Another week, another pointless study no doubt funded by the taxpayer. Sorry, don’t mean to get all political.
Scientists at Northumbria University have been researching what sort of dance movements women are attracted to in men, in an attempt to establish whether young men exhibited the same courtship movement rituals as animals in the wild do. These movements show information about the health, age, reproductive potential and hormone status of said animals.
"People go to night clubs to show off and attract the opposite sex so I think it's a valid way of doing this," Dr Neave explained. "In animals, the male has to be in good physical quality to carry out these movements. We think the same is happening in humans and certainly the guys that can put these movements together are going to be young and fit and healthy."
They used biometric analysis to record the movements of young men who aren’t professional dancers, and then mapped them onto an avatar and recorded the reactions of women watching the avatar’s movements. They found that women paid more attention to the core body region than the arms and legs, and the variability of the movements therein as well as the speed.
He also took blood samples from the volunteers, and early indications from biochemical tests suggest that the men who were better dancers were also more healthy. Wow.
Watch the video at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11223473 and see if your dancing is unhealthy.