Women Make Better Mushroom Hunters?
Women Gathering Mushrooms, from 'Travaux des Champs', engraved by Lucien Pissarro (1863-1944) published London 1893 (woodcut)
I do not know how Kevin Lewis of Boston.com found out about a forthcoming Evolution and Human Behavior paper by Pacheco-Cobos, L. et al., “Sex Differences in Mushroom Gathering: Men Expend More Energy to Obtain Equivalent Benefits” but you gotta’ respect him for it. In his column, Uncommon Knowledge, Lewis briefly describes the results of this paper which concludes that:
Using GPS and activity monitors, the researchers found that men were less efficient–they traveled farther, went higher, and exerted more effort than women for the same amount of mushrooms. Women also collected a greater variety of mushrooms from more sites.
Silly men.
Upon further investigation, perhaps the paper is only forthcoming in print, since the paper was published by the journal online on April 5, 2010.
Here is the abstract:
Some of the strongest evidence for sex differences in human cognition relate to spatial abilities, with men traditionally reported to outperform women. Recently, however, such differences have been shown to be task dependent. Supporting the argument that a critical factor selecting for sex differences in spatial abilities during human evolution is likely to have been the division of labor during the Pleistocene, evidence is accumulating that women excel on tasks appropriate to gathering immobile plant resources, while men excel on tasks appropriate to hunting mobile, unpredictable prey. Most research, with the exception of some recent experimental field studies, has been conducted in the laboratory, with little information available on how men and women actually forage under natural conditions. In a first study, we GPS-tracked the foraging pathways of 21 pairs of men and women from an indigenous Mexican community searching for mushrooms in a natural environment. Measures of costs, benefits and general search efficiency were analyzed and related to differences between the two sexes in foraging patterns. Although men and women collected similar quantities of mushrooms, men did so at significantly higher cost. They traveled further, to greater altitudes, and had higher mean heart rates and energy expenditure (kcal). They also collected fewer species and visited fewer collection sites. These findings are consistent with arguments in the literature that differences in spatial ability between the sexes are domain dependent, with women performing better and more readily adopting search strategies appropriate to a gathering lifestyle than men.
Mushrooms and Human Evolution
I know of ethnomycological studies of Wasson, McKenna, and others, but I wonder how much recent effort has been put into studying fungus-human interactions from an evolutionary and behavioral perspective? I decided to snoop around the archives of Evolution and Human Behavior a bit to see what I could find.
According to Does women’s greater fear of snakes and spiders originate in infancy?, “previous studies with adult humans and nonhuman animals revealed more rapid fear learning for spiders and snakes than for mushrooms and flowers.” What a surprise!
That’s about it for this journal. A search for “mushrooms” and related fungal terms did turn up about a dozen hits, but this was the only additional one that had the relevant keywords in an available abstract. I was unable to view the full text of any of the other articles to see if they referenced mushrooms at all.
Mushroom Gathering Women of the Shōtoku Era (1891).
I also searched the journals Evolution, The Journal of Human Evolution, The Journal of Evolutionary Biology, Brian, Behavior and Evolution,
Nothing found really. Although I did find “The evolution of spore size in Agarics: do big mushrooms have big spores?” in The Journal of Evolutionary Biology. (Answer: Seemingly so, but only slightly.)
There doesn’t seem to be much new under the sun in ethnomycology and/or the evolutionary biology of human-fungus interactions. It’s probably a pretty hard subject to make headway in. If I’m wrong, please let me know!
More on this Topic (the men vs. Women thing)
Men are better at map reading, but women are superior at remembering routes, study finds
Women navigate more efficiently than men
Link to scumbag blogger site who lifted the Daily Mail article word-for-word and picture-for-picture without attribution omitted.
Tags: gathering mushrooms, human behavior, mushroom gathering, mushroom hunting
It appears you’ve been searching in the wrong places my friend. There have been many studies in ethnomycology since Wasson and McKenna, many have been published in Economic Botany and the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine (which even made a special number dedicated to Ethnomycology!). Of course, most of the work in this area has had more of a cultural aproach (rather than evolutionary) but there are many many things worth taking a peek at. Hope you do!
Thanks for the comment. I don’t know how long the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine has been around, but a search of their archives turns up exactly 3 papers, all since 2006.
You do have a point about Economic Botany though [special issue 82(8): 2008]. Unfortunately, no university near me carries it (except by electronic subscription). However, a search of their archives shows they generally publish about 1-2 ethnomycology papers a year (a total of 36 in the last 12 years, including 17 in the 2008 special issue); hardy a swelling of the literature. But, definitely worth keeping an eye on. Thanks again.