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“Ardi’s” Contribution to Our Sexual Evolution
To be honest, I don’t watch very much T.V., but the other day I saw a Discovery Special on Ardipithecus - to date our oldest up-right walking ancestor by about 4.4 million years. Like all new discoveries Ardi had many notable features that puzzled scientists, but two of the most intriguing were that it lived in a forest and had small “K-9″ teeth (you know, the Vampire teeth).
Why are these features interesting? Let’s consider the evidence…
1) Apparently the going theory used to be that our ancestors started to walk on two legs for hunting purposes since we lived on PLAINS and could see over the grasslands. Turns out, we didn’t live on plains, but lived in FORESTS instead when we made our great move to tallness…So that theory got tossed.
2) All of our primate relatives have large K-9s which they use to intimidate each other during mating-fight-matches. The bigger the teeth, the more damage one male can do to another. So, those teeth are directly linked to their mating ability. (Ha - size does matter after all!) Obviously this is not the case with humans, since we have oddly small k-9s and our men don’t (typically) go around biting each other to prove their manliness (though I could get into watching that). 
Anyhoo, Dr. Smarty-Pants Scientists decided the two features (our ability to walk upright and our small teeth) MUST be linked in some odd way…Why the two things couldn’t have developed at the same time for two completely different reasons I’m not sure…But leave it to them to link everything to our burgeoning romantic emotions…
The New Theory:
Human ancestor men began walking upright in forests so that they could use both hands to carry food back to their barefoot and pregnant mates who they loved dearly with all of their hearts. In return their mates would, um…mate…with them over and over and create lots of babies.
Aaaawwww.
Now scientists are considering that just around that time our strong pair-bonding feelings - love - made large male teeth unnecessary since men weren’t fighting over mates every moment of the day. Nope, now they just picked ONE woman, fell in love with her, mated for life and used their impressive balancing-on-two-legs ability to bring their mates food. Women, on the other hand, could blissfully mate with their men over and over and have as many children as possible.
So, there you have it.
Our greatest sex lesson from a 4.4 million year old skeleton is:
Bring women food and they will have sex with you.
(As if we didn’t all know THAT already…hehe)
‘Til Next Time!
Technorati Tags: Ardi, ardipithecus, discovery, food, love, mating, science, Sexual Psych., sexual theory, sexy, womenspeaksexy @ October 19, 2009
