Why did men evolve map-reading skills? They were PAID BY BONK - study

The reason men refuse to ask for directions when lost isn't down to pig-headed stubbornness, but rather a hard-wired evolutionary instinct which has developed so they can, err, get more sex – say anthropologists.

Students with clipboards from the University of Utah interviewed dozens of members of the Twe and Tjimba tribes in northwest Namibia. They found that men who did better spatial tasks, unsurprisingly, travelled farther - but also had children with more women.

Anthropologist Elizabeth Cashdan said the data supports the hypothesis that men have evolved a greater spatial ability to "benefit reproductively from getting more mates" and "ranging farther is one way they do this."

Compared with other cognitive differences between the sexes, such as cultural differences in maths skills, the difference in spatial skills is much larger, found the research.

The sex differences in some mammals' spatial and navigation abilities have been observed for sometime, but until now little has been known about this relationship in humans, said the researchers.

One of the tests included the ability to gauge distances, with 37 men and 36 women asked to point to nine regions, ranging from about 8 to 80 miles away.

Other tests included the ability to rotate objects mentally, general spatial perception tests, and the "range size" of Twe and Tjimba. Men scored significantly better than women on all the tests.

Layne Vashro, the study's first author, said: "It looks like men who travel more in the past year also have children from more women - what you would expect if mating was the payoff for travel."

The study is "Spatial cognition, mobility, and reproductive success in northwestern Namibia". ®