A recent article by Ocobock and Lacy (Ocobock & Lacy, 2023) argues that human females are “just as, if not more, capable as males at performing arduous physical tasks” and therefore likely to have “meaningfully engaged in hunting during our evolutionary past.” This is a direct challenge to the (generally accepted) canon that gendered subsistence activities are a key feature of the human ecological niche, with men typically contributing more to subsistence via endurance hunting and women through plant and small-prey foraging and other activities more compatible with women's reproductive roles and energetic trade-offs. In support of their argument, Ocobock and Lacy provide a comprehensive and novel review of the aspects of women's skeletal, muscular, and hormonal biology that may confer greater cardiometabolic protection and even enhanced athletic endurance and recovery capabilities relative to men. We agree with the authors that women have been woefully underrepresented in exercise physiology studies, and we hope that their review motivates further research into previously unexamined variation in women's physiological and athletic abilities.

However, we strongly disagree with a central premise that appears to motivate this scholarship: that the idea of evolved gendered subsistence activities derives largely from incorrect assumptions extrapolated from patriarchal norms today and/or rationalizations of “implicit male superiority” based solely on anatomical gender differences. Such claims are belied by extensive ethnographic and human behavioral ecology research across multiple extant foraging societies. These studies document the near universality of gendered divisions of labor, with women's large-scale participation in hunting occurring only in specific societies (i.e., the Agta) or contexts (i.e., small-game hunting) (Bird, 1999; Hoffman, Farquharson, & Venkataraman, 2023). We further argue that the review and reconstruction of women's evolved physiological capabilities is overly reliant on, and may misapply, data from Western industrialized populations.

We also caution that the authors’ methodological approach does not follow the typical structure of a scientific study. Ocobock and Lacy do not state any falsifiable hypotheses or predictions to answer a specific research question, nor do they demonstrate how the physiological evidence presented changes predictions about the impact of human hunting behaviors on biological fitness (survival and reproduction). Rather, the paper is focused on underscoring the reasons why the original interpretations of male-biased hunting are “wrong” (not incomplete), while attempting to demonstrate how flawed the patriarchal view is. It is further rooted in assumptions that hunting is a superior, more-desirable activity, even explicitly stating that women are “relegated to mothering and gathering.” In doing so, the authors conflate arguments belonging to different and not always compatible or comparable planes: the moral, ideological, and scientific. While Westernized individualistic perspectives may position mothering and women's domestic labor as relatively less-skilled or important activities compared to other (often male) economic contributions, this view is not shared by most contemporary scholars of foraging societies, nor by many women in foraging societies themselves. Fundamentally, we agree that gender biases in our field should be challenged, but this should not be confounded by a reluctance to accept that underlying evolutionary explanations may differ from what the “antipatriarchal” position may posit.

In this critique, we focus mainly on what we see as the scientific limitations of the paper, drawing our arguments from empirical and theoretical advances in human and nonhuman primate reproductive ecology and biology. We selected this approach because we are researchers with many collective years of experience studying the behavior and biology of mothers and infants in natural fertility populations (with limited modern contraception) and subsistence-scale societies. Our critique does not deny the plausibility that women engaged in endurance hunting in the past, nor that flawed assumptions based on gender biases have permeated our field and other spaces where knowledge on this topic has been produced. Our aim is to underscore reproductive fitness as central in thinking, advancing, and testing hypotheses about human evolution—as challenging and imperfect as this approach can be.

Essentially, when focusing on the features of women's biology that confer physical fitness advantages, Ocobock and Lacy do not consider (1) what aspects of reproductive fitness this physiology would have been selected for; or (2) what the energetic costs and benefits are to women engaging in hunting vs. the myriad other behaviors that enhance their reproductive fitness, particularly in resource-limited environments. In short, what women are physiologically capable of and how they optimally allocate their energy are two different questions. The well-documented physical and time costs of human reproduction—from gestation and lactation to prolonged infant and child care (Emery Thompson, 2013; Jasieńska, 2009)—cannot be easily discounted or extrapolated from one environment to another, let alone from the present day to the ancestral past. Suggesting that these reproductive costs are minimal risks undermining recent decades of scholarship advocating for maternal, child, and family health policies better informed by human evolutionary biology (McKenna & Gettler, 2016; Rosenberg & Trevathan, 2018; Sellen, 2007; Stuebe & Tully, 2020).

