CATHERINE OWENS ONLY

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.. ~· SEX HOW WE MATE, WHY WE STRAY,

AT AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR MODERN RELATIONSHIPS

DAWN Christopher Ryan, PhD,

and Cacilda Jetha, MD

HARPER e PERENNIAL NEW YORK • LONDONo TORONTO o SYDNEY o NEW DELHI o AUCKLAND

HARPER 4£) PE:RENNIAL

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FIRST HARPER PERENNIAL EDITION PUBLISHED 2011.

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The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows: Ryan, Christopher

Sex at dawn : the prehistoric origins of modern sexuality I Christopher Ryan and CacildaJetha.-1st ed.

p.cm. Summary: "A controversial, idea-driven book that challenges everything

you know about sex, marriage, family, and society."-Provided by publisher Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-06-170780-3 (hardback) 1. Sex. 2. Sex-History. 3. Sex customs. 4. Marriage. I. Jetha, Cacilda.

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ISBN 978-0-06-170781-0 (pbk.)

2009045457

12 13 14 15 OV/RRD 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters

of life's longingfor itself

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INTRODUCTION

Another Well-Intentioned Inquisition

Forget what you've heard about human beings having descended from

the apes. We didn't descend from apes. We are apes. Metaphorically

and factually, Homo sapi.ens is one of the five surviving species of great

apes, along with chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans (gib-

bons are considered a "lesser ape"). We shared a common ancestor with

two of these apes-bonobos and chimps-just five million years ago.1

That's "the day before yesterday" in evolutionary terms. The fine print

distinguishing humans from the other great apes is regarded as "wholly

artificial" by most primatologists these days.2

If we're "above" nature, it's only in the sense that a shaky-legged

surfer is "above" the ocean. Even if we never slip (and we all do), our

inner nature can pull us under at any moment. Those of us raised in

the West have been assured that we humans are special, unique among

living things, above and beyond the world around us, exempt from the

humilities and humiliations that pervade and define animal life. The

natural world lies below and beneath us, a cause for shame, disgust, or

alarm; something smelly and messy to be hidden behind closed doors,

drawn curtains, and minty freshness. Or we overcompensate and imag-

ine nature floating angelically in soft focus up above, innocent, noble,

balanced, and wise.

Like bonobos and chimps, we are the randy descendents of hy-

persexual ancestors. At first blush, this may seem an overstatement,

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l SEX AT DAWN

but it's a truth that should have become common knowledge long ago.

Conventional notions of monogamous, till-death-do-us-part mar-

riage strain under the dead weight of a false narrative that insists we're

something else. What is the essence of human sexuality and how did

it get to be that way? In the following pages, we'll explain how seismic

cultural shifts that began about ten thousand years ago rendered the

true story of human sexuality so subversive and threatening that for

centuries it has been silenced by religious authorities, pathologized by

physicians, studiously ignored by scientists, and covered up by moral-

izing therapists.

Deep conflicts rage at the heart of modern sexuality. Our cultivated

ignorance is devastating. The campaign to obscure the true nature of

our species' sexuality leaves half our marriages collapsing under an

unstoppable tide of swirling sexual frustration, libido-killing boredom,

impulsive betrayal, dysfunction, confusion, and shame. Serial mo-

nogamy stretches before (and behind) many of us like an archipelago

of failure: isolated islands of transitory happiness in a cold, dark sea

of disappointment. And how many of the couples who manage to stay

together for the long haul have done so by resigning themselves to sac-

rificing their eroticism on the altar of three of life's irreplaceable joys:

family stability, companionship, and emotional, if not sexual, intimacy?

Are those who innocently aspire to these joys cursed by nature to pre-

side over the slow strangulation of their partner's libido?

The Spanish word esposas means both "wives" and "handcuffs." In

English, some men ruefully joke about the ball and chain. There's good

reason marriage is often depicted and mourned as the beginning of the

end of a man's sexual life. And women fare no better. Who wants to

share her life with a man who feels trapped and diminished by his love

for her, whose honor marks the limits of his freedom? Who wants to

spend her life apologizing for being just one woman?

Yes, something is seriously wrong. The American Medical Asso-

ciation reports that some 42 percent of American women suffer from

sexual dysfunction, while Viagra breaks sales records year after year.

