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that we have humongous brains and, at birth, relatively large heads, five times the size of what you’d expect in a primate our size. But in order for newborns to get through our unusually narrow bipedal hips, their faces need to be flat, said Bentley. Flat faces and flat chests don’t work well together. Think of kissing a mirror; if the baby’s face had to smoosh against a flat chest, it wouldn’t be able to breathe through its nose. (Now here you might be clever and ask, as I did, Why didn’t evolution instead come up with a different place for the nose, say, near the ear? In fact, why are all mammal noses between the eyes and mouth? The answer has to do with our primitive, born-from-fish infrastructure, a template we’re not free to mess with. No doubt it was easier for our genes to tinker with the breast instead.) Thanks to round breasts, we can be smarter.
    I started reading more about heads and necks, and I learned about a unique human feature called basicranial flexion. That’s how we bend where our neck meets our head, and it is different in us than in anyone else. Human babies, let’s not forget, cannot hold their heads up. We may be the only mammal that can’t do this. We have unusually big heads, and we also have necks, the better for growing a laryngeal cavity so that we can speak. A newborn must be held in order to breast-feed (because we have no fur for him to grab), and his head must be supported, or else his delicate larynx tube, also called a neck, would break. All the more reason why it might be helpful to have a nipple that can come down to the baby. It’s a theory, but I like it: thanks to pendulous breasts, we can speak.
    Other primates also have fleshy breasts while nursing, but without the permanent fat pad they’re not quite as enlarged or as round.What’s appealing about these woman-centered theories for the breast is that they make some attempt to understand how the organ actually works. The boobs-for-men theories do not.
    This is what flummoxes Dan Sellen. He’s an anthropologist specializing in nutrition and ecology at the University of Toronto. “Most anthropologists don’t study the breast. They have no idea what it does,” he told me. “There’s a whole industry of folks looking at mate choice, and sure, breasts attract males, but that’s different from saying their primary function is to attract mates.” Furthermore, he says, “it seems really odd that of all the mammals who have mammary glands, we’d be the only one where the appendage is sexually selected. That would be adding a new function to the breast that’s absent from every other mammal.”
    One could argue that it doesn’t really matter why we have breasts. We have them, we love them, they can be useful. “They’re pretty, they’re flamboyant, they’re irresistible,” wrote Natalie Angier in Woman: An Intimate Geography. “But they are arbitrary, and they signify much less than we think.”
    But it does matter because, as we’ve seen, the origin stories wag long political, sexual, and social tails. Beliefs about the origins— and thus “purpose”—of breasts can even influence their health and functioning. It’s not just the feminists who are down on the sexual selection stories. Sellen is also, because, as he put it, oversexualizing the breast detracts from infant health and contributes to body image problems in young women. It’s hard enough to get women to breast-feed as it is. “If we keep reinforcing that breasts are exclusively for sex, we’re always undermining the idea that breast-feeding is normative and normal and should be supported. Look,” he said, “the reason humans have a slightly different breast structure has to do with delivering essential nutrients.”
    As a specialist in infant nutrition, Sellen acknowledges his own biases. But the ones governing the work of the Dixsons and the other Morris descendants are stronger, he argues; in fact, they’re rooted in human nature.