Was it his eyes or hair? Was it her nose or smile?
People don't always know what attracted them to a potential mate.
But it is certain that the roots of that attraction reach far back
into the human past, when our ancestors were foraging
across some African plain. As
explained in SEX AND THE HUMAN ANIMAL, Part 4 of NATURE's THE NATURE
OF SEX, our sexual behavior evolved to improve the odds that our
offspring would survive to have their own children.
Nobody knows exactly what these proto-human societies were like.
But we can gather some hints from still-living relatives, such as
chimpanzees. Like humans, they live in family groups. And, like
humans, they can spend years nurturing a newborn to maturity. But
when it comes to sex, there are so me key
differences. Most importantly, female chimps mate just every few
years, when they are fertile, a fact they widely advertise to males
with bright red genitalia. Attracted and aroused by the sight, male
chimps will crowd around the female, competing to copulate as often
as possible. In contrast, it isn't obvious to men when women are
fertile.
This change may have helped forge closer bonds between women and
their male partners -- cooperation that may have been key to
successfully raising kids. The general idea is that since men didn't
know exactly when women were ready to conceive, they hung around in
a bid to improve their odds of becoming fathers. And to maintain a
male's interest, human females may have evolved other attractions,
such as curvaceous breasts. Human females, in fact, are the only
primate to have permanently swollen breasts -- a significant
attraction for males evolved to equate swollen breasts with
fertility. That ancient biological history may help explain today's
continued fascination with cleavage among both men and women.
Men have also evolved assets designed to attract a mate. Large
muscles, for instance, may have once signaled a man's prowess as a
hunter and defender. But strength alone probably wasn't enough to
attract and keep a mate. To be successful, men also had to show that
they had the smarts to be creative and dependable providers, clever
enough to find food and shelter for their families in an often
hostile environment.
Today, physical attributes such as muscles and breasts may have
little meaning in modern societies where most people work in offices
and limit their foraging to the local grocery store. But they still
hold powerful sex appeal, a fact not lost on advertisers who use
bikini-clad supermodels and ripple-chested jocks to sell everything
from cars to dish detergent. Sex, it seems, has long been a
best-seller.
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