kband: bluprnt 4 rvolution

Sex crazed anthropologists

You know how funny it is to read studies from the 50's and how they thought black people had smaller heads so they were not as smart? I think there's a lot of that sort of possibility in this study in Discover, but it's still completely interesting.

An anthropologist at U of Arkansas decided that Lucy, everyone's favorite Australopithecus afarensis homonid, was promiscuous because the few male body parts they have from her same species are on average 50% larger than her. This, according to people who apparently do not have anything better to do with their time, means that a few big males probable dominated the mating.

Apparently species where the males are much larger than the females are that way so that males can fight each other for the females. And normally pair bonding species are of similar sizes. So I have two questions:

1) What about species where the females are larger, as is the norm in the animal world?

and 2) If large males are large to fight off other males, does this not imply that winning males simply took the females they were fighting for? And if so, are we forced to once again examine rape as a driving force behind human evolution?

Posted by bluprnt at August 22, 2005 10:41 PM