Evolutionary Research

Amongst humans, men are, on average, taller, heavier, more muscular, and have more pronounced facial bone growth compared to women. Although these differences are small compared to some species such as Gorillas, previous researchers have nevertheless argued that they indicate ancestral polygyny in humans, including male-male competition. Other authors have argued that ‘masculine’ traits may signal heritable quality to women selecting a partner. We have found that in fact there is no clear link between facial masculinity and heritable health (e.g. Boothroyd et al., 2017) and that most ‘masculine’ body traits in men do not predict how many children they have (except muscularity; Lidborg et al., 2022).

We have collaborated with Dr Kate Cross (St Andrews) to investigate how parenthood and partnership status may moderate physical aggression in contexts such as criminal data and self-report questionnaires. See e.g. Boothroyd & Cross (2016).

In collaboration with Dr Bobby May (St Andrews), this work is investigating how and why humans may create gendered patterns of behaviour in complex social environments. We have argued that the social acquisition of gender is important in flexible species like ours who share parental responsibilities in different ways in different contexts (Boothroyd & Cross, 2022). Most recently we ran modelling papers which showed that simple copying biases could lead to high levels of gender segregation between social roles even without there being any group differences in skills (Cross et al., 2023).