anthropological originalism

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16182-deepvoiced-men-not-guaranteed-to-impress.html
"Deep-Voiced Men not Guaranteed to Impress"
by Ewen Callaway
December 3, 2008
NewScientist

I'm not as interested in the content of the study, as I am in what is said here:

"A new study among African hunter-gatherers found that women who were nursing a child prefer higher-pitched male voices than fertile women who had not recently given birth.

The Hadza - hunter-gatherers native to northern Tanzania - have limited exposure to the mass media. Cut off from the daily bombardment of advertisements, pop songs and newscasts that's typical in much of the world, they were an ideal population in which to study innate sexual preferences, says Coren Apicella, an anthropologist at Harvard University and leader of the study.

"They're also an evolutionarily relevant population - they live like we lived 200,000 years ago," she says. "Most of our psychological preferences probably evolved when we were hunter-gatherers.""

I'll take these a paragraph at a time. The first paragraph is the lead-in, the hook, the interesting sound bite. What is interesting (and perhaps not surprising) is the way it masks some interesting qualifications to the study. First of all, the preference was "slight." Second, the fact that non-nursing mothers had no preference is not clear.

The weird thing about the second paragraph is that it implies than a non-Western culture is cultureless. I would say: sure, these people aren't "bombarded" by Western media, but surely they have a culture - stories, ways of going about, images of what is good and bad and beautiful and so forth? So in what sense are their preferences to be considered "innate." Morevoer, why would we even be interested in how sexual preferences are absent a culture - given that we are so immersed in culture? Wouldn't any such results be almost irrelevant to our situation?

The last paragraph seems to imply that humans have been, more or less, constant in nature since our time in Africa 200,000 years ago. But research indicates that evolution can move much faster than that (consider the Grants' research on Darwin's finches); and indeed, studies show that humans have continued to evolve in the past 200,000 years. So who's to say whether our "innate" psychological preferences evolved then?

(None of this is to say that culture can form humans into whatever it wants. It is practically a necessary truth that humans are a result of both nature and nurture.)