What's interesting about this geriatric fetish, known as gerontophilia, is not that it happens but that it's considered so extraordinary. We take for granted that men prefer young women and that older women will buy all sorts of products to appear young. We all know what Joan Collins meant when she quipped that the problem with beauty is that it's like being born rich and getting poorer.

Yet the youth premium doesn't apply to other creatures. A paper published last week in Current Biology reports that chimpanzee females grow sexier with age. Chimp males are natural gerontophiles.

Boston University anthropologist Martin Muller and colleagues observed this pattern over many years following wild chimps at Kibali National Park in Uganda.

The finding makes sense, he says, if you know that chimps employ a completely different mating strategy than we humans. The females are not just promiscuous, they're almost frantically so. "It looks like their primary goal is to mate with all the males," Muller says.

This strategy probably evolved, he says, to protect their young. Males of many species tend to kill their rivals' babies - but not their own - before mating. In chimp evolution, the females who gave all the males a shot at being dad had the most surviving offspring to carry on their genes.

Anything less than total sluttishness could be deemed juvenile-endangerment.

Still, male chimps do have standards. Muller's team found that males in the troop tend to be indifferent toward the chimp equivalent of nubile teenage girls. Even more surprising, females get more and more male attention as they age. Grandmother chimps are the most chased and fought over.
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