When we observe humanity from a perspective of animal behaviour (ethology), we find something unusual: human females do not look or act like females in most other species. Instead, they exhibit behaviours and characteristics that, in the rest of the animal kingdom, are associated with males competing for mates. This might seem counterintuitive at first, but when we consider my hypothesis that human society has evolved around reproductive control, it makes perfect sense.
In most species, males are the ones who display elaborate fitness signals, competing for female choice. Think of peacocks with their extravagant tails, male deer with their antlers, or lions with their thick manes. These traits are costly, requiring energy and resources, and they exist because males must prove their fitness to gain mating access. Females, on the other hand, usually remain bland, passive, and cryptic in appearance and behaviour—because they don’t need to advertise themselves. They simply choose the best mate available.
Humans, however, break this pattern completely. In our species, women also engage in fitness signaling, sometimes even more than men. This is evident in:
- Ornamentation and beauty: Women tend to invest in personal appearance, makeup, jewelry, fashion—forms of display that in other species are typical of males.
- Sexual signaling: Women, unlike most female mammals, develop permanent secondary sexual characteristics (such as enlarged breasts) that serve as constant reproductive signals, rather than just appearing during estrus.
- Social grooming and competition: Women form complex social alliances, engage in status competition, and use indirect aggression—a pattern seen in male-male competition in many other species.
Why does this happen? As I mentioned, the answer may lie in our evolutionary origins: humanity is built on intentional self-domestication—the ability to control our own offspring and shape social structures across generations. And the ones who are naturally situated to have the most influence over this process are biological females—mothers.
This is particularly evident when we look at our hunter-gatherer past, which represents the vast majority of human evolutionary history. Unlike agricultural and industrial societies, which are recent and male-dominated in terms of formal political structures, hunter-gatherer societies were fundamentally built around maternal control.
Consider the nature of human societies, their marriage and kinship systems. While hunter-gatherer groups largely avoided material private property—owning no land and accumulating little stored wealth—they could hardly escape the need to own females, which are the basic resource involved in maintaining their society over the generations. In most other great apes, females disperse from their natal groups upon reaching sexual maturity. However, in humans, maintaining cohesive and large social groups required mechanisms to prevent dispersal, ensuring stability and cooperative child-rearing.
This likely led to the development of sexual signals aimed at keeping females—and males—integrated within the group, forming the foundation of early human societies. This integration placed reproductive resources primarily under maternal influence.
Had males been the ones to control this basic resource, they would have inevitably competed in a manner similar to hierarchical animal species such as gorillas or lions, where dominance is asserted through direct conflict. Such a system would have led—and eventually did lead—to instability, making social cohesion difficult to sustain. Instead, early human societies appear to have followed a different path—one where control over reproduction remained in maternal hands, not through brute force, but through a subtler, sexual form of influence.
This explains why our species is so exceptionally sexual. In a broad sense of animal behaviour, women are akin to males who compete symbolically to attract mates and cooperators who help them have more descendants. This did not simply shape early human societies—it laid the foundation of human civilization. Human societies likely emerged through maternal strategies of influence, fostering long-term stability, but the inherent maleness of this domesticating behaviour paved the way for the direct and aggressive strategies of their sons.
Where does this leave modern Western society? That is a question for another discussion. But if we are to make sense of contemporary conflicts over gender, power, and social organization, we must begin by recognizing the biological and anthropological realities that have shaped us as a species.