We agree that many aspects of sexually dimorphic physiology should be reexamined with enhanced understanding of proximate and ontogenetic processes, not merely assumed adaptive functions that may be confounded with cultured gender norms (Dunsworth, 2020). However, the biological basis for the sexual division of labor, and especially hunting, extends well beyond athletic and endurance capabilities. Importantly, the gendered subsistence activities observed in humans—and not in any other primates—are proposed to have evolved specifically in relation to our unique pattern of prolonged postweaning juvenile dependency and provisioning (Lancaster & Lancaster, 1983; Panter-Brick, 2002). While there have been lively disagreements as to whether gendered divisions in subsistence activities constitute cooperative parental provisioning (Bird, 1999) or different strategies maximizing mating vs. parenting efforts (Kristen Hawkes, O'Connell, & Rogers, 1997), these debates have primarily centered around reproductive strategies and offspring provisioning—not anatomical sex differences.

In asking if women participated in endurance hunting at the relatively same or greater rate as men, we should first consider the costs and benefits of hunting as a subsistence and reproductive strategy, and then evaluate these relative to pooled energy budgets modeled from extant foraging societies (Kramer & Ellison, 2010; Kramer & Otárola-Castillo, 2015). First, and assuming equivalent physiological potential to hunt, becoming a successful hunter requires years of observation, practice, and experience (Gurven, Kaplan, & Gutierrez, 2006; Koster et al., 2020). Like hunting, women's foraging is highly skilled, with peak returns occurring after the third decade of life (Kaplan et al., 2000). Meanwhile, women's foraging (including small-prey foraging) may contribute as much or more to group subsistence as men's endurance hunting, which can be risky, unreliable, and confer as much social as caloric benefits (Bliege Bird & Bird, 2008; K. Hawkes et al., 1997; Lee, 1968). For women, time spent learning to and participating in endurance hunting would necessarily trade off against time spent learning to and participating in other foraging activities. Given the importance of these latter nutritional contributions, and their compatibility with reproduction, strategies favoring women's endurance hunting could negatively impact survival and reproductive fitness.

While men and women could have been equally engaged in endurance hunting and foraging, such a strategy would absolutely not have been favored by equivalent reproductive strategies—especially with peak hunting and foraging returns coinciding with the peak ages of female reproduction (∼ages 20–40) (Kaplan et al., 2000). While human males, along with a few other primate species, are fairly unique in providing intense paternal care (Fernandez-Duque, Valeggia, & Mendoza, 2009; Rosenbaum & Silk, 2022; Winking et al., 2009), they, like other mammalian males, did not evolve to be particularly good at gestating and lactating.1

There are several lines of evidence suggesting that the demands of human female reproduction would favor less risky and less energetically demanding subsistence tasks (Sadhir & Pontzer, 2023). First, extreme physical stress and endurance suppress ovulation, which has been well documented among both elite women athletes (Prior et al., 1982) and nonathletes with high physical activity levels, even with compensatory caloric intake (Jasieńska & Ellison, 1998). Second, pregnancy was likely not that compatible with endurance hunting. Women's blood volume, oxygen, and nutrient demands substantially increase during pregnancy, as early as the first trimester (Soma-Pillay et al., 2016). While we do not endorse a view of pregnancy as a particularly fragile state, extreme energetic demands and stress (which may be characteristic of endurance hunting) can increase risks of pregnancy loss and maternal complications (Sadhir & Pontzer, 2023; Vitzthum, 2009). Pregnancy is also cumbersome at later stages for bipedal humans, hindering women's ability to track and hunt game over long distances.

Third, maternal and infant health benefit from prolonged postpartum social support and continuous contact across infancy. Traditional home births (in the absence of biomedical obstetric care) are accompanied by periods of postpartum social support in many cultures (Dennis et al., 2007), supporting maternal and infant recovery, survivorship, and bonding. In the United States, these social support traditions (and adequate maternal leave policies) are frequently absent (Miller & Price-Crist, 2023), contributing to our disproportionately high rates of maternal mortality among high-income nations, particularly for ethnic minority groups (Jou et al., 2018; Van Niel et al., 2020).

