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Aggressive Behavior and Mate Selection: Paleolithic Times vs Today
As in many other species, human mate selection often boils down to: males display, females choose. Human females have to make enormous investments of time, energy, and sacrifice in raising offspring. In North America, for example, women with children earn significantly less than men. However, childless career women earn just as much as men.
While females have evolved as mate choosers, males have evolved to display. Human males tend to become status-and-power competitors. Where opportunities arise, females tend to choose (except in cultures where parents arrange marriages) high-achieving (i.e., displaying) male mates.
In Palaeolithic times, men used physical power, aggressiveness, and competitive instincts to achieve status and power, and impress women. Today, men use the same inborn aggressiveness and competitiveness to achieve status and power in business, religion, politics, and justice—and impress women. As listed in Brown’s Human Universals, human males dominate the institutions of power in every culture, a fact that will not likely change any time soon, despite wishful thinking. This is a trifle unsettling for the future of H. sapiens as a species, considering human males exclusively build and control all the nuclear weapons in all the nations that have nukes.