Early Female Hunters Were More Common Than We Thought

Curiosity Weekly

Warner Bros. Discovery

Science

4.6 • 964 Ratings

🗓️ 17 December 2020

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Learn about why ants are better farmers than we'll ever be; how female big-game hunters were likely common in the early Americas; and why presenting too much evidence could actually make you lose an argument, thanks to the overkill backfire effect.

Ants Are Better Farmers Than We'll Ever Be by Steffie Drucker

Ants are skilled farmers: They have solved a problem that we humans have yet to. (2020). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-11/uoc-aas110420.php
Handwerk, B. (2017, April 12). How Ants Became the World’s Best Fungus Farmers. Smithsonian Magazine; Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-ants-became-worlds-best-fungus-farmers-180962871/
Byers, D. The First Farmers. Florida State College Jacksonville. http://web.fscj.edu/David.Byres/tango.html

Female big-game hunters were likely common in the early Americas by Grant Currin

Early big-game hunters of the americas were female, researchers suggest. (2020). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-11/uoc--ebh102920.php
Carne, N. (2020, November 5). Men hunt and women gather. But not always. Cosmos Magazine. https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/archaeology/men-hunt-women-gather-but-maybe-not-always/
Haas, R., Watson, J., Buonasera, T., Southon, J., Chen, J. C., Noe, S., Smith, K., Llave, C. V., Eerkens, J., & Parker, G. (2020). Female hunters of the early Americas. Science Advances, 6(45), eabd0310. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abd0310

Presenting Too Much Evidence Could Make You Lose an Argument by Cody Gough

https://www.curiositydaily.com/tips-to-win-an-argument-how-to-wash-your-hands-sum/

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes.
0:03.6	With Curiosity Daily from Curiosity.com, I'm Cody Gough.
0:07.0	And I'm Ashley Hamer.
0:08.0	Today you learn about why ants are better farmers than we'll ever be,
0:12.0	what the quote-unquote discovery of female big game hunters
0:15.9	can teach us about human knowledge and why presenting too much evidence could make you lose
0:21.3	an argument.
0:22.3	Would satisfy some curiosity.
0:24.0	Humans started farming about 10,000 years ago.
0:28.0	But another creature was way ahead of us.
0:31.0	That's right, the world's first farmers were ants.
0:35.4	Fungus farming ants to be specific. There are 240 species of them and
0:41.4	they've been added for more than 60 million years.
0:46.1	My goodness.
0:48.0	And scientists say that we could learn a thing or two from how they do it.
0:51.5	You know how they were able to farm that far back right how because there was an alien and farm
1:00.0	that's pretty good thanks do you do-d-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo, the only alien ant farm song I know is a cover of Michael Jackson.
1:08.3	Yeah, they were smooth criminals.
1:10.8	They were.
1:12.2	All right, well, we humans have learned to domesticate plants in the same way we did with animals,
1:17.0	through selective breeding.
1:19.0	While that can result in crops with better taste, texture, or yield, it also reduces genetic diversity, and that can make the plants
	...

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