Lumbar curvature: a previously undiscovered standard of attractiveness
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Fig. 1
A woman with (a) less vertebral wedging at the third-to-last lumbar vertebra (modal L3 depicted), and (b) greater wedging, resulting in a more acute angle of lumbar curvature.
Fig. 2
Schematic of a complete series of stimuli.
Fig. 3
The relationship between women's lumbar curvature and physical attractiveness. Dots represent mean attractiveness ratings for each morph of each model. Lines indicate model-predicted values.
Fig. 4
Buttock protrusion associated with (a) gluteal development indicating physical fitness, (b) adipose tissue deposition, and (c) vertebral wedging. Notes: All women exhibit identical buttock protrusion. Women (a) and (c) also exhibit an identical angle between the thoracic spine and buttocks (i.e., lumbar curvature).
Fig. 5
Men's preference for cues to vertebral wedging versus buttock mass across different levels of external lumbar curvature. The x-axis organizes the arrays of women according to lumbar condition; in some conditions, the women's external lumbar curvature was below optimum, in other conditions, it was above optimum. The tick marks on the x-axis indicate the WHR of the women within the arrays.
Abstract
This paper reports independent studies supporting the proposal that human standards of attractiveness reflect the output of psychological adaptations to detect fitness-relevant traits. We tested novel a priori hypotheses based on an adaptive problem uniquely faced by ancestral hominin females: a forward-shifted center of mass during pregnancy. The hominin female spine possesses evolved morphology to deal with this adaptive challenge: wedging in the third-to-last lumbar vertebra. Among ancestral women, vertebral wedging would have minimized the net fitness threats posed by hypolordosis and hyperlordosis, thereby creating selective pressures on men to prefer such women as mates. On this basis, we hypothesized that men possess evolved mate preferences for women with this theoretically optimal angle of lumbar curvature. In Study 1, as hypothesized, men's attraction toward women increased as women's lumbar curvature approached this angle. However, vertebral wedging and buttock mass can both influence lumbar curvature. Study 2 thus employed a forced-choice paradigm in which men selected the most attractive woman among models exhibiting the same lumbar curvature, but for different morphological reasons. Men again tended to prefer women exhibiting cues to a degree of vertebral wedging closer to optimum. This included preferring women whose lumbar curvature specifically reflected vertebral wedging rather than buttock mass. These findings reveal novel, theoretically anchored, and previously undiscovered standards of attractiveness.
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