In its entirety and without comment: "BORN TO SHOP?"

Women have an evolved knack for remembering where to find edible plant matter, a new study argues.

Rafts of studies have shown that men trump women at many spatial skills, a spillover from our past, say evolutionary psychologists, when men were the hunters and women the gatherers. Studies have also shown that women beat out men in recalling objects' locations. But no one had tested this skill with foods.

So a team led by Steven Gaulin of the University of California (UC), Santa Barbara, tested modern city dwellers on the closest thing to foraging: browsing in a farmers' market. After looking around the stalls, the 86 subjects were asked to remember where they'd seen particular foods. The test involved dead reckoning, a male-dominated skill, rather than navigating by landmarks, a female forte. Yet women were 27% more accurate than men in recalling food locations, the scientists reported online 21 August in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

"The results fit well with the foraging adaptation theory that explains why women should perform better than men in such a spatial cognition task," says evolutionary psychologist Andreas Wilke of UC Los Angeles. But he notes that both sexes "were significantly more accurate in locating high-calorie food items," such as avocados and olive oil.

Source: Random Samples, Science, Volume 317, Number 5843, Issue of 07 September 2007.