I agree that "power and status" probably predate civilisation and "culture" as we know it today; or put alternatively (as you have done in the first few sentences), that there is no "precultural" time where no social structure exists at all. But TF's assertion wasn't merely that power and status are culturally dependent, but that expressions of power and status are culturally dependent, in the sense that one can both demonstrate and infer power and status via purely cultural references. TF gave the examples of a Broadsword and a Rolex. Wielding effectively the former and possessing the latter certainly demonstrate power and status, and yet they are culturally dependent: killing people with a broadsword in modern day Europe would demonstrate madness and danger, and would be rather unattractive to women (one should hope), while a Rolex might mean very little at all to women in some Amazonian tribe and be far less impressive than, say, a nice headdress (at the risk of sounding ignorant and racist......).
So already we can see that the determinants of attractiveness for women are, to a large extent, culturally influenced. I contend that the same applies to men, that what men typically find attractive are not strictly the biological facts of youth and fertility, but the expressions of attractiveness that we have confounded with biological facts. Red cheeks probably do, biologically speaking, signify sexual arousal (amongst many other things!), and we probably are hardwired to take slightly reddened cheeks as an indicator of arousal (amongst many other things!). But I contend that we are not attracted to women who wear red blusher because they trigger some biological instinct that the woman is totally up for it, but rather because red blusher is a cultural expression that a woman is totally up for it. We have subconsciously learnt through experience that women who are out on the pull wear lots of make-up, and so we know from this experience that women with red cheeks are up for it, and thus are more likely to be attracted to them. This experience is entirely culturally dependent; an Amazonian woman might look, act or dress in an entirely different way when she is on the pull, and thus the expressions of attractiveness might be entirely different. And because this is all happening at a level that our conscious brains don't have access to, we assume there's got to be some innate biological reason. Well, there is, sort of: we've learnt it from experience, from our peers, from our culture, from all around us. We're really good at doing that -- learning stuff -- and we do it on such an innate, biological, subconscious level that when we do consciously access that knowledge, we treat it as an immutable biological fact, one that just has to be universally true.
So I don't accept that there is some immutable biological fact, because, having encountered many different cultures, and many different ideas of attractiveness, I can only conclude that cultural influences rather dwarf any biological fact. And that's even permitting that we are talking averages: the influence of individual preferences clearly dwarf both cultural and biological influences in all but the most trivial of features. If I were constructing a predictive statistical model, I would surely build one based on the peculiarities of the individual, and not the facts of biology or culture or whatever. I can't imagine that simple biological facts offer much predictive power at all.
Oh, here's a good one: Why are men in Botswana attracted to fat women?
