Selection Rationale

Finally, scientific evidence that chimpanzees are smarter than the human male when it comes to playing the dating game and getting it right.

Recent research from Uganda’s Kibale National Park, published in the journal Current Biology, suggests that while human males tend to pursue younger women, male chimps prefer the company of females with some life experience.

But it is not as if chimps value experience over youth because they are realize youth is ephemeral. It just happens that female chimps unlike human females remain fertile all their lives.

It’s easy to blame women’s magazines or the fashion industry’s impossible standards for the human obsession with youth, but Thompson said the preference is actually much more organic. “It’s consistent with a mating strategy in which males are investing in a woman’s entire reproductive career,” she explained. In other words, if a man can monopolize a woman’s entire fertile life, he increases the chance of getting his genes into the next generation.