A prolonged postpartum rest period with female support may also be critical in successfully establishing breastfeeding (Scelza & Hinde, 2019). The evolved pattern of human lactation and infant care (with an average age of weaning estimated at ∼2–3 years) is likely to resemble that of other great apes: infants are in constant arm's reach of their mothers, and nurse in frequent, short bursts, multiple times an hour, 24 hours a day (Hinde & Milligan, 2011; Martin, 2017; Sellen, 2007). While these prolonged and intensive breastfeeding practices are frequently absent in modernized, industrialized settings, they support optimal infant health and development (Pérez-Escamilla et al., 2023) and are crucial for infant survival in resource-limited, high-pathogen environments, under which our ancestors would have evolved (Veile & Miller, 2021). Because infants depend on this prolonged maternal investment, infants who lose their mothers are far more likely to die in extant hunter-gatherer and other natural fertility subsistence-scale societies (Sear & Mace, 2008).

Lastly, the energetic demands of pregnancy and lactation must be evaluated within their evolved contexts. Though estrogen levels (emphasized by Ocobock and Lacy as key to women's endurance advantage) are much higher in women than men, and even more so during pregnancy, estrogen levels are generally much lower in women from subsistence-scale as compared to industrialized populations (Vitzthum, 2009) and decrease substantially with intensive breastfeeding (McNeilly, 1997) and during and after menopause. Water, food, and other resources were much less abundant (and harder to obtain and extract given the technologies available), and microbial exposures much more prevalent, than they are today (Harper & Armelagos, 2010). In the absence of effective or explicit family planning, women spent most of their reproductive lives (ages ∼20–40) in a continuous cycle of pregnancy and prolonged lactation (Strassmann, 1997).

For all of the above reasons, the physical demands and capabilities of even the most elite modern women athletes cannot stand in for those of ancestral foraging women. We note that all of the physiological research reviewed in Ocobock and Lacy comes from studies of nonpregnant women athletes in highly industrialized settings. As such, the incredible triumph of Sophie Power running an ultra-marathon at three months postpartum is not an example of “what women's bodies can do” but rather an impressive example of what a modern athlete can do. A modern athlete with water and calorically dense foods and energy gels available to them on demand, with a relative absence of disease burdens and related immune costs, with limited prior pregnancies, with years of elite training to support them, and with modern medical and therapeutic care available at the ready. And this is even before the breast pump and helpful partner is there to bring it to them.

In conclusion, we agree with Ocobock and Lacy that “[in] essence, females … take part in an endurance event that spans years, and their bodies both anticipate this and are able to adjust quickly when the pregnancy hormonal milieu signals its beginning … many pregnancy adaptations in humans are evolutionarily advantageous, not a handicap or a tradeoff, as they are often portrayed.” Yet, these adaptations have not been realistically considered in extrapolating to an endurance hunting advantage in ancestral settings. The consensus from and since “Man the Hunter” is that pooled energy budgets constituted the major innovation in the human ecological niche (Kramer & Ellison, 2010; Lee, 1968), enabled by a suite of co-evolved adaptations—including higher quality weaning foods acquired through cooperative, extractive foraging, alloparenting from older children at the nest and grandmothers, greater paternal care and provisioning, and divisions of labor—which ultimately optimized maternal energy allocation, allowing for shorter interbirth intervals, overlapping generations, and markedly higher total fertility in human foragers as compared to other great apes (Kaplan et al., 2000; Kramer, 2019; Kristen Hawkes, 2020). Alternative strategies that substantially increase maternal energy expenditure (even if they were compensated with more calories from game), decrease fertility, or increase maternal and infant morbidity/mortality would be highly disfavored in this landscape.

It is not an all-or-nothing question or one of can versus cannot. Rather, the question is: How likely is it that hunting would have evolved as a stable, universal strategy for both sexes in equal terms with similar trade-offs? Neither hunting nor reproduction is activated overnight. Each is contingent on energy capital above maintenance (for both reproduction and hunting), skills acquisition (physical, technical, cognitive), and practice (Kaplan et al., 2000). These two highly demanding activities, in terms of energy, time, and effort away from other subsistence activities, would have been pulling in opposite directions, particularly for the sex with the highest additional demands (gestation, lactation, postnatal care). Opportunity costs, risk assessments, and returns are likely to tip the balance for females to more long-term sustainable and less-risky strategies (in energetic and survival terms) that are more compatible with all reproductive stages and with creating and maintaining reliable support networks, alliances, and reciprocal arrangements. Prioritizing lifetime reproductive capital does not preclude women from hunting, possibly even specializing in certain types of hunting depending on the social and physical ecology. Still, the frequency at which women could have engaged in those activities would be limited in natural fertility subsistence-scale populations.

