2014 was no doubt the year of the booty, but as it turns out, according to evolutionary psychologists at Bilkent University in Turkey, men have always loved them buns. They've also claimed to have discovered the reason for it.

Published in Science Direct, they claim that men are attracted to big butts because the curvature of it suggests an evolutionary advantage at foraging for food.

Really now?

That means:

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.

Then the Daily Mail added:

Researchers have discovered that men are particularly attracted to women with a back that curves 45 degrees above the top of her bottom.

Such an angle would have given a woman an advantage while pregnant in early hunter-gatherer societies and so has evolved as being seen as attractive around the world, they claim.

The scientists found that extra mass around the buttocks could often enhance the curvature of a woman’s spine.

But it's also the physical curvature of the spine, seen more attractive than extra buttock mass:

However, the researchers also found that a physical curvature of the spine – known as vertebral wedging – was seen as more attractive than extra buttock mass.

Dr David Lewis, a psychologist at Bilkent University in Turkey, said: ‘It’s an independent and previously undiscovered standard of attractiveness.



‘(The curve) would have enabled ancestral women to shift their centre of mass back over their hips during pregnancy, a time during which there is a dramatic forward shift of their centre of mass.

‘This benefit is critical: without being able to do this, women would experience a dramatic increase in hip torque (pressure) subjecting them to risk of muscular fatigue and injury.

‘Consequently, ancestral women who possessed this degree of lumbar curvature would have been able to forage longer into pregnancy and would have been able to carry out multiple pregnancies with a reduced risk of spinal injury.’

What ever happened to just liking them because they looked nice?