RT info:eu-repo/semantics/article
T1 No sex differences in the economy of load‐carriage
A1 Prado‐Nóvoa, Olalla
A1 Rodríguez, Jesús
A1 Vidal Cordasco, Marco Adolfo
A1 Zorrilla Revilla, Guillermo
A1 Mateos, Ana
K1 Burden transport
K1 Load-carriage economy
K1 Foraging strategies
K1 Division of labour
K1 Antropología física
K1 Physical anthropology
K1 Evolución humana
K1 Human evolution
K1 Caza prehistórica
K1 Hunting, Prehistoric
AB Objectives:Load transport activities are of vital importance to current foragers for daily subsistence tasks; thus, it has been suggested that these practices have transformed physical and behavioral characteristics through human evolution. Together with the procurement targets and strategies, the transportation of resources acquired while foraging is strongly influenced by the sex of the foragers. In hunter-gatherer societies, women, despite their smaller body size, usually carry heavier burdens than males. In this study, whether those behavioral differences can be explained by a different economy of load-carriage by sex, irrespective of the body mass of the individuals, is investigated.Material and methods:The energy expenditure of a sample of 48 volunteers (21 females, 27 males) during a set of locomotion and burden transport trials was monitored. Two indexes were computed to compare the increment in the cost of locomotion relative to the load carried by sex.Results:The results demonstrate that both males and females, carrying the same relative loads, experience the same increment over the cost of their unloaded locomotion. Therefore, apart from obvious differences in body mass, there is no evidence of a dissimilar economy favoring one sex over the other that would explain the differences in load-carriage activities observed among current foraging populations.Conclusions:These outcomes provide new conclusions about the constraints of the behavioral ecology of burden transport activities, and highlight the necessity to reevaluate, from an evolutionary perspective, the ideas about the sexual division of subsistence labor in hunter-gatherer and agriculturalist populations.
PB Wiley
SN 1042-0533
YR 2020
FD 2020-05
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10259/11372
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10259/11372
LA eng
NO This study was supported by the Span-ish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO)project CGL2015-65387-C3-3-P. Prado-Nóvoa, Vidal-Cordasco, and Zorrilla-Revilla benefited from predoctoralresearch grants EDU/310/2015 and EDU/602/2016 fromJunta de Castilla y León funded with the Social EuropeanFund, Operative Program of Junta de Castilla y León,through the Consejería de Educación.
DS Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Burgos
RD 27-abr-2026