What
is the CECD? |
| The CECD is an AHRC funded research group dedicated to examining the
evolutionary underpinnings of human cultural behaviour, past and present. more> |
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05/09/2004 - Research Findings:
Strong Mothers Bear More Sons
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Human ecologists have recorded evidence that, physiologically, it costs more for a mother to bear a son than to bear a daughter. Evolutionarily speaking, we expect Parents should manipulate the sex of offspring born in response to resource availability to maximize their reproductive success. For a rural food-stressed community in southern Ethiopia, Dr. Mhairi Gibson (Anthropology, UCL) and Ruth Mace (UCL Anthropology/ AHRB CEACB), have shown a strong association between a mothers’ nutrition and the sex of her most recent birth . Gibson and Mace measured fat and muscle mass in mothers by measuring their mid-upper arm muscle area. They found those women in the upper 25th percentile muscle mass were more than twice as likely to have had a recent male birth than those in the lowest 25th percentile.
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