  We have these things called binoculars, telescopes, cameras and drones. All of which are able to observe subjects from a safe distance.

                  Binoculars, telescopes and cameras will tell you little about what islanders are doing inside the forest where they hunt if you are using them from the ocean. Drones flying over Sentinel Island would violate Indian law and whoever did it would be in huge trouble. Their data would likely be disregarded due to the ethical issues.

                  On top of that, if they heard a drone coming, they might just change what they normally do.

                  Like these people. Hunting becomes less of an issue suddenly when there’s a flying threat.

                  https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/brazil/2049750/Uncontacted-Amazonian-tribe-photographed.html

                  • Cypher@lemmy.world
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                    2 months ago

                    Not having the time or funding to perform my own study does not invalidate my criticism that the authors used an incomplete and flawed data set.

        • kofe@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          So there are tribes with both dynamics, maybe more one than the other?. We can also look at things like, say, competitive records between “sexes” (it’s a spectrum, so the binary divide is weird to begin with, but I digress). Men run on average like 30 seconds faster on the mile than women in societies with clear disadvantages to women’s training.

          Is this actually significant enough to exclude women? I fail to see how it could be for a role that requires a multitude of skills.

          Society’s seem to have stratified based on sex to “protect” women, and maybe a lot of women even prefer it. The issue is when we use some societal preferences to override the individual and prescribe roles before the individual can even develop their own preference (men and enbies included).

          What I’m seeing are some societies seem to have figured that out well enough, others are more oppressive.

          • Cypher@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            I am concerned only with the factuality of the data presented and have zero interest in cultural implications and any inferences that may be drawn from them.

              • Cypher@lemmy.world
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                2 months ago

                Conclusions drawn from incomplete or misleading data are worthless to everyone

                • kofe@lemmy.world
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                  2 months ago

                  If you think my argument is missing something, by all means, it would be useful to say that rather than passive aggressive.

        • LibertyLizard@slrpnk.netOP
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          2 months ago

          I can’t believe so many people upvoted this comment. Do they just assume because there are lots of words and you referenced the original paper that this is a good critique? But I guess a lot of people just turn off their brain when they feel cognitive dissonance.

          Do you know what a survey is? It’s not meant to be comprehensive, it’s supposed to be representative. Furthermore, it is based on existing ethnographic data, so it’s obviously not going to include data on tribes that are currently uncontacted, because there is little or none. The reasons why are obvious but since you don’t seem to understand, we can spell it out.

          Conducting anthropological research on these tribes typically involves going to the tribe and living with, observing, and interviewing them for an extended period to fully understand their culture and way of life. This is not advisable with uncontacted tribes because it is dangerous for researchers and dangerous for the tribe which may lack exposure to endemic diseases in the rest of the world. It’s simply not done and I guarantee no ethics board would approve such research today.

          Furthermore, it’s hilarious to suggest that the authors deliberately omitted cultures we know little about to reinforce their own agenda. How would they even know which tribes the exclude? And, as others have pointed out, even if all of these uncontacted tribes had only male hunting (a fact which would be highly surprising), it would barely change the conclusion here that in most forager societies, women engage in hunting.

          Overall, this seems a very bad-faith critique. It’s good to delve into the science and examine whether a given paper was conducted in a sound way, but you need to approach it with an open mind, not just seek to undermine it with the simplest and most superficial criticism you can conceive of that supports your pre-existing position.