Tooby and Cosmides have argued that because we can be quite certain that our Pleistocene ancestors had to, among other things, “select mates of high reproductive value” and “induce potential mates to choose them,” we can also be sure that psychological adaptations evolved for solving these problems. But efforts to identify the adaptive problems that drove human psychological evolution confront a dilemma.
On the one horn, while it is true that our ancestors had to “induce potential mates to choose them,” for example, such a description is too abstract to provide any clear indication of the nature of human psychological adaptations. All species face the problem of attracting mates. Male bowerbirds build ornately decorated bowers, male hangingflies offer captured prey, and male sedge warblers sing a wide repertoire of songs. Figuring out which strategies ancestral humans had to use requires a much more precise description of the adaptive problem for early humans.
More precise descriptions of the adaptive problems our ancestors faced, however, get impaled by the other horn of the dilemma: these descriptions are purely speculative, because we have little evidence of the conditions under which early human evolution occurred. The paleontological record provides a few clues about some aspects of early human life, but it is largely silent regarding the social interactions that would have been of principal importance in human psychological evolution. Nor do extant hunter-gatherer populations provide many hints about the social lives of our ancestors. Indeed, the lifestyles of these groups vary considerably, even among those who live in the regions of Africa populated by early humans.

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