Two million years later, it’s the same old story

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/06/2011 (5464 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Things haven’t changed much in the last two million years on the dating scene, it seems. Things do evolve; an Australopithecine fellow or a Homo robustus guy might find it hard to get a date at a singles bar these days — although Arnold Schwarzenegger seems to do all right — but that’s really just a matter of style. Hairy skin, sloping brows and knuckle-dragging could come back at any moment at the whim of talk show host or a TV model.

What doesn’t seem to change much is human nature. Women, for example, wander, always have and I guess always will, whether it’s from bar to bar on the Winnipeg dating scene today or all across Africa two million years ago, looking to hook up with Mr. Right.

We know this because anthropologists have been checking the dental work of our ancient ancestors and they have discovered that, just as investigators can tell by our dental work if we come from Britain or Russia (brutal) or Winnipeg (costly but not bad) or Hollywood (brilliantly expensive) they can tell that paleolithic partners had wandering eyes — or at least the women among them did.

Researchers have discovered that in prehistoric teeth found in the same location, the mineral components differed between male and female, from which they could deduce that while the men were sticks in the mud who never left home, the women were footloose and fancy free and wandered, in every sense of that word.

There are good evolutionary reasons for this — it prevents inbreeding and incest and the genetic weaknesses that can produce. It also explains two age-old mysteries — why women always have those sweetly innocent smiles and why men can never be entirely certain whose kids are whose.