It’s no secret that men tend to like women with small waists, long legs and an ample bust.

But now we can add a curved spine to the list, according to body boffins.

(Spine tingling: It’s the angles that gets men’s hearts pumping, according to the body brainboxes)

Scientists have discovered that men are particularly attracted to women with a back that curves 45 degrees above the top of her bottom.

And that could explain the male fascination with curvy celebs like Kim Kardashian and Jennifer Lopez.

The 45 degrees angle would have given a woman an advantage for childbearing in the hunter-gatherer times, and that is why men have evolved to find it preferable, the researchers claim.

Without such a curve, the pressure on the woman’s hips during pregnancy would have increased by nearly 800 per cent – leaving her immobile and unable to look for food for her and her family or escape danger.

Importantly, the researchers found that the preference for the curve was unrelated to the size of a woman’s actual bottom.

“It’s an independent and previously undiscovered standard of attractiveness,” said study author David Lewis of Bilkent University in Turkey.

“(The curve) would have enabled ancestral women to shift their centre of mass back over their hips during pregnancy, a time during which there is a dramatic forward shift of their centre of mass.

“This benefit is critical: without being able to do this, women would experience a dramatic increase in hip torque (pressure) subjecting them to risk of muscular fatigue and injury.

“Consequently, ancestral women who possessed this degree of lumbar curvature (spine curve) would have been able to forage longer into pregnancy and would have been able to carry out multiple pregnancies with a reduced risk of spinal injury.

“These benefits to women, in turn, would have created the background selective conditions for the evolution of a male preference for this angle: men who preferred such women would have had mates who were less vulnerable to spinal injuries, who would have more successfully foraged during pregnancy, and who would have been able to carry out multiple pregnancies without suffering debilitating injuries.”

For the study, which was published in the journal Evolution and Human Behaviour, the psychologists showed 300 men silhouette images of women with different angles of curvature and asked them to rate them.

[via Mirror]