If reproduction is the selective force behind the proposed metabolic and physiological “pregnancy advantages” Ocobock and Lacy describe, under what circumstances would these advantages confer a fitness benefit if not realized for reproduction? The energy-sparing and -maximizing adaptations purported to enhance women's endurance activity (e.g., higher estrogen and adiponectin levels and related enhanced efficiency in substrate mobilization and fatigue recovery) would only have been selected for endurance hunting if greater endurance translated into greater energetic returns from hunting and then into higher reproduction. Perhaps we are mischaracterizing Ocobock and Lacy's argument here in that they are not arguing about the selective pressures operating on this physiology, but only its application. Yet we would counter, who would have had higher reproductive fitness: the women who used their endurance advantage for direct reproductive investment (pregnancy, lactation, offspring care) while being assisted in provisioning, or the women who participated frequently in endurance hunting in order to provision themselves and their own and others’ offspring? How likely is the latter to outcompete the former as a behavioral strategy over multiple generations?

If the aim of Ocobock and Lacy's review was to provide biological evidence against the generalization of endurance hunting as an activity that only males had the capacity to perform, that aim was achieved. This is an important contribution and addition, but it does not automatically destroy the “myth” of Man the Hunter as presented. In other words, this new evidence does not refute years of accumulated evidence supporting gendered divisions of labor as a human evolutionary strategy. The claim is incomplete unless the authors develop the implications of such evidence to the level where it matters in evolutionary terms. In other words, what their work contributes is an answer to the question “Are women capable of endurance hunting?” It is not an answer to the question “Is the capability of endurance hunting sufficient evidence of a widely practiced, viable fitness strategy for women?” The precise question that needs answering to truly weaken the assumptions underlying the Man the Hunter theory as proposed should be “Could women's participation in endurance hunting have contributed significantly to fitness as to be a key selective force driving human evolution?” In our view, based on evidence derived from empirical and theoretical advances in human and nonhuman primate reproductive ecology and biology, the answer is “no.”

奥科博克和莱西最近发表的一篇文章（Ocobock & Lacy，2023）认为，人类女性“在执行艰巨的体力任务方面与男性一样，甚至更强”，因此可能“在我们的进化过程中有意义地参与狩猎” ”。这是对（普遍接受的）准则的直接挑战，即性别生存活动是人类生态位的一个关键特征，男性通常通过耐力狩猎为生存做出更多贡献，而女性则通过植物和小猎物觅食以及其他更兼容的活动为生存做出更多贡献女性的生育角色和精力充沛的权衡。为了支持他们的论点，奥科博克和莱西对女性骨骼、肌肉和激素生物学方面进行了全面而新颖的综述，这些生物学可能会比男性提供更好的心脏代谢保护，甚至增强运动耐力和恢复能力。我们同意作者的观点，即女性在运动生理学研究中的代表性严重不足，我们希望他们的评论能够激发对女性生理和运动能力先前未经检验的变化的进一步研究。

然而，我们强烈不同意似乎激发这项奖学金的一个核心前提：进化的性别生存活动的想法很大程度上源于从今天的父权制规范中推断出的错误假设和/或仅基于解剖学性别差异的“隐性男性优越感”的合理化。这种说法被对多个现存觅食社会的广泛的人种学和人类行为生态学研究所推翻。这些研究记录了性别劳动分工的几乎普遍性，妇女大规模参与狩猎只发生在特定社会（即阿格塔）或环境（即小型狩猎）中（Bird，1999；Hoffman，Farquharson，和文卡塔拉曼，2023）。我们进一步认为，对女性进化生理能力的审查和重建过度依赖，并且可能误用来自西方工业化人口的数据。

我们还提醒您，作者的方法论并不遵循科学研究的典型结构。奥科博克和莱西没有提出任何可证伪的假设或预测来回答特定的研究问题，也没有证明生理证据如何改变关于人类狩猎行为对生物适应性（生存和繁殖）影响的预测。相反，本文的重点是强调为什么最初对男性偏见狩猎的解释是“错误的”（并非不完整），同时试图证明父权制观点有多么错误。它进一步植根于这样的假设，即狩猎是一种更高级、更令人向往的活动，甚至明确指出女性“被降级为母亲和采集”。在这样做的过程中，作者将属于不同但并不总是兼容或可比较的层面的论点混为一谈：道德、意识形态和科学。虽然西方化的个人主义观点可能将母亲和妇女的家务劳动视为与其他（通常是男性）经济贡献相比技能相对较低或重要的活动，但大多数当代觅食社会学者以及许多觅食社会中的妇女并不认同这种观点。 。从根本上说，我们同意我们领域的性别偏见应该受到挑战，但这不应该因为不愿接受潜在的进化解释可能与“反父权制”立场所假设的不同而混淆。

