Anthropologist Agustín Fuentes tells us that one study of forty-six different meta-analyses shows that among the differences between the sexes that we tend to think of as “essential,” there are only a very few that hold across cultures. !Kung boys focus on tasks as well as !Kung girls. Girls in three Middle Eastern countries—Jordan, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—outpace boys in math. But worldwide, men have greater grip strength, throwing velocity, and throwing strength than women. For these reasons men suddenly had and continue to have a physical advantage in plough-farming settings. In
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