INTRODUCTION 3

Worldwide, pornography is reported to rake in anywhere from fifty-

seven billion to a hundred billion dollars annually. In the United States,

it generates more revenue than CBS, NBC, and ABC combined and

more than all professional football, baseball, and basketball franchises.

According to U.S. News and World Report, "Americans spend more

money at strip clubs than at Broadway, off-Broadway, regional and

nonprofit theaters, the opera, the ballet and jazz and classical music

performances-combined. "3

There's no denying that we're a species with a sweet tooth for sex.

Meanwhile, so-called traditional marriage appears to be under assault

from all sides-as it collapses from within. Even the most ardent de-

fenders of normal sexuality buckle under its weight, as never-ending

bipartisan perp-walks of politicians (Clinton, Vitter, Gingrich, Craig,

Foley, Spitzer, Sanford) and religious figures (Haggard, Swaggert, Bak-

ker) trumpet their support of family values before slinking off to private

assignations with lovers, prostitutes, and interns.

Denial hasn't worked. Hundreds of Catholic priests have confessed

to thousands of sex crimes against children in the past few decades

alone. In 2008, the Catholic Church paid $436 million in compensa-

tion for sexual abuse. More than a fifth of the victims were under ten

years old. This we know. Dare we even imagine the suffering such

crimes have caused in the seventeen centuries since a sexual life was

perversely forbidden to priests in the earliest known papal decree: the

Decreta and Cum in unum of Pope Siricius (c. 385)? What is the moral

debt owed to the forgotten victims of this misguided rejection of basic human sexuality?

On threat of torture, in 1633, the Inquisition of the Roman Catho-

lic Church forced Galileo to state publicly what he knew to be false:

that the Earth sat immobile at the center of the universe. Three and a

half centuries later, in 1992, Pope John Paul II admitted that the sci-

entist had been right all along, but that the Inquisition had been "well- intentioned."

Well, there's no Inquisition like a well-intentioned Inquisition!

:· 'J!~H~ '; .. hl-'1~;;; ,•oa;hJ{ ~ ~:!.,i·n ~· • ;i\,.~~~~ ~q::;q~ ' tr:j)~:l <~\;H~j~ ;.~.$~~1!~ '"! '1J1H (lr~.:..l,j

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.. SEX AT DAWN Like those childishly intransigent visions of an entire universe spin-

ning around an all-important Earth, the standard narrative of prehis-

tory offers an immediate, primitive sort of comfort. Just as pope after

pope dismissed any cosmology that removed humankind from the exalted center of the endless expanse of space, just as Darwin was (and,

in some crowds, still is) ridiculed for recognizing that human beings are

the creation of natural laws, many scientists are blinded by their emo-

tional resistance to any account of human sexual evolution that doesn't

revolve around the monogamous nuclear family unit.

Although we're led to believe we live in times of sexual liberation,

contemporary human sexuality throbs with obvious, painful truths that

must not be spoken aloud. The conflict between what we're told we feel

and what we really feel may be the richest source of confusion, dissatis-

faction, and unnecessary suffering of our time. The answers normally

proffered don't answer the questions at the heart of our erotic lives: why

are men and women so different in our desires, fantasies, responses,

and sexual behavior? Why are we betraying and divorcing each other

at ever increasing rates when not opting out of marriage entirely? Why

the pandemic spread of single-parent families? Why does the passion

evaporate from so many marriages so quickly? What causes the death

of desire? Having evolved together right here on Earth, why do so

many men and women resonate with the idea that we may as well be

from different planets?

Oriented toward medicine and business, American society has

responded to this ongoing crisis by developing a marital-industrial

complex of couples therapy, pharmaceutical hard-ons, sex-advice col-

umnists, creepy father-daughter purity cults, and an endless stream of

in-box come-ons ("Unleash your LoveMonster! She'll thank you!").

Every month, truckloads of glossy supermarket magazines offer the

same old tricks to get the spark back into our moribund sex lives.

Yes, a few candles here, some crotchless panties there, toss a handful

of rose petals on the bed and it'll be just like the very first time! What's

INTRODUCTION 5

that you say? He's still checking out other women? She's still got an air

of detached disappointment? He's finished before you've begun?

