Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (14 page)

The social lives of foragers are characterized by a depth and intensity of interaction few of us could imagine (or tolerate).

For those of us born and raised in societies organized around the interlocking principles of individuality, personal space, and private property, it’s difficult to project our imaginations into those tightly woven societies where almost all space and property is communal, and identity is more collective than individual. From the first morning of birth to the final mourning of death, a forager’s life is one of intense, constant interaction, interrelation, and interdependence.

In this section, we’ll examine the first element in Hobbes’s famous dictum about prehistoric human life. We’ll show that before the rise of the state, prehistoric human life was far from “solitary.”

Societies Mentioned in Text

CHAPTER SIX

Who’s Your Daddies?

In view of the frequent occurrence of modern domestic groups
that do not consist of, or contain, an exclusive pair-bonded
father and mother, I cannot see why anyone should insist that
our ancestors were reared in monogamous nuclear families
and that pair-bonding is more natural than other
arrangements.

MARVIN HARRIS1

The birds and the bees are different in the Amazon. There, a woman not only
can
be a little pregnant, most are. Each of the societies we’re about to discuss shares a belief in what scientists call “partible paternity.” These groups have a novel conception of conception:
a fetus is made of accumulated
semen.

Anthropologists Stephen Beckerman and Paul Valentine explain, “Pregnancy is viewed as a matter of degree, not clearly distinguished from gestation … all sexually active women are a little pregnant. Over time … semen accumulates in the womb, a fetus is formed, further acts of intercourse follow, and additional semen causes the fetus to grow more.”2

Were a woman to stop having sex when her periods stopped, people in these cultures believe the fetus would stop developing.

This understanding of how semen forms a child leads to some mighty interesting conclusions regarding “responsible” sexual behavior. Like mothers everywhere, a woman from these societies is eager to give her child every possible advantage in life. To this end, she’ll typically seek out sex with an assortment of men. She’ll solicit “contributions” from the best hunters, the best storytellers, the funniest, the kindest, the best-looking, the strongest, and so on—in the hopes her child will literally absorb the essence of each.

Anthropologists report similar understandings of conception and fetal development among many South American societies,

ranging

from

simple

hunter-gatherers

to

horticulturalists. A partial list would include the Aché, the Araweté, the Barí, the Canela, the Cashinahua, the Curripaco, the Ese Eja, the Kayapó, the Kulina, the Matis, the Mehinaku, the Piaroa, the Pirahã, the Secoya, the Siona, the Warao, the Yanomami, and the Ye’kwana—societies from Venezuela to Bolivia. This is no ethnographic curiosity, either—a strange idea being passed among related cultures. The same understanding is found among cultural groups that show no evidence of contact for millennia. Nor is partible paternity limited to South America. For example, the Lusi of Papua New Guinea also hold that fetal development depends on multiple acts of intercourse, often with different men. Even today, the younger Lusi, who have some sense of the modern understanding of reproduction, agree that a person can have more than one father.

As Beckerman and Valentine explain, “It is difficult to come to any conclusion except that partible paternity is an ancient folk belief capable of supporting effective families, families

that provide satisfactory paternal care of children and manage the successful rearing of children to adulthood.”3

When an anthropologist working in Paraguay asked his Aché subjects to identify their fathers, he was presented with a mathematical puzzle that could be solved only with a vocabulary lesson. The 321 Aché claimed to have over six hundred fathers. Who’s your daddies?

It turns out the Aché distinguish four different kinds of fathers. According to the anthropologist Kim Hill, the four types of fathers are:

•
Miare
: the father who put it in;

•
Peroare
: the fathers who mixed it;

•
Momboare:
those who spilled it out; and

•
Bykuare
: the fathers who provided the child’s essence.4

Rather than being shunned as “bastards” or “sons of bitches,” children of multiple fathers benefit from having more than one man who takes a special interest in them. Anthropologists have calculated that their chances of surviving childhood are often significantly better than those of children in the same societies with just one recognized father.5

Far from being enraged at having his genetic legacy called into question, a man in these societies is likely to feel
gratitude
to other men for pitching in to help create and then care for a stronger baby. Far from being blinded by jealousy as the standard narrative predicts, men in these societies find themselves bound to one another by shared paternity for the children they’ve fathered together. As Beckerman explains, in the worst-case scenario, this system may provide extra security for the child: “You know that if you die, there’s some other man who has a residual obligation to care for at least one of your children. So looking the other way or even giving your blessing when your wife takes a lover is the only insurance you can buy.”6

Lest any readers feel tempted to file this sort of behavior under B.A.D. (Bizarre And Distant), similar examples can be found quite close to home.

The Joy of S.E.Ex.

Understanding is a lot like sex; it’s got a practical purpose,
but that’s not why people do it normally.

FRANK OPPENHEIMER

Desmond Morris spent months observing a British pro soccer team in the late 1970s and early 1980s, later publishing his thoughts in a book called
The Soccer Tribe.
As his title suggests, Morris found the behavior of the teammates to be strikingly similar to what he’d encountered among tribal groups in previous research. He noted two behaviors particularly salient in both contexts: group leveling and nonpossessiveness.

