• Kitathalla@lemy.lol
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    22 hours ago

    They also do ‘wipe.’ Quite often, actually. I have seen just about every variety of mammal that I’ve observed for longer than a few hours lick their bum clean.

  • rockerface 🇺🇦@lemm.ee
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    24 hours ago

    Animals don’t need to wipe because they don’t have massive glutes evolved to support an entire upright body while also walking and running. This is the curse of our intelligence and endurance.

    • leadore@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      OK, I was gonna say it was because they don’t have big fat butt cheeks like humans but I like your version better. It’s glutes. Yeah that’s it, glutes.

    • edinbruh@feddit.it
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      20 hours ago

      Did we evolve to like butts because walking upright upright was advantageous? Or did we evolve to walk upright because we liked butts?

      • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net
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        17 hours ago

        Something that blows my mind is realising how much of our understanding of sex and attraction is socially constructed. For example, there are plenty of documented cultures where women’s breasts don’t have the erotic connotation we attach to them. The thing that really threw me off was learning about some people who don’t kiss as a show of affection — I found this a surreal concept, because in terms of romantic interactions with a partner, I’m fairly meh about sex, but I’m a big fan of kissing/making out; There’s a sense in which I obviously know that preference towards kissing is likely not an evolved trait, but more sociocultural, but it feels so intuitive that something so visceral isn’t necessarily an innate trait.

        Anyway, this is a long way of saying “did we evolve to like butts, though?”. Evolutionary biology, the field that would consider questions like these, is unavoidably pretty heavy on the speculation side — given that humans have evolved to be such social creatures, we can’t really separate out the sociocultural aspects of development from the genetic side, and that makes asking evolutionary questions on large timescales to be a tricky endeavour.

        Edit: This isn’t to say that asking these questions is pointless to do. I appreciated your question precisely because it’s the kind of thing that cooks my brain (and I enjoy that)

    • LouNeko@lemmy.world
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      21 hours ago

      Technically humans don’t have to wipe either. But it would be like dried Nutella in a shag carpet.