Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality

SEX

THE PREHISTORIC ORIGINS

AT

OF MODERN SEXUALITY

DAWN

Christopher Ryan, PhD,

and
Cacilda Jethá, MD

To all our relations

CONTENTS

Preface: A Primate Meets His Match (A note from one of the
authors)

Introduction:
Another Well-Intentioned Inquisition
A Few Million Years in a Few Pages

PART I: On the Origin of the Specious

CHAPTER ONE. Remember the Yucatán!

You Are What You Eat

CHAPTER TWO. What Darwin Didn’t Know About Sex
The Flintstonization of Prehistory

What Is Evolutionary Psychology and Why Should You Care?

Lewis Henry Morgan

CHAPTER THREE. A Closer Look at the Standard Narrative of Human Sexual Evolution

How Darwin Insults Your Mother (The Dismal Science of
Sexual Economics)

The Famously Flaccid Female Libido

Male Parental Investment (MPI)

“Mixed Strategies” in the War Between the Sexes
Extended Sexual Receptivity and Concealed Ovulation
CHAPTER FOUR. The Ape in the Mirror

Primates and Human Nature

Doubting the Chimpanzee Model

In Search of Primate Continuity

PART II: Lust in Paradise (Solitary)

CHAPTER FIVE. Who Lost What in Paradise?

On Getting Funky and Rockin’ Round the Clock
CHAPTER SIX. Who’s Your Daddies?

The Joy of S.E.Ex.

The Promise of Promiscuity

Bonobo Beginnings

CHAPTER SEVEN. Mommies Dearest

Nuclear Meltdown

CHAPTER EIGHT. Making a Mess of Marriage, Mating, and Monogamy

Marriage: The “Fundamental Condition” of the Human
Species?

On Matrimonial Whoredom

CHAPTER NINE. Paternity Certainty: The Crumbling Cornerstone of the Standard Narrative

Love, Lust, and Liberty at Lugu Lake
On the Inevitability of Patriarchy

The March of the Monogamous

CHAPTER TEN. Jealousy: A Beginner’s Guide to Coveting Thy Neighbor’s Spouse

Zero-Sum Sex

How to Tell When a Man Loves a Woman
PART III: The Way We Weren’t

CHAPTER ELEVEN. “The Wealth of Nature” (Poor?)
Poor, Pitiful Me

The Despair of Millionaires

Finding Contentment “at the Bottom of the Scale of Human
Beings”

CHAPTER TWELVE. The Selfish Meme (Nasty?) Homo Economicus

The Tragedy of the Commons

Dreams of Perpetual Progress

Ancient Poverty or Assumed Affluence?

On Paleolithic Politics

CHAPTER THIRTEEN. The Never-Ending Battle over Prehistoric War (Brutish?)

Professor Pinker, Red in Tooth and Claw
The Mysterious Disappearance of Margaret Power
The Spoils of War

The Napoleonic Invasion (The Yanomami Controversy)
The Desperate Search for Hippie Hypocrisy andBonobo
Brutality

CHAPTER FOURTEEN. The Longevity Lie (Short?)
When Does Life Begin? When Does It End?

Is 80 the New 30
?

Stressed to Death

Who You Calling a Starry-Eyed Romantic, Pal?

PART IV: Bodies in Motion

CHAPTER FIFTEEN. Little Big Man

All’s Fair in Love and Sperm War

CHAPTER SIXTEEN. The Truest Measure of a Man
Hard Core in the Stone Age

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN. Sometimes a Penis Is Just a Penis CHAPTER EIGHTEEN. The Prehistory of O

“What Horrid Extravagancies of Minde!”
Beware the Devil’s Teat

The Force Required to Suppress It

CHAPTER NINETEEN. When Girls Go Wild

Female Copulatory Vocalization

Sin Tetas, No Hay Paraíso

Come Again?

PART V: Men Are From Africa, Women Are from Africa CHAPTER TWENTY. On Mona Lisa’s Mind

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE. The Pervert’s Lament
Just Say What?

Kellogg’s Guide to Child Abuse

The Curse of Calvin Coolidge

The Perils of Monotomy (Monogamy + Monotony)
A Few More Reasons I Need Somebody New (Just Like You)
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO. Confronting the Sky Together
Everybody Out of the Closet

The Marriage of the Sun and the Moon
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED FURTHER READING

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

About the Authors

Copyright

About the Publisher

NOTES

PREFACE

A Primate Meets His Match

(A note from one of the

authors)

Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise
above.

KATHARINE HEPBURN,

as Miss Rose Sayer, in
The African Queen
One muggy afternoon in 1988, some local men were selling peanuts at the entrance to the botanical gardens in Penang, Malaysia. I’d come with my girlfriend, Ana, to walk off a big lunch. Sensing our confusion, the men explained that the peanuts weren’t for us, but to feed irresistibly cute baby monkeys like those we hadn’t yet noticed rolling around on the grass nearby. We bought a few bags.

We soon came to a little guy hanging by his tail right over the path. His oh-so-human eyes focused imploringly on the bag of nuts in Ana’s hand. We were standing there cooing like teenage girls in a kitten shop when the underbrush exploded in a sudden simian strike. A full-grown monkey flashed past me, bounced off Ana, and was gone—along with the nuts.

Ana’s hand was bleeding where he’d scratched her. We were stunned, trembling, silent. There’d been no time to scream.

