Indeed, Singh, Morton, and Stone’s hypothesis has been mocked in scientific circles. “It makes very little sense. Chimps actually prefer older females as their mates,” Virpi Lummaa, at the University of Sheffield, tells me. Another prominent researcher in the field, Rebecca Sear, at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, agrees. “It’s a stupid argument and it was trashed when it came out. It’s a circular explanation. The reason men don’t prefer postmenopausal women is that they’re postmenopausal and they can’t get pregnant, not the other way round.”
