In the 1971 cult film Harold and Maude, a young man finds romance with a septuagenarian. Real life is usually different: Cross-cultural research suggests that men generally prefer to hook up with younger women. The same does not appear to hold true for chimpanzees. A new study finds that the males of that species go for older females in a big way.
Chimp researchers have long suspected that the animals prefer older females as mates. For example, Jane Goodall, who spent nearly half a century studying the chimps at Gombe, Tanzania, noted that some males were extremely attracted to older females. And a 1970s study with two females showed that most males preferred the older one. Yet few rigorous studies with larger numbers of animals have been conducted.
To tackle the question systematically, a team led by anthropologist Martin Muller of Boston University in Massachusetts analyzed the behavior of nearly 3 dozen chimps at Kibale National Park in Uganda between 1996 and 2003. Muller and colleagues looked at four measures of female attractiveness to the opposite sex: the number of times a male approached a female to copulate; the number of males that grouped around an ovulating female; the rate at which high-ranking males copulated with particular females; and the extent to which males appeared to be fighting over females.
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