> You're moving into the biologically irrelevant historical period.
There is no evidence for male preference for women younger than they except from the biologically irrelevant historical period. There is no empirical evidence for prehistoric men's preference for younger prehistoric women.
Besides, "the contemporary American marriage's average age difference is three years between spouses" (at <http:// www.harvardindependent.com/news/2005/10/13/Forum/Age- Gaps.In.Marriage.Good.Or.Bad-1021806.shtml>). That's a pretty small difference which doesn't make an impact on fertility or appearance for either sex. So, it seems to me that there is nothing here that one can explain biologically. A more plausible explanation is that parents in pre-modern times, and women in modern times, prefer older to younger men for, other things being equal, older men tend to have more economic resources than younger ones, whereas men, earning more than women on average and socially conditioned to avoid economic dependence on women, don't mind pairing with partners with lesser economic resources.
> > There weren't too
> > many old women (or
> > old men for that matter). In that context, I doubt
> > that age meant
> > much of anything sexually,
>
> Well, I was really focusing on appearing fertile, ofw hich age
> might be an index, I wasn't the one who brought that up. However,
> it's also true, that a preference for fertileappearing women might
> be linked to a preference for women in their teens rather than
> their 20s or 30s because these might have more children simply as a
> mater of time.
As a matter of fact, it is probably easier for today's men to successfully procreate with much younger women than prehistoric men did. Why? Because the age of menarche, shaped by nutrition, has declined. "Menarche generally occurs earlier among well-nourished women. Average menarcheal age in the developed West is about 13 years, while in the middle of the nineteenth century it was between 15 and 16 years among European women. Areas which have not experienced nutritional improvement over the past century have not witnessed decreases in the age at menarche" (<http://www.eh.net/ encyclopedia/article/cuff.anthropometric>).
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org> * Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: <http://montages.blogspot.com/2005/07/mahmoud- ahmadinejads-face.html>; <http://montages.blogspot.com/2005/07/chvez- congratulates-ahmadinejad.html>; <http://montages.blogspot.com/ 2005/06/iranian-working-class-rejects.html>