When we last left off, we noticed that *infant* chimpanzee skulls looked more human than adult chimpanzee skulls. To understand this, we need to head in an unexpected direction.
A few years back I read about an experiment performed by Soviet scientists. They were trying to understand how human beings used sexual selection to breed wolves into the domesticated dog. So these Soviet scientists set up an experiment to reproduce this domestication process in silver foxes. They bred them, and separated out the most friendly fits and the most aggressive kits. They bred the most aggressive ones together and bred the most friendly ones together. What's astonishing is that within only a few generations, these friendly foxes began to take on dog-like behavior. They would wag their tails and be loyal and friendly to other humans. What's most interesting is that soon their tails started to curl upwards just like many domestic dog breeds. When this research continued after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian scientists noticed that the most friendly foxes were the ones that retained into adulthood the playful and friendly behavior they displayed while they were kits.
Let's consider cuteness as a evolutionary survival mechanism. Have you ever noticed that a lot of baby animals are, well, cute? Look at a kitten, or a puppy, or almost any mammal. Baby animals tend to be cute. This is no accident. Being cute can change the behavior of parents, and increase their investment into the caring of that offspring. When you see a kitten the last thing you'd want to do is harm it. Rather, you feel the impulse to be nice to it. This increases the likelihood of that kitten surviving into adulthood and passing along it's genes to the next generation.
In some species, this child-like cuteness is sometimes carried on into adulthood. Using sexual selection, Soviet scientists bread cuteness into adult silver foxes. This carrying of child-like characteristics into adulthood had the effect of domesticating these foxes.
We often think of various animals as wild or domesticated, when it comes to the later, you got cats, dogs, pigs, cows, chickens, goats, sheep. But have you ever considered that maybe human beings are domesticated too?
As it turns out, human beings carry a lot of characteristics of our childhood into our adult lives. And this may be why we are so very different from other primates. And it would also explain why an infant chimpanzee skull looks remarkably similar to an adult human skull.
This carrying of childhood features into adulthood may even explain why we have so little body hair (babies aren't hairy), but more importantly, it may have been a key driver in why human beings because so intelligent in the first place.
It's time we gave this phenomenon a name. Carrying child-like features into adulthood is called neoteny.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny
And human beings have a LOT of neoteny going on. One particularly interesting feature of neoteny is that in humans it means our heads are disproportionately large for the size of our bodies. This is most noticeable in infants, who's heads are so disproportionately large, their necks cannot even hold their heads up.
There are other features of neoteny in humans. But here's the kicker (and the hard pill to swallow). Men and women do not have equal amounts of neoteny. As it turns out, women have a lot more neoteny than men do. This is why women, when they're in their most fertile years, are cute. It's why they don't have a lot of body hair. It's why they have large doe-like eyes. And larger lips. And less pronounced jaws. it's why women don't have beards. It's why women, on average are shorter than men. It's why women have less muscle mass and over all body strength than men. It's why women have higher pitched voices. All of these characteristics are the same characteristics of human beings when they're children. You can even see similarities in behaviors between women and children. Ever seen a woman cry?
Yes, as it turns out, the more feminine a woman is, the more likely she will be displaying features of neoteny, and the more likely that you, as a man, will find her attractive. In a study conducted across cultures, it found that men rated women the most attractive if she displayed increased neoteny. It seems that human beings sexually selected for neoteny, resulting in our large brains, but with women displaying a high number of child-like characteristics.
Think this can't be true? Think of how turned on you'd be by a woman with a killer body, but a woman who had a beard, a deep voice and a hairy chest.
