this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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This might be pseudoscience I got taught 20 years ago, but I have been under the impression that human evolution of breasts as a secondary sexual characteristic has to do with the shift to becoming bipedal. Like a lot of animals, early hominids would see the rear end of a fellow hominid and know this as a trigger for copulation. But when homo erectus started standing upright, butts weren't so universally erotic anymore. They had a whole back and head above them now. Breasts didn't need to be very large to fill their function, but an increase in size gave them a curvy appearance similar to a set of butt cheeks. And early humans were like, yeah, I think that's right, and selected for increased (or at least variable) breast size.
It's probably part of it, but there's definitely also other stuff like the fact that human breasts are always prominent, unlike most other animals where the sexual display stuff waxes and wanes with them being fertile.
The best hypothesis i'm aware of is that human sexuality is just really strange and kinda.. slutty.. (this applies to everyone). Like it seems that our default way of going about things before civilization fucked it up was to just kinda have fun with anyone who caught our fancy and reciprocated the feelings, so our dicks evolved to scoop out sperm and tits evolved to always be on display so no one can tell if you're fertile or not, and presumably same thing with us having no mating season to speak of.
Just try to be attractive so as many people as possible will want to bang you, and maybe if you're lucky you can even find someone who likes you enough that they actively avoid banging others, which is pretty damn sweet because you know that kid will be yours. But in the end it doesn't really matter whose kid is whose, because everyone will help raise them.
Listen, I'm not trying to refute anything here. I'm just saying that some extra tiddy experiments are probably required in order to fully understand this phenomena. I know that not everyone is cut out for this kind of thing, so I'm willing to take one for the team here. I just need a little funding and a steady supply of consenting tiddy owners.
I feel obligated to offer my services in helping with this.
You're going to need to send your resume to jerbs@tiddyscience.com. Fair warning though, you need at least a decade of experience in tiddy sciences in order to join the A team.
I'm 42, I have at least several hours worth of experience across many decades. Hopefully that's adequate? I have references.
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This is where you lost me.
I, too, watched the anime Prison School.
Haven't seen that, but now I want to.
It is batshit crazy.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5qLYAFdddPw&t=8s&pp=2AEIkAIB
The unhinged tone in the subbed version over the dubbed is what sells it for me.
Boobs don’t need to be large? Have you seen cow udders? Or a wet nurses tits? A lot of women cannot produce enough milk so they used to have a wet nurse, which is basically rent-a-tits.
Oh my. Lots to dig into here.
Let's start with breast size. No, breasts don't need to be big to produce adequate milk. Many women with small breasts have breast tissue that is dense with gland structure, meaning they have plenty of milk production capabilities.
About 1 - 4% of women do struggle to provide enough milk for their offspring, but this is typically a hormonal issue that has less to do with breast size and more to do with ovaries. As long as the mother's breasts increase by about a cup size during pregnancy, it is expected they will have adequate milk production.
Here's a source on the topic:
https://www.didymos.de/en/blog/small-breasts-no-milk/?srsltid=AfmBOoqepv0oQNz0TGIpPESnwNiIT2-eVP7aY7a_GHCI2Tn29O19FVMD
Yes, wet nurses used to be prevalent. And yes, they used to be hired when mothers could not produce enough milk on their own (that 1 - 4%). But childbirth used to be a lot more dangerous, so a major role of wet nurses was to provide for the infant when the mother died during childbirth.
But the primary use of wet nurses was by the upper class. Not because the mother required help producing milk but because such activities were seen as lower class. They would leave it to the wet nurse to feed the baby which also allowed them to stop lactating sooner and return to a fertile state where they could produce more children sooner.
It's also interesting you bring up dairy cows because they are a prime counter-example to your point. Over many generations, we bred and selected for dairy cows with large udders for increased milk production. They didn't produce such huge volumes of milk until we started breeding them to do so. So, they are a good example showing that animals in nature do not need large breasts to produce an adequate volume of milk, but breeding for larger breasts can increase the milk production to excessive levels. And cause back problems.