> > This is a lot harder than ret-conning sexism on the Internet
> "ret-conning"? Do you mean retroactive continuity? In what way does that apply to anything I wrote? Is that an accusation of sexism on the part of an argument that advocates the possibility of innate gender differences?
Evolutionary psychology is a useful thought exercise but it fails to produce many falsifiable hypotheses, mostly due to the combination of limited historical evidence and the inability to conduct experiments. What this means in practice is that you should be skeptical of claims that existing social customs exist because of biology in the absence of strong evidence that such biological differences exist, have the stated effect and are not explained by other means.
Any neuroscientist will tell you that there are differences between male and female brains (really, it's more accurately caused hormone levels which that simple gender binary doesn't accurately express); they will also tell you that there's insufficient understanding how these low-level differences affect higher level abilities (reading, logic, etc.). This doesn't mean that there aren't effects but rather that anyone who's trying to use this in support of traditional Western gender roles is significantly in advance of what the evidence supports.
> > This Disney history, not anthropology.
I actually expected a response like this. I'm using "males go hunting" and "females tend to the family at home" imagery so it must be a cartoonish simplification, right?
The fact that the remainder of your paragraph went on to accept that your original argument was, in fact, over-simplified suggests that it was. Again, nobody is arguing that men tend to be stronger but that doesn't tell you much about daily life, what the average person ate or how their children were raised. Since there are many examples of cultural differences in all of these areas, I submit that this cannot be so broadly described.
> As does "hundreds of thousands of years ago". The two overlap. No change of time-frames.
I stand by my earlier observation that 100,000 and 10,000 are an order of magnitude apart. This is actually of some significance as we have extremely little information for human life 100,000 years ago and even 10,000 years is still paltry; by the time you get into areas where we have much information about daily life (how would we be able to tell if it were common for men and women to hunt and gather together 100k years ago?), particularly at a level sufficient to shed any light at all on division of labor, socialization is already a major factor confounding any biological arguments.
> Not that that has anything to do with the accusation that I ascribe purpose to evolution, of which you provided no evidence.
See the previous paragraph, where you repeated it again. You cannot simply look at something's existence and conclude that it has been specifically selected for. It's highly likely that some minor differences might simply be due to things like different hormone levels at various points which trigger different, worthwhile changes; similarly since human brains take years to develop it's also hard to separate out the effects of practice. Adults who grew up without exposure to written text have significant differences in their brain structure which are entirely social but brain imaging can't tell you why. Going back to the topic, there are e.g. studies finding early gender preferences for colors but none of them can say how much is innate and how much is learned.
Since this has dragged on far too long, I'm going to leave a final summary of my position:
1. Our understanding of how the brain works is still quite limited, particularly when it comes to complex behaviour.
2. We have relatively little historical data beyond the last few thousand years, making general statements of any sort hard to support. We simply don't have the data.
3. Because humans are such social animals and we don't do experiments on our young, it's extremely difficult to avoid confounds due to socialization. In particular, many questions are going to have problems determining causation.
4. Scientific claims are held to a high standard: hard data, falsifiability, predictiveness, etc.
All of this means that attempts to explain complex behaviour in terms of innate biology are decades ahead of scientific support. It can be interesting to discuss and could possibly even motivate people to advance the science to answer some of these questions but it's premature to call any of it science.