• Sagifurius@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    That was a theory? I was under the impression Male/Female size differentiation was from men fighting men.

    • ExLisper@linux.community
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      1 year ago

      No, one of the theories is actually that early homo sapiens groups were mostly closely related and interbred often. That’s what have them advantage over other species. We can see evidence of that in the DNA. Men fighting men came later, probably with first settlements and dependence on local resources.

      • Starkstruck@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        You mean to tell me incest is what led to the success of the human race? That… actually explains a lot /s

        • ExLisper@linux.community
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          1 year ago

          No, it’s the opposite. Tribe was pretty much a big family. Neanderthals were reproducing mostly inside the tribe. Homo sapiens were reproducing with neighbouring tribes more often than Neanderthals. They had less incest and more varied genes. But this means that people had a lot of family in neighbouring tribe (like uncles and cousins) so they were less likely to fight them. That’s the theory.

    • JoBo@feddit.uk
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      1 year ago

      Apes fighting apes, maybe. AFAIK, size differences between the sexes has not increased since we first evolved. It’s part of our pre-human genetic heritage, not an evolutionary pressure on homo sapiens.

      • Sagifurius@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I rather doubt that, because you see much larger male/female size differentiation in certain ethnicities than others, almost like there was some sort of pressure or selection geographically.

        • JoBo@feddit.uk
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          1 year ago

          Size has much more to do with diet and environment than genes. It’s not uncommon for societies where food is scarce to feed boys more than girls. In some places fat wives are prized as an external indicator that her husband is wealthy. These relationships change with place and time, and faster than genetic selection could possibly act.

        • brambledog@lemmy.today
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          1 year ago

          If you look at Polynesians, the women often tend to be bigger as well, maintaining the size disparity seen in other races and cultures. Wouldn’t this suggest that evolutionary pressures which will give preference to larger stature bodies are affecting the sexes equally?

          If so, then the innate size disparity between sexes was written into our genetic code before we branched off.

          I’m not an evolutionary biologist though.