Sex at Dawn полностью

Having made this argument, have we outed ourselves as card-carrying comrades in the Delusional Utopian Movement (DUM)? Is it Rousseauian fantasy to assert that prehistory was not an unending nightmare? That human nature leans no more toward violence, selfishness, and exploitation than toward peace, generosity, and cooperation? That most of our ancient ancestors probably experienced a sense of communal belonging few of us can imagine today? That human sexuality probably evolved and functioned as a social bonding device and a pleasurable way to avoid and neutralize conflict? Is it silly romanticism to point out that ancient humans who survived their first few years often lived as long as the richest and luckiest of us do today, even with our high-tech coronary stents, diabetes medication, and titanium hips?

No. If you think about it, the neo-Hobbesian vision is far sunnier than ours. To have concluded, as we have, that our species has an innate capacity for love and generosity at least equal to our taste for destruction, for peaceful cooperation as much as coordinated attack, for an open, relaxed sexuality as much as for jealous, passion-smothering possessiveness ...to see that both these worlds were open to us, but that around ten thousand years ago a few of our ancestors wandered off the path they’d been on forever into a garden of toil, disease, and conflict where our species has been trapped ever since . well, this is not exactly a rose-colored view of the overall trajectory of humankind. Who are the naive romantics here, anyway?

Love’s mysteries in souls do grow, But yet the body is his book.

JOHN DONNE (1572-1631)

Everybody has a story to tell. So does every body, and the story told by the human body is rated XXX.

Like any narrative of prehistory, ours rests on two types of evidence: circumstantial and material. We’ve already covered a good bit of the circumstantial evidence. As for more tangible material evidence, the song says, “What goes up must come down,” but unfortunately for archaeologists and those of us who rely on their findings, what goes down rarely comes back up. And even when it does, ancient social behavior is hard to see reflected in bits of bone, flint, and pottery—fragments that represent only a fraction of what once existed.

At a conference not long ago, the subject of our research came up over breakfast. Upon hearing that we were investigating human sexual behavior in prehistory, the professor sitting across the table from us scoffed and asked (rhetorically), “So what do you do, close your eyes and dream?” While one should never scoff with a mouthful of scone, he had a point. As social behavior presumably doesn’t leave physical artifacts, any theorizing must amount to little but “dreaming.”

Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould was an early scoffer at the notion of evolutionary psychology, asking, “How can we possibly know in detail what small bands of hunter-gatherers did in Africa two million years ago?”¹ Richard Potts, director of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program, agrees, warning, “Many characteristics of early human behaviour are . difficult to reconstruct, as no appropriate material evidence is available. Mating patterns and language are obvious examples ... [they] leave no traces in the fossil record.” But he then adds, as if under his breath, “Questions of social life ... may be accessible from studies of ancient environments, or from certain aspects of anatomy and behaviour that leave material evidence.”²

Certain aspects of anatomy and behaviour that leave material evidence.... Can we glean reliable information about the contours of ancient social life—even sexual behavior—from present-day human anatomy?

Yes we can.

Every creature’s body tells a detailed story about the environment in which its ancestors evolved. Its fur, fat, and feathers suggest the temperatures of ancient environments. Its teeth and digestive system contain information about primordial diet. Its eyes, legs, and feet show how its ancestors got around. The relative sizes of males and females and the particulars of their genitalia say a lot about reproduction. In fact, male sexual ornaments (such as peacock’s tails or lions’ manes) and genitals offer the best way to differentiate between closely related species. Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey F. Miller goes so far as to say that “evolutionary innovation seems focused on the details of penis shape.”¹