How Did Cavemen Win a Woman's Heart?

Three suitors show up at Mira's cave before breakfast: a strongman, a singer, and Dex with a single flower. Forty thousand years before roses and phone numbers, how did people actually court each other? Mira and Dex go through the real archaeology — 142,000-year-old shell beads, ochre "makeup," bone flutes, symmetrical hand axes, and the hunter-gatherer data on what women and men actually look for in a partner — while Brok and Lark try to out-impress a single red-faced rival. Chapters: 0:00 Three suitors, one cave 0:15 No roses, no phones 1:02 Step 1: Gifts worth 10,000 hours 3:21 Step 2: A 42,000-year-old serenade 4:28 Step 3: What hunter-gatherer women want 6:10 Step 4: Care is older than us 7:04 Step 5: The laugh test 7:40 Dex's big plan 8:42 Her choice 9:13 Where are those two going? 9:30 Whose flower is that? Which of the five steps — gifts, music, skills, care or humor — do you think mattered most 40,000 years ago? Tell us in the comments, and subscribe so you don't miss what happens next: Dex is about to find out how jealousy evolved. Science notes: The hard facts — the Bizmoune and Blombos Cave shell beads, Sunghir's ivory beads, the Blombos ochre workshop, the Hohle Fels vulture-bone flute, Frank Marlowe's and the 2009 Hadza height study, David Buss's 37-culture survey, and the McMaster humor study — come from real archaeology and anthropology (sources below). The characters, the three suitors and the clumsy courtship scene are a comedic framing device. The story is fiction — the science is real. Sources: Sehasseh et al., "Early Middle Stone Age personal ornaments from Bizmoune Cave, Morocco," Science Advances, 2021; Henshilwood et al., "Emergence of Modern Human Behavior: Middle Stone Age Engravings from South Africa," Science, 2002 (Blombos Cave beads and ochre); Trinkaus et al. on the Sunghir burials, Journal of Human Evolution; Conard, Malina & Münzel, "New flutes document the earliest musical tradition in southwestern Germany," Nature, 2009 (Hohle Fels flute); Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871; Marlowe, "Mate preferences among Hadza hunter-gatherers," Cross-Cultural Research, 2004; Sear & Marlowe, "How universal are human mate choice priorities?", Biology Letters, 2009 (Hadza height study); Kohn & Mithen, "Handaxes: products of sexual selection?", Antiquity, 1999; Trinkaus & Zimmerman on the Shanidar 1 Neanderthal; Buss, "Sex differences in human mate preferences," Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1989; Bressler & Balshine, "The influence of humor on desirability," Evolution and Human Behavior, 2006. Positions and events are a dramatized reconstruction for storytelling. #lore #animation #history