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Every once in a while we find yet another uncontacted tribe of people somewhere in the world. The most recent one I read about was in the Amazon.
Now, if these tribes were previously unconnected to the rest of the world, whatever "patriarchy" the rest of the world follows would not affect them. It's an unbiased sample. All of the published pictures I'm seeing are all men and no women.
The thing is that, in general, these tribes all seem to follow generally the same social schemes... the men seem to do the hunting, and the women tend to do the child-rearing and non-hunting activities. Now I'm sure there are some outliers where women are also doing hunting, but generally this isn't a thing.
From a purely physical perspective (and I'm assuming this isn't a controversial stand), being pregnant, giving birth, and the first year or so after giving birth to a child is hard and energy-intensive endeavor that would preclude many strenuous activities. Seeing as women are the only members of humanity that can do this, it would follow that societies would be set up around this. To be super specific, when I'm saying "women," I mean members of the human species who are adults and with a body form intended to produce the larger gametes we call "eggs" and gestate offspring internally and can produce nourishment for said offspring. The fact that I need to write this out, I find silly.
Men and women are different. Both men and women are needed and valuable. The progressive stance that men and women are entirely interchangeable and indistinguishable is laughable in my opinion. Men and women are different, and that's a good thing.
On the topic of SciAm, well, I dropped my subscription when they endorsed a candidate for the presidency last time around. To have science mix with politics takes away from the science aspect. Science is the search for truth -- not just "truth" that meshes with currently popular ideas.
This is true, however I’d just point out, uncontacted tribes in the Amazon usually do have contact with other tribes.
The word used in countries where these tribes are typically found is more accurate, people who are in “voluntary isolation”.
Not saying this to make any point one way or another, just because the subject interests me.
Point taken. Some of the pics from the linked article have cow skulls strung up on a stick, so there's some contact with the outside world. But that said it still says something that the only photos of the tribe only have men. However, I sincerely doubt that the interaction with outsiders caused a shift in gender roles for this (or other) tribe(s).
It all reeks of starting from a conclusion and working backward to make an article to support it.
Another thing I just thought of which is unrelated to this: insurance rates. I'm a guy in my early 50s, which means at some point in the past I was a teenager. I've also worked in insurance for quite a while -- not the actual underwriting, but I had plenty of interactions with the people who did. There's a vast disparity between the accident rates for young men compared to young women, which leads to the disparate amount charged by the companies. There's something pretty obviously different in the behavior, in the aggregate, between men and women from a purely behavioral standpoint concerning risk-taking.
Similarly, all one has to do is look at the prison population and note that the vast majority of inmates are men. Some of this is caused by women getting lighter sentences for the same crimes, but that doesn't explain the order of magnitude difference between the behavior of men and women.
Even discounting differences in physical strength, there's something fundamentally different in our wiring.
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