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 ring, whatever). Small writes, “The only consistent interest seen among the general primate population is an interest in novelty and variety.. In fact,” she reports, “the search for the unfamiliar is documented as a female preference more often than is any other characteristic our human eyes can
perceive.”16
Frans de Waal could have been referring to any of the previously mentioned Amazonian societies when he wrote that the male “has no idea which copulations may result in conception and which may not. Almost any [child] growing up in the group could be his.. If one had to design a social system in which fatherhood remained obscure, one could hardly do a better job than Mother Nature did with [this] society.”17 Though de Waal’s words are applicable to any of the many societies who engage in ritualized extra-pair sex, he was, in fact, writing of the bonobo, thus underscoring the sexual continuity linking the three most closely related apes: chimps, bonobos, and their conflicted human cousins.
In light of the hypersexuality of humans, chimps, and bonobos, one wonders why so many insist that female sexual exclusivity has been an integral part of human evolutionary development for over a million years. In addition to all the direct evidence presented here, the circumstantial case against the narrative is overwhelming.
For starters, recall that the total number of monogamous primate species that live in large social groups is precisely zero—unless you insist on counting humans as the one and only example of such a beast. The few monogamous primates that do exist (out of hundreds of species) all live in the treetops. Primates aside, only 3 percent of mammals and one in ten thousand invertebrate species can be considered sexually monogamous. Adultery has been documented in every ostensibly monogamous human society ever studied, and is a leading cause of divorce all over the world today. But even in the latest editions of his classic book The Naked Ape, the same Desmond Morris who observed soccer players happily sharing their lovers still insists that “among humans sexual behavior occurs almost exclusively in a pair-bonded state,” and that “adultery reflects an imperfection in the pair-bonding mechanism.”18
That’s a major minor “imperfection.”
As we write these words, CNN reports that six adulterers are
being stoned to death in Iran. Before the hypocritical sinners
throw the first stones, the male adulterers will be buried up to
their waists. In a sickening gesture toward chivalry, the
women will be buried to their necks, presumably to bring a
quicker death to these women who dared consider their
bodies their own. Such brutal execution of sexual
transgressors is anything but an oddity, historically speaking.
“Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Hinduism each share a
fundamental concern over the punishment for a woman’s
sexual freedom,” says Eric Michael Johnson. “Whereas any
‘man that committeth adultery with another man’s wife [both]
the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death,’
(Leviticus 20:10) but any unmarried woman who has sexual
relations with an unmarried man shall be brought ‘to the door
of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her
19
with stones that she die’ (Deuteronomy 22:21).”
Yet even after centuries of such barbaric punishment, adultery persists everywhere, without exception. As Alfred Kinsey noted back in the 1950s, “Even in cultures which most rigorously attempt to control the female’s extramarital coitus, it is perfectly clear that such activity does occur, and in many instances it occurs with considerable regularity.”20
Think about that. No group-living nonhuman primate is monogamous, and adultery has been documented in every human culture studied—including those in which fornicators are routinely stoned to death. In light of all this bloody retribution, it’s hard to see how monogamy comes “naturally” to our species. Why would so many risk their reputations, families, careers—even presidential legacies—for something that runs against human nature? Were monogamy an ancient, evolved trait characteristic of our species, as the standard narrative insists, these ubiquitous transgressions would be infrequent and such horrible enforcement unnecessary.
No creature needs to be threatened with death to act in accord with its own nature.
Modern men and women are obsessed with the sexual; it is the only realm of primordial adventure still left to most of us. Like apes in a zoo, we spend our energies on the one field of play remaining; human lives otherwise are pretty well caged in by the walls, bars, chains, and locked gates of our industrial culture.
EDWARD ABBEY
As we consider alternate views of prehistoric human sexuality, keep in mind that the core logic of the standard narrative pivots on two interlocking assumptions:
• A prehistoric mother and child needed the meat and protection a man would provide.
• A woman would have had to offer her own sexual autonomy in exchange, thus assuring him that it was his child he was supporting.
The standard narrative is founded upon the belief that the exchange of protein and protection for assured paternity was the best way to increase the odds of a child’s survival to reproductive age. Survival of offspring is, after all, the primary engine of natural selection as described by Darwin and subsequent theorists. But what if risk to offspring were mitigated more effectively by behavior that encouraged the opposite arrangement? What if, rather than one man agreeing to share his meat, protection, and status with a particular woman and her child, sharing were generalized? What if
group-wide sharing offered a more effective approach to the risks our ancestors encountered in the prehistoric world? And in light of these risks, what if paternity uncertainty were more beneficial to the child’s chances of survival, as more men would take an interest in him or her?
Again, we’re not suggesting a nobler social system, just one that might have been better suited to meeting the challenges of prehistoric conditions and more effective in helping people survive long enough to reproduce.
This sharing-based social life is far from uniquely human. For example, vampire bats in Central America feed on the blood of large mammals. But not every bat finds a meal each night. When they return to their dens, those bats who have had a good night regurgitate blood into the mouths of bats who have not had as much luck. Recipients of such largess are likely to return the favor when the conditions have reversed themselves, but are less likely to give blood to bats who have denied them in the past. As one reviewer put it, “The key to this bit for bat process is the individual bat’s ability to remember the history of its relationships with all other bats living in its den. This mnemonic requirement has driven the evolution of vampire bat brains, which possess the largest neocortex of all known bat species.”21