When Henry Higgins sang “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” in My Fair Lady, he made two fundamental mistakes. First, he carelessly betrayed himself as a lonely, chauvinistic bachelor. And second, he was exactly wrong about humankind’s greatest evolutionary coup, according to recent studies.
Anthropologists believe that the rapid “feminisation” of early man about 50,000 years ago may have given human beings the social sophistication that put our species on the track to cave paintings, syntax and the electric toothbrush.
The story behind mankind’s extra-ordinary cultural sophistication is a mystery. For more than 100,000 years after we first emerged as a distinct species, you would have been hard pressed to pick out Homo sapiens as a likely candidate for world domination.