SEX. THE PREHISTORIC ORIGINS AT
OF MODERN SEXUALITY DAWN
Christopher Ryan, PhD, and Cacilda Jetha, 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 Yucatan!
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 Paraiso
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.