Evolution.

Hold onto your hats:

US scientists have discovered that young male monkeys prefer to play with boys toys while female monkeys like playing with dolls, just like human kids.

Read it for yourself at:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080408.wtoys08/BNStory/Science/homeIt’s
primate playtime!

The US team – Janice Hassett, Kim Wallen and Erin Seibert – decided to offer typical "male" and "female" toys to rhesus monkeys to see if toy preferences aligned with sex. The researchers offered 11 young male and 23 young females rhesus monkeys wheeled toys and plush toys. The wheeled toys, intended to be masculine, included wagons and vehicles. The more feminine plush toys included Winnie the Pooh and Raggedy-Ann dolls.

The researchers found that the females showed a slight preference for the plush toys whereas the males showed a very striking preference for the wheeled toys.

"It’s exactly [the marked preference] that you see in published reports about humans," Prof. Wallen said in a telephone interview yesterday.

However, he also cautions about reading too much into all this:

"What we think may be operating – in kids as well as monkeys – is that one of the primary sex differences is in the activities that males and females find rewarding or pleasurable, and you pick the toys that facilitate the things you like to do," he said.

He also said: "I think one of the biggest sex differences in little monkeys is that males like this kind of rough-and-tumble wrestling play and engage in this much more than little females do.

And little females really like touching and holding infants and they do that much, much more than little males do."

So there you have it, sort of. REAL little monkeys are little different from HUMAN little monkeys. Being the father of four and having umpteen grand-kids, I could have told them that without all their expensive scientific mumbo jumbo.

Is this yet another nail in the coffin?

Pass me another banana.