“The first thing you notice when footballers talk among themselves,” Morris wrote, “is the speed of their wit. Their humour is often cruel and is used to deflate any team-mate who shows the slightest signs of egotism.” But echoes of prehistoric egalitarianism reverberate beyond ego deflation in the locker room, extending to sexuality as well. “If one of them scores (sexually), he is not possessive, but is only too happy to see his team-mates succeed with the same girl.” While this may strike some as unfeeling, Morris assured his readers that this lack of jealousy was “simply a measure of the extent to which selfishness is suppressed between team-mates, both on the field and off it.”7

For professional athletes, musicians, and their most enthusiastic female fans, as well as both male and female members

of

many

foraging

societies,

overlapping,

intersecting sexual relationships strengthen group cohesion and can offer a measure of security in an uncertain world.

Sometimes, perhaps most of the time, human sex isn’t just about pleasure or reproduction. A casual approach to sexual relationships in a community of adults can have important social functions, extending far beyond mere physical gratification.

Let’s try putting this liquid libido into dry, academic terms: we hypothesize that
Socio-Erotic Exchanges
(S.E.Ex. for short) strengthen the bonds among individuals in small-scale nomadic

societies

(and,

apparently,

other

highly

interdependent groups), forming a crucial, durable web of affection, affiliation, and mutual obligation.

In evolutionary terms, it would be hard to overstate the importance of such networks. After all, it was primarily such flexible, adaptive social groups (and the feedback loop of brain growth and language capacities that both allowed and resulted from them) that enabled our slow, weak, generally unimpressive species to survive and eventually dominate the entire planet. Without frequent S.E.Ex., it’s doubtful that foraging bands could have maintained social equilibrium and fecundity over the millennia. S.E.Ex. were crucial in binding adults into groups that cared communally for children of obscure or shared paternity, each child likely related to most or all of the men in the group (if not a father, certainly an uncle, cousin …).*

Because these interlocking relationships are so crucial to social cohesion, opting out can cause problems. Writing of the Matis people, anthropologist Philippe Erikson confirms,

“Plural paternity … is more than a theoretical possibility….

Extramarital sex is not only widely practiced and usually tolerated, in many respects, it also appears
mandatory.

Married or not, one has a
moral duty
to respond to the sexual advances

of

opposite-sex

cross-cousins

(real

or

clas-sificatory), under pains of being labeled ‘stingy of one’s genitals,’ a breach of Matis ethics far more serious than plain infidelity [emphasis added].”8

Being labeled a sexual cheapskate is no laughing matter, apparently. Erikson writes of one young man who cowered in the anthropologist’s hut for hours, hiding from his horny cousin, whose advances he couldn’t legitimately reject if she tracked him down. Even more serious, during Matis tattooing festivals, having sex with one’s customary partner(s) is expressly forbidden—under threat of extreme punishment, even death.9

But if it’s true that S.E.Ex. played a central role in maintaining prehistoric social cohesion, we should find remnants of such shamelessly libidinous behavior throughout the world, past and present. We do.

Among the Mohave, women were famous for their licentious habits and disinclination to stick with one man.10 Caesar (yes,
that
Caesar) was scandalized to note that in Iron Age Britain,

“Ten and even twelve have wives common to them, and particularly brothers among brothers….”11 During his three months in Tahiti in 1769, Captain James Cook and his crew found that Tahitians “gratified every appetite and passion before witnesses.” In an account of Cook’s voyage first published in 1773, John Hawkesworth wrote of “[a] young man, nearly six feet high, perform[ing] the rites of Venus with a little girl about 11 or 12 years of age, before several of our people and a great number of natives, without the least sense of its being indecent or improper, but, as appeared, in perfect conformity to the custom of the place.” Some of the older islander women who were observing this amorous display apparently called out instructions to the girl, although Cook tells us, “Young as she was, she did not seem much to stand in need of [them].”12

Samuel Wallis, another ship captain who spent time in Tahiti, reported, “The women in General are very handsome, some really great Beauties, yet their Virtue was not proof against a Nail.” The Tahitians’ fascination with iron resulted in a de-facto exchange of a single nail for a sexual tryst with a local woman. By the time Wallis set sail, most of his men were sleeping on deck, as there were no nails left from which to hang their hammocks.13

There is a yam-harvest festival in the present-day Trobriand Islands, in which groups of young women roam the islands

“raping” men from outside their own village, purportedly biting off their eyebrows if the men do not satisfy them.

Ancient Greece celebrated sexual license in the festivals of Aphrodisia, Dionysia, and Lenea. In Rome, members of the cult of Bacchus hosted orgies no fewer than five times per month, while many islands in the South Pacific are still famous for their openness to unconstrained sexuality, despite the concerted efforts of generations of missionaries preaching the morality of shame.14 Many modern-day Brazilians let it all hang out during Carnival, when they participate in a rite of consensual nonmarital sex known as
sacanagem
that makes the goings-on in New Orleans or Las Vegas look tame.

Though the eager participation of women in these activities may surprise some readers, it has long been clear that the sources of female sexual reticence are more cultural than biological, despite what Darwin and others have supposed.

Over fifty years ago, sex researchers Clellan Ford and Frank Beach declared, “In those societies which have no double standard in sexual matters and in which a variety of liaisons are permitted, the women avail themselves as eagerly of their opportunity as do the men.”15

Nor do the females of our closest primate cousins offer much reason to believe the human female
should
be sexually reluctant due to purely biological concerns. Instead, primatologist Meredith Small has noted that female primates are highly attracted to novelty in mating. Unfamiliar males appear to attract females more than known males with
any
other characteristic a male might offer (high status, large size, coloration, frequent grooming, hairy chest, gold chains, pinky