Well, then, let the experts figure out what ails you, your partner,

your relationship. Perhaps his penis needs enlarging or her vagina needs

a retrofit. Maybe he has "commitment issues," a "fragmentary super-

ego," or the dreaded "Peter Pan complex." Are you depressed? You say

you love your spouse of a dozen years but don't feel sexually attracted

the way you used to? One or both of you are tempted by another?

Maybe you two should try doing it on the kitchen floor. Or force your-

self to do it every night for a year.4 Maybe he's going through a midlife

crisis. Take these pills. Get a new hairstyle. Something must be wrong

with you.

Ever feel like the victim of a well-intentioned Inquisition?

This split-personality relationship with our true sexual nature is

anything but news to entertainment corporations, who have long re-

flected the same fractured sensibility between public pronouncement

and private desire. In 2000, under the headline "Wall Street Meets

Pornography," The New York Times reported that General Motors sold

more graphic sex films than Larry Flynt, owner of the Hustler empire.

Over eight million American subscribers to DirecTV, a General Motors

subsidiary, were spending about $200 million a year on pay-per-view

sex films from satellite providers. Similarly, Rupert Murdoch, owner of

the Fox News Network and the nation's leading conservative newspa-

per, The Wall Street journal, was pulling in more porn money through

a satellite company than Playboy made with its magazine, cable, and

Internet businesses combined.5 AT&T, also a supporter of conservative

values, sells hard-core porn to over a million hotel rooms throughout

the country via its Hot Network.

The frantic sexual hypocrisy in America is inexplicable if we adhere

to traditional models of human sexuality insisting that monogamy is

natural, marriage is a human universal, and any family structure other

than the nuclear is aberrant. We need a new understanding of ourselves,

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6 SEX AT DAWN

based not on pulpit proclamations or feel-good Hollywood fantasies,

but on a bold and unashamed assessment of the plentiful scientific data

that illuminate the true origins and nature of human sexuality.

We are at war with our eroticism. We battle our hungers, expecta-

tions, and disappointments. Religion, politics, and even science square

off against biology and millions of years of evolved appetites. How to

defuse this intractable struggle?

In the following pages, we reassess some of the most important sci-

ence of our time. We question the deepest assumptions brought to con-

temporary views of marriage, family structure, and sexuality-issues

affecting each of us every day and every night.

We'll show that human beings evolved in intimate groups where

almost everything was shared-food, shelter, protection, child care,

even sexual pleasure. We don't argue that humans are natural-born

Marxist hippies. Nor do we hold that romantic love was unknown or

unimportant in prehistoric communities. But we'll demonstrate that

contemporary culture misrepresents the link between love and sex.

With and without love, a casual sexuality was the norm for our prehis-

toric ancestors.

Let's address the question you're probably already asking: how can

we possibly know anything about sex in prehistory? Nobody alive today

was there to witness prehistoric life, and since social behavior leaves no

fossils, isn't this all just wild speculation?

Not quite. There's an old story about the trial of a man charged

with biting off another man's finger in a fight. An eyewitness took the

stand. The defense attorney asked, "Did you actually see my client bite

off the finger?" The witness said, "Well, no, I didn't." "Aha!" said the

attorney with a smug smile. "How then can you claim he bit off the

man's finger?" "Well," replied the witness, "I saw him spit it out."

In addition to a great deal of circumstantial evidence from societies

around the world and closely related nonhuman primates, we'll take a

look at some of what evolution has spit out. We'll examine the anatomical

evidence still evident in our bodies and the yearning for sexual novelty

INTRODUCTION 7

expressed in our pornography, advertising, and after-work happy hours.

We'll even decode messages in the so-called "copulatory vocalizations" of

thy neighbor's wife as she calls out ecstatically in the still of night.

Readers acquainted with the recent literature on human sexuality will

be familiar with what we call the standard narrative of human sexual

evolution (hereafter shortened to "the standard narrative"). It goes

something like this:

1. Boy meets girl.

2. Boy and girl assess one another's mate value from perspectives

based upon their differing reproductive agendas/capacities:

• He looks for signs of youth, fertility, health, absence of previ-

ous sexual experience, and likelihood of future sexual fidelity.

