Are Men Better Navigators?

Yes, according to a study that takes an evolutionary perspective

According to a new study, men developed a better navigational ability to serve an evolutionary purpose—to travel farther and have children with more mates. The study claims men developed better spatial skills because men may have wanted to mate with women in different regions to spread their genes further afield, to reduce inbreeding or simply because their culture allowed it.

For the study, which was published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, researchers studied two north-western tribes in Namibia, the Twe and Tjimba tribes. Members of this tribe travel widely on foot and have a liberal sexual culture, where it is socially permissible for members to have affairs with individuals they are not married to. Members of these two tribes, according to the researchers, cover around 120 miles of terrain a year and the men are known to regularly mate with women in the regions they cover.

The researchers made around 120 men and women from the two tribes undergo spatial and navigational awareness tasks, from matching pictures to faces to pointing out locations on a map. They were then asked about how many places they had visited in the past year, how far they had walked to each place, and how many children they had.

Not only did men perform significantly better than women on the spatial and navigational awareness tasks, it was also found that the men travelled more widely than the women. The researchers also found that among the men, those who performed better on the tasks, not only travelled more widely, they also had children with more women. In comparison, among women, no such link between spatial abilities and how much they travelled and how many children they bore was found.

According to the researchers, men developed spatial and navigational abilities better than women so as to have multiple mates. They write in the journal, ‘These findings offer strong support for the relationship between sex differences in spatial ability and ranging behavior, and identify male mating competition as a possible selective pressure shaping this pattern.’

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