I sometimes try to imagine what would have happened if we’d known the bonobo first and chimpanzee only later or not at all. The discussion about human evolution might not revolve as much around violence, warfare, and male dominance, but rather around sexuality, empathy, caring, and cooperation. What a different intellectual landscape we would occupy!
FRANS DE WAAL, Our Inner Ape
The weakness of the “killer ape theory” of human origins becomes clear in light of what’s now known about bonobo behavior. Still, de Waal makes a good case that even without the data that became available in the 1970s, the many flaws in the chimp-fortified Hobbesian view eventually would have emerged. He calls attention to the fact that the theory confuses predation with aggression, assumes that tools originated as weapons, and depicts women as “passive objects of male competition.” He calls for a new scenario that “acknowledges and explains the virtual absence of organized warfare among today’s human foragers, their egalitarian tendencies, and generosity with information and resources across groups.”26
By projecting recent post-agricultural preoccupations with female fidelity into their vision of prehistory, many theorists have Flintstonized their way right into a cul-de-sac. Modern man’s seemingly instinctive impulse to control women’s sexuality is not an intrinsic feature of human nature. It is a response to specific historical socioeconomic conditions—conditions very different from those in which our species evolved. This is key to understanding sexuality in the modern world. De Waal is correct that this hierarchical, aggressive, and territorial behavior is of recent origin for our species. It is, as we’ll see, an adaptation to the social world that arose with agriculture.
From our perspective on the far bank, Helen Fisher, Frans de Waal, and a few others seem to have ventured out onto the bridge that crosses over the rushing stream of unfounded assumptions about human sexuality—but they dare not cross it. Their positions seem, to us, to be compromises that strain against the most parsimonious interpretation of data they know as well as anyone. Confronted with the unignorable fact that human beings sure don’t act like a monogamous species, they make excuses for our “aberrant” (yet perplexingly consistent) behavior. Fisher explains the phenomenon of worldwide marital breakdown by arguing that the pair bond evolved to last only until the infant grows to a child who can keep up with the foraging band without fatherly assistance. For his part, de Waal still argues that the nuclear family is “intrinsically human” and the pair-bond is “the key to the incredible level of cooperation that marks our species.” But
he then suggestively concludes that “our success as a species
is intimately tied to the abandonment of the bonobo lifestyle
27
and to a tighter control over sexual expressions.” “Abandonment?” Since it’s impossible to abandon what one never had, de Waal would presumably agree that hominid sexuality was, at some point, profoundly similar to that of the relaxed, promiscuous bonobo—although he never says so explicitly. Nor has he ventured to s28 when or why our ancestors abandoned that way of being.2
Table 2: Comparison of Bonobo, Chimp, and Human
29
Socio-sexual Behavior and Infant Development
Human and bonobo females copulate throughout menstrual cycle, as well as during lactation and pregnancy. Female chimps are sexually active only 25-40 percent of
their cycle._
Human and bonobo infants develop much more slowly than chimpanzees, beginning to play with others at about
1.5 years, much later than chimps._
Like humans, female bonobos return to the group immediately after giving birth and copulate within months. They exhibit little fear of infanticide, which has never been observed in bonobos—captive or free-living. Bonobos and humans enjoy many different copulatory positions, with ventral-ventral (missionary position) appearing to be preferred by bonobo females and rear-entry by males, while chimps prefer rear-entry almost exclusively. Bonobos and humans often gaze into each other’s eyes when copulating and kiss each other deeply. Chimps do neither.
The vulva is located between the legs and oriented toward the front of the body in humans and bonobos, rather than oriented toward the rear as in chimps and other primates. Food sharing is highly associated with sexual activity in
humans and bonobos, only moderately so in chimps._
There is a high degree of variability in potential sexual combinations in humans and bonobos; homosexual
activity is common in both, but rare in chimps._
Genital-genital (G-G) rubbing between female bonobos appears to affirm female bonding, is present in all bonobo populations studied (wild and captive), and is completely absent in chimpanzees. Human data on G-G rubbing are presently unavailable. (Attention: ambitious graduate
students!)_
While sexual activity in chimps and other primates appears to be primarily reproductive, bonobos and humans utilize sexuality for social purposes (tension reduction, bonding, conflict resolution, entertainment, etc.)._
P A R T II
Lust in Paradise (Solitary)
CHAPTER FIVE Who Lost What in Paradise?
[Man] has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights, the one ecstasy that stands first and foremost in the heart of every individual of his race... sexual intercourse! It is as if a lost and perishing person in a roasting desert should be told by a rescuer he might choose and have all longed-for things but one, and he should elect to leave out water!
MARK TWAIN, Letters from the Earth
Turns out, the Garden of Eden wasn’t really a garden at all. It was anything but a garden: jungle, forest, wild seashore, open savanna, windblown tundra. Adam and Eve weren’t kicked out of a garden. They were kicked into one.
Think about it. What’s a garden? Land under cultivation. Tended. Arranged. Organized. Intentional. Weeds are pulled or poisoned without mercy; seeds are selected and sown. There’s nothing free or spontaneous about such a place. Accidents are unwelcome. But the story says that before their fall from grace, Adam and Eve lived carefree, naked, and innocent—lacking nothing. Their world provided what they needed: food, shelter, and companionship.
But after the Fall, the good times were over. Food, previously the gift of a generous world, now had to be earned through hard work. Women suffered in giving birth. And sexual pleasure—formerly guilt-free—became a source of humiliation and shame. Although the biblical story has it that the first humans were expelled from the garden, the narrative clearly got reversed somewhere along the line. The curse suffered by Adam and Eve centers around the exchange of the arguably low-stress, high-pleasure life of foragers (or bonobos) for the dawn-to-dusk toil of a farmer in his garden. Original sin represents the attempt to explain why on Earth our ancestors ever accepted such a raw deal.1
The story of the Fall gives narrative structure to the traumatic transition from the take-it-where-you-find-it hunter-gatherer existence to the arduous struggle of agriculturalists. Contending with insects, rodents, weather, and the reluctant Earth itself, farmers were forced to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow rather than just finding the now-forbidden fruit and eating it hand to mouth, as their ancestors had done forever. No wonder foragers have almost never shown any interest in learning farming techniques from Europeans. As one forager put it, “Why should we plant, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?”