Not sure if the European Tribes covered their breasts. I’ve not seen how the women folks dressed for the conquests Caesar had against Germanic or Gallic tribes.
Not sure how the Cro Magnon woman dressed either. Most online pictures show Cro Magnon women covering their breasts while Neanderthal Women pictures show that their breasts are not covered. Like this one
The Venus Figurines discovered all over Europe seems to suggest that European guys were pretty much into breasts even back when breasts may have been exposed.
I remember watching a documentary with Morris where he presented as simple self-evident proof of his theory a shot of the cleft of a model’s buttocks side-by-side with her (very impressive) frontal cleavage. The weakness of his argument is that, as far as I know, proto-humanoids didn’t wear evening gowns on the Serengeti.
That’s only if you believe these are ancient man’s equivalent to pornography. No one know what they were for, but it’s highly likely they were some kind of devotional - eg, a fertility offering, or a goddess figure. Your link even suggests they may have been created by women.
There are many others who take it seriously, but Morris has been the most visible and vocal proponent.
It’s difficult to account for the characteristic human breast other than as a sexual signal. It certainly isn’;t necessary for feeding babies – apes do quite well without prominent breasts. Most of the breast is fatty tissue, not useful for milk production, anyway.
I suggest that a useful comparison is the gelada baboon. The female has a heart-shaped “necklace” of features surrounding the buttocks and sexual parts (as in most apes, the buttocks are not pronounced). The female has a parallel series of marks around the chest area. Like humans, gelada approach each other upright, even for mating. In both cases you have a sexual signal on the female’s chest that mimics the signal around the female’s rump.* It’s hard for me to see in both cases the same principle at work.
*Human buttocks are almost unique in the world. Females had to have characteristically wide hips to allow passage of the baby’s head through the birth canal. But we also need enlarged gluteus maximus muscles and the covering fat in order to keep us upright. we’re not knuckle-walkers like other apes, which don’t need the strong buttock muscles to stay upright. Elsewhere in the animal world, bipedal animals stay upright by the use of a counterbalancing tail (like theropod dinosaurs – T. Rex and the like. Allosaurs actually had a “corset” of cartilage to keep the tail stiff and sticking straight out.), or by shifting the legs to be under the center of gravity of the body, as with most birds. Humans are the only bipedal creatures I know of that keep upright not by balancing, but by using a powerful set of muscles to keep us from toppling over.
I’ve wondered if a comparison might be made with sexual attraction to lips. Most people have fully exposed lips and we generally don’t think of random lips as erotic. However, a person may be attracted to the lips of a specific person and think of them as being kissable or something like that. Generally, it’s someone who they are attracted to in the first place. Other exposed body parts, like ears and noses, aren’t really like that. So maybe in a society where the women are always topless, breasts become something which enhances attraction but doesn’t necessarily create it on its own.
Anecdotally, I find a woman in lingerie more appealing than a naked woman (although naked works too). Slightly covered but suggestive is more titillating than uncovered.
Morris addresses this, too. He claims that lips are a sexual signal, too, and a mimic, as well. Humans seem to be unique in having prominent lips among the primates.
Desmond Morris has a vivid imagination, but his only formal credentials are in zoology. AFAIK, many of his claims have not become mainstream psychology or even science, so take them with a grain of sodium chloride.
Morris has a doctorate in Zoology, and specialized in animal behavior. It’s not like he’s a science journalist who happened to have some quirky ideas. He was publishing about animal behavior (most notably primate behavior) since 1952, well before he published The Naked Ape in 1967. So Morris is a well-trained specialist in exactly the sort of thing he wrote about, but switching the view from animal behavior to human behavior.
Wikipedia has this to say about criticism of his work:
That’s not the last line of the article. It’s not even the end of the piece. It’s one of several comments they solicited, and this one is from someone who profoundly disagrees with Morris. In fact, that “half the human race” part clearly shows that the commentator is taking issue with his treatment of women – and it’s about behavior, not about the structure and purpose of breasts. (this is confirmed by the title of her book – Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story
The Guardian’s author evidently didn’t feel that way – he or she couldn’t have, in writing the line I quoted. (I can’t tell if “Robin” is male or fem,ale)
My own feelings echo those of the last author, Adam Rutherford. Especially since I’ve seen many a topless San and Xhosa woman and “protuberant, hemispherical breasts” are decidedly not the norm.
BTW, to get back to the OP, as far as I know, breasts are still sexualized in Xhosa society, which is probably why they are covered up in married women - all the topless Xhosa and Zulu women I’ve encountered were unmarried.
Oh, certainly human breasts are a sexual signal. They’re just not mimicking buttocks.
And if human face-lips are supposed to be mimicking vulval labia, then they do a really poor job of it, and an even poorer job if they’re supposed to be mimicking anything else. I’d assume that the more prominent lips in humans are connected to our language use.
“Some primates advertize their fertility via changes to their prominent, or colorful, buttocks.
Human females don’t go into heat, and there are no changes to the buttocks. Nonetheless, the breasts, which would otherwise be non-sexual, are sexualized by growing to resemble the shape of the buttocks”
Versus, to me, the far simpler:
“Breasts are one of the clearest signs of sexual dimorphism in mammals, and are very prominent in humans due to our bipedal stance. As well as showing that a female is post pubescent* they can also advertize other things like skin elasticity. Accordingly, they became sexually selected in our species, and are significantly larger than required for only feeding babies.”
(OK, that’s a longer paragraph but it also explains more)
* Yes, or currently pubescent. But of course in pre-modern times that was often an age where reproduction happened anyway. And there will be a correlation between years of puberty and average boob size.
It may be “simpler”, but I find it far less convincing. Why should a bipedal stance lead to prominent breasts? I submit that sexual selection based on mimicry (as in the gelada) is far more convincing than skin elasticity. And our simian relatives don’t require enlarged breasts to demonstrate that puberty has been reached.
ISTR that with the in The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker that he mocked evolutionary psychologists with a joke about the reason that men prefer women in miniskirts is that women with long skirts would get them caught in the bush and crush their kids.