在这篇评论中，我们主要关注本文的科学局限性，并从人类和非人类灵长类动物生殖生态学和生物学的经验和理论进展中得出我们的论点。我们选择这种方法是因为我们是具有多年研究自然生育人群（现代避孕措施有限）和维持生计的社会中母亲和婴儿的行为和生物学经验的研究人员。我们的批评并不否认女性过去从事耐力狩猎的合理性，也不否认基于性别偏见的有缺陷的假设已经渗透到我们的领域和产生该主题知识的其他领域。我们的目标是强调生殖适应性是思考、推进和检验人类进化假设的核心——尽管这种方法可能具有挑战性和不完美性。

本质上，当关注赋予身体健康优势的女性生物学特征时，奥科博克和莱西没有考虑（1）这种生理学会被选择用于生殖健康的哪些方面；或（2）对于从事狩猎的女性来说，与其他提高她们生殖健康的行为相比，能量成本和收益是什么，特别是在资源有限的环境中。简而言之，女性的生理能力和她们如何最佳地分配能量是两个不同的问题。有据可查的人类繁殖的物理和时间成本——从妊娠和哺乳到长期的婴儿和儿童保育（Emery Thompson，2013；Jasieńska，2009）——不能轻易地从一种环境到另一种环境进行折扣或推断，更不用说从现在开始了。天地祖往昔。表明这些生殖成本是破坏近几十年学术界倡导的以人类进化生物学为基础的孕产妇、儿童和家庭健康政策的最小风险（McKenna & Gettler, 2016 ; Rosenberg & Trevathan, 2018 ; Sellen, 2007 ; Stuebe & Tully, 2020）。

我们同意，应该重新审视性二态生理学的许多方面，以增强对近邻和个体发生过程的理解，而不仅仅是假设可能与文化性别规范相混淆的适应性功能（Dunsworth，2020）。然而，性别劳动分工（尤其是狩猎）的生物学基础远远超出了运动和耐力能力。重要的是，在人类（而非任何其他灵长类动物）中观察到的性别生存活动被认为是专门与我们断奶后幼年依赖和供给的独特模式相关的（Lancaster & Lancaster，1983；Panter-Brick，2002）。虽然对于生存活动中的性别差异是否构成合作性父母提供（Bird，1999）或最大化交配与养育努力的不同策略（Kristen Hawkes，O'Connell，＆Rogers，1997 ）存在激烈的分歧，但这些辩论主要是以生殖策略和后代供应为中心，而不是解剖学上的性别差异。

在询问女性参与耐力狩猎的比例是否与男性相对相同或更高时，我们应该首先考虑狩猎作为生存和繁殖策略的成本和收益，然后根据现有觅食社会模型的汇总能源预算来评估这些成本和收益。克莱默和埃里森，2010；克莱默和奥塔罗拉-卡斯蒂略，2015）。首先，假设具有同等的狩猎生理潜力，成为一名成功的猎人需要多年的观察、练习和经验（Gurven、Kaplan 和 Gutierrez，2006 年；Koster 等人，2020 年）。与狩猎一样，女性的觅食技能也很高，回报高峰发生在三十岁之后（Kaplan et al., 2000）。与此同时，女性的觅食（包括小猎物觅食）对群体生存的贡献可能与男性的耐力狩猎一样多，甚至更多，这可能是危险的、不可靠的，并带来与热量一样多的社会效益（Bliege Bird & Bird，2008；K.霍克斯等人，1997；李，1968）。对于女性来说，学习和参与耐力狩猎所花费的时间必然会与学习和参与其他觅食活动所花费的时间进行权衡。鉴于后者营养贡献的重要性及其与繁殖的相容性，有利于女性耐力狩猎的策略可能会对生存和生殖健康产生负面影响。