In other words, his assessment is skewed toward finding a

fertile, healthy young mate with many childbearing years

ahead and no current children to drain his resources.

• She looks for signs of wealth (or at least prospects of future

wealth), social status, physical health, and likelihood that he

will stick around to protect and provide for their children.

Her guy must be willing and able to provide materially for

her (especially during pregnancy and breastfeeding) and their

children (known as male parental investment).

3. Boy gets girl: assuming they meet one another's criteria, they

"mate," forming a long-term pair bond-the "fundamental con-

dition of the human species," as famed author Desmond Morris

put it. Once the pair bond is formed:

• She will be sensitive to indications that he is considering

leaving (vigilant toward signs of infidelity involving intimacy

with other women that would threaten her access to his re-

sources and protection)-while keeping an eye out (around

·' -·-f:· 8 SEX AT DAWN .

ovulation, especially) for a quick fling with a man genetically

superior to her husband.

• He will be sensitive to signs of her sexual infidelities (which

would reduce his all-importai?-t paternity certainty)-while

taking advantage of short-term sexual opportunities with other

women (as his sperm are easily produced and plentiful).

Researchers claim to have confirmed these basic patterns in studies

conducted around the world over several decades. Their results seem to

support the standard narrative of human sexual evolution, which ap-

pears to make a lot of sense. But they don't, and it doesn't.

While we don't dispute that these patterns play out in many parts of

the modern world, we don't see them as elements of human nature so

much as adaptations to social conditions-many of which were intro-

duced with the advent of agriculture no more than ten thousand years

ago. These behaviors and predilections are not biologically programmed

traits of our species; they are evidence of the human brain's flexibility

and the creative potential of community.

To take just one example, we argue that women's seemingly con-

sistent preference for men with access to wealth is not a result of innate

evolutionary programming, as the standard model asserts, but simply a

behavioral adaptation to a world in which men control a disproportion-

ate share of the world's resources. As we'll explore in detail, before the

advent of agriculture a hundred centuries ago, women typically had as

much access to food, p~otection, and social support as did men. We'll

see that upheavals in human societies resulting from the shift to settled

living in agricultural communities brought radical changes to women's

ability to survive. Suddenly, women lived in a world where they had to

barter their reproductive capacity for access to the resources and pro-

tection they needed to survive. But these conditions are very different

from those in which our species had been evolving previously.

INTRODUCTION 9

It's important to keep in mind that when viewed against the full

scale of our species' existence, ten thousand years is but a brief moment.

Even if we ignore the roughly two million years since the emergence of

our Homo lineage, in which our direct ancestors lived in small foraging

social groups, anatomically m~dern humans are estimated to have ex- isted as long as 200,000 years: With the earliest evidence of agriculture

dating to about 8000 BCE, the amount of time our species has spent

living in settled agricultural societies represents just 5 percent of our collective experience, at most. As recently as a few hundred years ago,

most of the planc:;t was still occupied by foragers.

So in order to trace the deepest roots of human sexuality, it's vital to

look beneath the thin crust of recent human history. Until agriculture,

human beings evolved in societies organized around an insistence on

sharing just about everything. But all this sharing doesn't make anyone

a noble savage. These pre-agricultural societies were no nobler than you

are when you pay your taxes or insurance premiums. Universal, cultur-

ally imposed sharing was simply the most effective way for our highly

social species to minimize risk. Sharing and self-interest, as we shall see,

are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, what many anthropologists call fierce

egalitarianism was the predominant pattern of social organization around

the world for many millennia before the advent of agriculture.

But human societies changed in radical ways once they started

farming and raising domesticated animals. They organized them-

selves around hierarchical political structures, private property, densely

populated settlements, a radical shift in the status of women, and other

social configurations that together represent an enigmatic disaster for

our species: human population growth mushroomed as quality of life

plummeted. The shift to agriculture, wrote author Jared Diamond, is a

"catastrophe from which we have never recovered."6

Several types of evidence suggest our pre-agricultural (prehistoric)

ancestors lived in groups where most mature individuals would have

• We use the terms "foragers" and "hunter-gatherers" interchangeably throughout the text.

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10 SEX AT DAWN

had several ongoing sexual relationships at any given time. Though

often casual, these relationships were not random or meaningless.