After a few minutes, when the adrenaline had finally begun to ebb, my fear curdled into loathing. I felt betrayed in a way I never had before. Along with our nuts went precious assumptions about the purity of nature, of evil as a uniquely human affliction. A line had been crossed. I wasn’t just angry; I was philosophically offended.

I felt something changing inside me. My chest seemed to swell, my shoulders to broaden. My arms felt stronger; my eyesight sharpened. I felt like Popeye after a can of spinach. I glared into the underbrush like the heavyweight primate I now knew myself to be. I’d take no more abuse from these lightweights.

I’d been traveling in Asia long enough to know that monkeys there

are

nothing

like

their

trombone-playing,

tambourine-banging cousins I’d seen on TV as a kid.

Free-living Asian primates possess a characteristic I found shocking and confusing the first time I saw it: self-respect. If you make the mistake of holding the gaze of a street monkey in India, Nepal, or Malaysia, you’ll find you’re facing a belligerently intelligent creature whose expression says, with a Robert DeNiro–like scowl, “What the hell are
you
looking at? You wanna piece of me?” Forget about putting one of these guys in a little red vest.

It wasn’t long before we came to another imploring, furry face hanging upside down from a tree in the middle of a clearing. Ana was ready to forgive and forget. Though I was fully hardened against cuteness of any kind, I agreed to give her the remaining bag of nuts. We seemed safely distant from underbrush from which an ambush could be launched. But as I pulled the bag out of my sweat-soaked pocket, its cellophane rustle must have rung through the jungle like a clanging dinner bell.

In a heartbeat, a large, arrogant-looking brute appeared at the edge of the clearing, about twenty yards away. He gazed at us, considering the situation, sizing me up. His exaggerated yawn seemed calculated to dismiss and threaten me simultaneously: a long, slow display of his fangs. Determined to fill any power vacuum without delay, I picked up a small branch and tossed it casually in his direction, making the point that these nuts were definitely not for him and that I was not to be trifled with. He watched the branch land a few feet in front of him, not moving a muscle. Then his forehead briefly crinkled in eerily emotional thought, as if I’d hurt his feelings. He looked up at me, straight into my eyes. His expression held no hint of fear, respect, or humor.

As if shot from a cannon, he leapt over the branch I’d tossed, long yellow dagger fangs bared, shrieking, charging straight at me.

Caught between the attacking beast and my terrified girlfriend, I understood for the first time what it would really mean to have a “monkey on your back.” I felt something snap in my mind. I lost it. In movement quicker than thought, my arms flew open, my legs flexed into a wrestler’s crouch, and my own coffee-stained, orthodontia-corrected teeth were bared with a wild shriek. I was helplessly launched into a hopping-mad, saliva-spraying dominance display of my own.

I was as surprised as he was. He pulled up and stared at me for a second or two before slowly backing away. This time, though, I’m pretty sure I saw a hint of laughter in his eyes.

Above nature? Not a chance. Take it from Mr. Allnut.

INTRODUCTION

Another

Well-Intentioned

Inquisition

Forget what you’ve heard about human beings having descended from the apes. We didn’t descend from apes. We
are
apes. Metaphorically and factually,
Homo sapiens
is one of the five surviving species of great apes, along with chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans (gibbons are considered a “lesser ape”). We shared a common ancestor with two of these apes—bonobos and chimps—just five million years ago.1 That’s “the day before yesterday” in evolutionary terms. The fine print distinguishing humans from the other great apes is regarded as “wholly artificial” by most primatologists these days.2

If we’re “above” nature, it’s only in the sense that a shaky-legged surfer is “above” the ocean. Even if we never slip (and we all do), our inner nature can pull us under at any moment. Those of us raised in the West have been assured that we humans are special, unique among living things, above and beyond the world around us, exempt from the humilities and humiliations that pervade and define animal life. The natural world lies below and beneath us, a cause for shame, disgust, or alarm; something smelly and messy to be hidden behind closed doors, drawn curtains, and minty freshness. Or we overcompensate and imagine nature floating angelically in soft focus up above, innocent, noble, balanced, and wise.

Like bonobos and chimps, we are the randy descendents of hypersexual ancestors. At first blush, this may seem an overstatement, but it’s a truth that should have become common knowledge long ago. Conventional notions of monogamous, till-death-do-us-part marriage strain under the dead weight of a false narrative that insists we’re something else. What is the essence of human sexuality and how did it get to be that way? In the following pages, we’ll explain how seismic cultural shifts that began about ten thousand years ago rendered the true story of human sexuality so subversive and threatening that for centuries it has been silenced by religious authorities, pathologized by physicians, studiously ignored by scientists, and covered up by moralizing therapists.

Deep conflicts rage at the heart of modern sexuality. Our cultivated ignorance is devastating. The campaign to obscure the true nature of our species’ sexuality leaves half our marriages collapsing under an unstoppable tide of swirling sexual frustration, libido-killing boredom, impulsive betrayal, dysfunction, confusion, and shame. Serial monogamy stretches before (and behind) many of us like an archipelago of failure: isolated islands of transitory happiness in a cold, dark sea of disappointment. And how many of the couples who manage to stay together for the long haul have done so by resigning themselves to sacrificing their eroticism on the altar of three of life’s irreplaceable joys: family stability, companionship, and emotional, if not sexual, intimacy? Are those who innocently aspire to these joys cursed by nature to preside over the slow strangulation of their partner’s libido?

The Spanish word
esposas
means both “wives” and