虽然男性和女性可以平等地参与耐力狩猎和觅食，但这种策略绝对不会受到同等生殖策略的青睐——尤其是狩猎和觅食回报高峰期与女性生殖高峰年龄（〜20-40岁）一致。 ）（卡普兰等人，2000）。虽然人类雄性以及其他一些灵长类物种在提供强烈的父爱照顾方面相当独特（Fernandez-Duque、Valeggia 和 Mendoza，2009 年；Rosenbaum 和 Silk，2022 年；Winking 等人，2009 年），但它们与其他灵长类动物一样，雄性哺乳动物并未进化到特别擅长妊娠和哺乳。1

有多项证据表明，人类女性生殖的需求更倾向于风险较小、精力要求较低的生存任务（Sadhir & Pontzer，2023）。首先，极端的身体压力和耐力会抑制排卵，这一点在优秀女运动员（Prior 等，1982）和体力活动水平较高的非运动员中都有充分记录，即使有补偿性热量摄入（Jasieńska & Ellison，1998）。其次，怀孕可能与耐力狩猎不太兼容。女性的血容量、氧气和营养需求在怀孕期间（早在妊娠的前三个月）就会大幅增加（Soma-Pillay 等，2016）。虽然我们不赞同将怀孕视为一种特别脆弱的状态，但极端的能量需求和压力（这可能是耐力狩猎的特征）可能会增加流产和孕产妇并发症的风险（Sadhir & Pontzer，2023；Vitzthum，2009）。对于双足人类来说，怀孕后期也很麻烦，阻碍了女性长距离追踪和狩猎的能力。

第三，产后长期的社会支持和整个婴儿期的持续接触有益于母婴健康。在许多文化中，传统的家庭分娩（在缺乏生物医学产科护理的情况下）伴随着产后社会支持（Dennis 等，2007），支持母婴康复、生存和情感纽带。在美国，这些社会支持传统（以及充足的产假政策）经常缺失（Miller & Price-Crist，2023），导致高收入国家中孕产妇死亡率过高，尤其是少数族裔群体（ Jou 等人，2018；Van Niel 等人，2020）。

在女性支持下延长产后休息时间对于成功建立母乳喂养也可能至关重要（Scelza & Hinde，2019）。人类哺乳和婴儿护理的进化模式（平均断奶年龄估计为~2-3岁）很可能与其他类人猿类似：婴儿总是在母亲的触手可及的范围内，并且频繁、短暂地哺乳。每天 24 小时，每小时多次（Hinde & Milligan，2011；Martin，2017；Sellen，2007）。虽然这些长时间和密集的母乳喂养实践在现代化、工业化环境中经常不存在，但它们支持最佳的婴儿健康和发育（Pérez-Escamilla 等，2023），并且对于资源有限、高病原体环境中的婴儿生存至关重要。这是我们的祖先进化而来的（Veile & Miller，2021）。由于婴儿依赖于这种长期的母性投资，因此在现存的狩猎采集社会和其他自然生育维持生计规模的社会中，失去母亲的婴儿更有可能死亡（Sear & Mace，2008）。

最后，必须在其进化背景下评估怀孕和哺乳期的能量需求。尽管女性的雌激素水平（奥科博克和莱西强调女性耐力优势的关键）比男性高得多，怀孕期间更是如此，但与工业化人口相比，维持生计规模的女性的雌激素水平通常要低得多（Vitzthum ，2009），并且随着强化母乳喂养（McNeilly，1997）以及绝经期间和之后显着下降。与今天相比，水、食物和其他资源远没有那么丰富（鉴于现有技术，更难获得和提取），微生物暴露也更加普遍（Harper & Armelagos，2010）。在缺乏有效或明确的计划生育的情况下，女性的大部分生殖生命（〜20-40岁）都在怀孕和长期哺乳的连续周期中度过（Strassmann，1997）。

由于上述所有原因，即使是最优秀的现代女运动员的体能要求和能力也无法替代祖先采集食物的女性。我们注意到，奥科博克和莱西审查的所有生理研究都来自对高度工业化环境中非怀孕女运动员的研究。因此，苏菲·鲍尔 (Sophie Power) 在产后三个月跑超级马拉松的令人难以置信的胜利并不是“女性身体可以做什么”的一个例子，而是一个现代运动员可以做什么的令人印象深刻的例子。现代运动员可以按需获得水和高热量食物和能量胶，相对没有疾病负担和相关的免疫成本，之前怀孕次数有限，有多年的精英训练来支持他们，并有现代医疗和治疗护理随时可用。这甚至是在吸奶器和乐于助人的伴侣将其带给他们之前。