Qyite the opposite: they reinforced crucial social ties holding these

highly interdependent communities together.7

We've found overwhelming evidence of a decidedly casual, friendly

prehistory of human sexuality echoed in our own bodies, in the hab-

its of remaining societies still lingering in relative isolation, and in

some surprising corners of contemporary Western culture. We'll show

how our bedroom behavior, porn preferences, fantasies, dreams, and

sexual responses all support this reconfigured understanding of our

sexual origins. Qyestions you'll find answered in the following pages

include:

Why is long-term sexual fidelity so difficult for so many

couples? • Why does sexual passion often fade, even as love deepens?

• Why are women potentially multi-orgasmic, while men all too

often reach orgasm frustratingly quickly and then lose interest?

• Is sexual jealousy an unavoidable, uncontrollable part of human

nature?

• Why are human testicles so much larger than those of gorillas

but smaller than those of chimps?

• Can sexual frustration make us sick? How did a lack of orgasms

cause one of the most common diseases in history, and how was

it treated?

INTRODUCTION II

A Few Million Years in a Few Pages

In a nutshell, here's the story we tell in the following pages: A few

million years ago, our ancient ancestors (Homo erectus) shifted from

a gorilla-like mating system where an alpha male fought to win and

maintain a harem of females to one in which most males had sexual

access to females. Few, if any experts dispute the fossil evidence for this

shift.8

But we part company from those who support the standard narra-

tive when we look at what this shift signifies. The standard narrative

holds that this is when long-term pair bonding began in our species:

if each male could have only one female mate at a time, most males

would end up with a girl to call their own. Indeed, where there is de-

bate about the nature of innate human sexuality, the only two acceptable

options appear to be that humans evolved to be either monogamous

(M-F) or polygynous (M-FFF+)-with the conclusion normally being

that women generally prefer the former configuration while most men

would opt for the latter.

But what about multiple mating, where most males and females

have more than one concurrent sexual relationship? Why-apart from

moral disgust-is prehistoric promiscuity not even considered, when

nearly every relevant source of evidence points in that direction?

After all, we know that the foraging societies in which human be-

ings evolved were small-scale, highly egalitarian groups who shared

almost everything. There is a remarkable consistency to how immediate

return foragers live-wherever they are.' The ! Kung San of Botswana

have a great deal in common with Aboriginal people living in outback

Australia and tribes in remote pockets of the Amazon rainforest. An-

thropologists have demonstrated time and again that immediate-return

• Anthropologist James Woodburn (1981/1998) classified foraging societies into immediate-

return (simple) and delayed-return (complex) systems. In the former, food is eaten within days

of acquisition, without elaborate processing or storage. Unless otherwise noted, we refer to these societies.

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ll SEX AT DAWN

.hunter-gatherer societies are nearly universal in their fierce egalitarian-

ism. Sharing is not just encouraged; it's mandatory. Hoarding or hiding

food, for example, is considered deeply shameful, almost unforgivable

behavior in these societies.9

Foragers divide and distribute meat equitably, breastfeed one anoth-

er's babies, have little or no privacy from one another, and depend upon

each other for survival. As much as our social world revolves around

notions of private property and individual responsibility, theirs spins in

the opposite direction, toward group welfare, group identity, profound

interrelation, and mutual dependence.

Though this may sound like nai've New Age idealism, whining over

the lost Age of Aquarius, or a celebration of prehistoric communism,

not one of these features of pre-agricultural societies is disputed by

serious scholars. The overwhelming consensus is that egalitarian social

organization is the de-facto system for foraging societies in all environ-

ments. In fact, no other system could work for foraging societies. Com-

pulsory sharing is simply the best way to distribute risk to everyone's

benefit: participation mandatory. Pragmatic? Yes. Noble? Hardly.

We believe this sharing behavior extended to sex as well. A great

deal of research from primatology, anthropology, anatomy, and psychol-

ogy points to the same fundamental conclusion: human beings and our

hominid ancestors have spent almost all of the past few million years

or so in small, intimate bands in which most adults had several sexual

relationships at any given time. This approach to sexuality probably

persisted until the rise of agriculture and private property no more than

ten thousand years ago. In addition to voluminous scientific evidence,

many explorers, missionaries, and anthropologists support this view,

having penned accounts rich with tales of orgiastic rituals, unflinching

mate sharing, and an open sexuality unencumbered by guilt or shame.

