Want Sex? Bring Home The (metaphorical) Bacon

Ever since the invention of bacon (between seven and ten thousand years ago shortly following the domestication of pigs in central Asia), one's ability to, as the adage goes, "bring it home" has been closely tied to the sexual success of an individual. It only stands to reason that good providers are considered better mates than those who are unwilling to or incapable of fulfilling basic needs. Ah, but there's more to that story than meets the eye. The concept of the strong hunter and the generous provider likely has a skewed history when it comes to our intrepid species. For homo sapiens sapiens, bringing home the bacon, literally and figuratively, isn't exclusively the domain of manly men. Quite the opposite, actually.

Aside from the fact that bacon curing itself was one of the few tasks in the gender divided past to be assigned to both men and women, the history of meat consumption by humans owes more to the clever and crafty than to the big and strong. While it's technically impossible to know exactly how prehistoric human society was structured, we can always look to our closest genetic cousins for a peek into what life was like for those scrappy early hominidae.

Take the Ivory Coast chimp study conducted by anthropologists Cristina Gomes and Christophe Boesch of the Max Planck Institute. Their data strongly suggests that male chimps who share meat (a supplementary delicacy for their species) with females outside their family group have a significantly higher chance of being accepted as mates. The study compensates for factors like pre-existing social status of the chimps involved, so Gomes and Boesch have isolated meat-gifting as a major factor in the sexual success of randy male chimpanzees.

But there's more to the story than that. Jill Pruetz and Paco Bertolani of Iowa State University were some of the first to witness chimps hunting for meat using wooden spears that take a significant amount of time and effort to craft. Naturally, those who made better spears got more meat and as the Gomes/Boesch study indicates, they probably got more sex as well. The funny thing about the spear situation is that the big, strong hunters weren't the ones to make good spears. It was the social misfits, the little guys (and girls) that concentrated on spear production as a way to compensate for being lower in the pecking order.

If we apply these same principles to human society, also considering our obvious differences from chimps, they paint a very interesting picture of what it actually means to get the meat, to bring home the bacon, in the human sense. Unlike chimps, human males are not very physically different from human females. So, the biggest, strongest human male in prehistory probably still didn't have the prowess to hunt with his bare hands like the biggest, strongest male chimps can today. So, early meat consumption by humans likely skewed toward the smart, crafty people, with no reason to believe males made more or better tools than females.

Update these revelations to the modern day and it reshapes the image of the good provider. The idea of the powerful Alpha Male doesn't fit in this model. Instead, the bringers of bacon have probably always been the smart, the inventive, the geeks who knew they couldn't posture like those Alphas. That would certainly explain why the population of our species is evenly divided by gender and why our society has evolved to make success possible without big muscles.

The lesson here is that, while good providers have a better chance of finding mates, what it means to be a good provider in the human sense is dramatically different than what it means in most other places in nature. If the chimps can teach us anything it's that it's important to have something to offer, regardless of how you get it.