Fossils of 200,000 year-old cavewomen have revealed that millennia ago, women’s hips were several inches wider and their bodies thick-set, meaning that “women may have been bigger than an average modern man,” says Dr Laura Gruss, of Radford University in Virginia.
The reason for this evolution in body shape was child-bearing, says Dr Gruss. Wide hips allowed women of the Middle Palaeolithic period to give birth to big babies, but during the course of evolution, the pelvis adapted to allow the rotation of the unborn child. Women today therefore are still able to carry babies with large heads but they can get away with far smaller frames.
Dr Gruss says the bodies of pre-evolutionary women may have made it easier to produce babies with large heads but it was much harder to walk long distances and stay cool in hot climates, pushing women’s bodies to evolve.
“Their solution was to evolve a birth canal with a twist in it so the baby is rotated through 90 degrees as it is born and comes out facing backwards rather than sideways as in other apes.
“The twist meant the whole pelvis could be narrower and the hips slimmer.”
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The changes to the pelvis also mean that modern women need far fewer calories thanks to our slimmer frames.
Maybe the Palaeolithic diet, which was based on the seemingly axiomatic idea that if a caveman didn’t need it neither do you, was generous after all.