总之，我们同意奥科博克和莱西的观点，即“本质上，女性……参加了一场持续数年的耐力活动，她们的身体都预见到了这一点，并且能够在怀孕荷尔蒙环境发出信号开始时迅速调整……许多人类的怀孕适应在进化上是有利的，而不是像人们经常描述的那样是一种障碍或权衡。”然而，在推断祖先环境中的耐力狩猎优势时，并没有实际考虑这些适应。自《猎人》以来的共识是，集中能源预算构成了人类生态位的重大创新（Kramer & Ellison，2010；Lee，1968），这是由一系列共同进化的适应措施（包括更高质量的断奶）实现的。通过合作、采掘性觅食、巢中年长儿童和祖母的异养、更多的父亲照顾和供给以及劳动分工获得食物——最终优化了母亲的能量分配，允许更短的生育间隔、世代重叠和显着更高的总生育率与其他类人猿相比，人类觅食者的差异更大（Kaplan 等人，2000 年；Kramer，2019 年；Kristen Hawkes，2020 年）。在这种情况下，大幅增加孕产妇能量消耗（即使通过游戏中更多卡路里来补偿）、降低生育率或增加孕产妇和婴儿发病率/死亡率的替代策略将受到高度不欢迎。

这不是一个全有或全无的问题，也不是一个可以与不可以的问题。相反，问题是：狩猎在平等条件下发展成为一种稳定、普遍的策略，并做出类似的权衡，有多大可能？狩猎和繁殖都不是一夜之间激活的。每一个都取决于维持（繁殖和狩猎）、技能获取（身体、技术、认知）和实践之上的能量资本（Kaplan 等，2000）。这两项高要求的活动，在精力、时间和精力上远离其他生存活动，本来会朝相反的方向发展，特别是对于额外要求最高的性别（妊娠、哺乳、产后护理）。机会成本、风险评估和回报可能会使女性采取更长期可持续和风险更低的策略（在精力和生存方面），这些策略更适合所有生殖阶段以及创建和维护可靠的支持网络、联盟和互惠安排。优先考虑终生生殖资本并不妨碍女性狩猎，甚至可能根据社会和自然生态专门从事某些类型的狩猎。尽管如此，在自然生育力维持生计的人口中，妇女参与这些活动的频率仍然受到限制。

如果繁殖是奥科博克和莱西所描述的代谢和生理“怀孕优势”背后的选择力，那么在什么情况下这些优势如果没有实现繁殖，会带来健康益处？只有当更大的耐力转化为更大的能量回报时，旨在增强女性耐力活动的能量节约和最大化适应（例如，更高的雌激素和脂联素水平以及相关的底物动员和疲劳恢复效率的提高）才会被选择用于耐力狩猎。狩猎，然后进入更高的繁殖。也许我们在这里误解了奥科博克和莱西的论点，因为他们并不是在争论作用于这种生理学的选择性压力，而只是在争论它的应用。然而，我们会反驳说，谁的生殖健康程度更高：那些利用耐力优势进行直接生殖投资（怀孕、哺乳、照顾后代）并在供给方面得到协助的女性，或者经常参加耐力狩猎的女性，以便获得更高的生殖健康。养活自己以及自己和他人的后代？作为多代人的行为策略，后者有多大可能超越前者？

如果奥科博克和莱西审查的目的是提供生物学证据，反对将耐力狩猎概括为只有雄性才有能力进行的活动，那么这个目标就达到了。这是一个重要的贡献和补充，但它并不会自动摧毁猎人所呈现的“神话”。换句话说，这一新证据并不能反驳多年来积累的支持性别分工作为人类进化策略的证据。除非作者将这些证据的含义发展到在进化方面具有重要意义的水平，否则这一主张是不完整的。换句话说，她们的工作贡献的是“女性有能力进行耐力狩猎吗？”这个问题的答案。它并不是对“耐力狩猎能力是否足以证明女性广泛采用、可行的健身策略？”这个问题的答案。要真正削弱所提出的“猎人男人”理论的假设，需要回答的确切问题应该是“女性参与耐力狩猎是否对健身做出了重大贡献，成为推动人类进化的关键选择力量？”我们认为，根据人类和非人类灵长类动物生殖生态学和生物学的经验和理论进展得出的证据，答案是“不”。