If you spend time with the primates closest to human beings,

you'll see female chimps having intercourse dozens of times per day,

with most or all of the willing males, and rampant bonobo group sex

that leaves everyone relaxed and maintains intricate social networks.

INTRODUCTION IJ

Explore contemporary human beings' lust for particular kinds of por-

nography or our notorious difficulties with long-term sexual monogamy

and you'll soon stumble over relics of our hypersexual ancestors.

Our bodies echo the same story. The human male has testicles far

larger than any monogamous primate would ever need, hanging vulner-

ably outside the body where cooler temperatures help preserve stand-by

sperm cells for multiple ejaculations. He also sports the longest, thick-

est penis found on any primate on the planet, as well as an embarrassing

tendency to reach orgasm too quickly. Women's pendulous breasts (utterly

unnecessary for breastfeeding children), impossible-to-ignore cries of de-

light (female copulatory vocalization to the clipboard-carrying crowd), and

capacity for orgasm after orgasm all support this vision of prehistoric pro-

miscuity. Each of these points is a major snag in the standard narrative.

Once people were farming the same land season after season,

private property quickly replaced communal ownership as the modus

AGRICULTURE

Structure

\ Rise of (Molal

Priestly Closs & Specialization

Demondfpo More land,

-··r~/

operandi in most societies. For nomadic foragers, personal property-

anything needing to be carried-is kept to a minimum, for obvious

i 'I

14 SEX AT DAWN

reasons. There is little thought given to who owns the land, or the fish

in the river, or the clouds i.n the sky. Men (and often, women) confront

danger together. An individual male's parental investment, in other

words-the core element of the standard narrative-tends to be diffuse

in societies like those in which we evolved, not directed toward one

particular woman and her children, as the conventional model insists.

But when people began living in settled agricultural communities,

social reality shifted deeply and irrevocably. Suddenly it became cru-

cially important to know where your field ended and your neighbor's

began. Remember the Tenth Commandment: "Thou shalt not covet

thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his

manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing

that [is] thy neighbour's." Clearly, the biggest loser (aside from slaves,

perhaps) in the agricultural revolution was the human female, who

went from occupying a central, respected role in foraging societies to

becoming another possession for a man to earn and defend, along with

his house, slaves, and livestock.

"The origins of farming," says archaeologist Steven Mithen, "is

the defining event of human history-the one turning point that has

resulted in modern humans having a quite different type of lifestyle and

cognition to all other animals and past types of humans."10 The most

important pivot point in the story of our species, the shift to agriculture

redirected the trajectory of human life more fundamentally than the

control of fire, the Magna Carta, the printing press, the steam engine,

nuclear fission, or anything else has or, perhaps, ever will. With agri-

culture, virtually everything changed: the nature of status and power,

social and family structures, how humans interacted with the natural

world, the gods they worshipped, the likelihood and nature of warfare

between groups, quality of life, longevity, and certainly, the rules gov-

erning sexuality. His survey of the relevant archaeological evidence led

archaeologist Timothy Taylor, author of The Prehistory of Sex, to state, "While hunter-gatherer sex had been modeled on an idea of sharing

INTRODUCTION 15

and complementarity, early agriculturalist sex was voyeuristic, repres-

sive, homophobic, and focused on reproduction." "Afraid of the wild,"

he concludes, "farmers set out to destroy it."11

Land could now be possessed, owned, and passed down the genera-

tions. Food that had been hunted and gathered now had to be sowed,

tended, harvested, stored, defended, bought, and sold. Fences, walls,

and irrigation systems had to be built and reinforced; armies to defend

it all had to be raised, fed, and controlled. Because of private property,

for the first time in the history of our species, paternity became a crucial concern.

But the standard narrative insists that paternity certainty has always

been of utmost importance to our species, that our very genes dictate

we organize our sexual lives around it. Why, then, is the anthropologi-

cal record so rich with examples of societies where biological paternity

is oflitde or no importance? Where paternity is unimportant, men tend

to be relatively unconcerned about women's sexual fidelity.

But before we get into these real-life examples, let's take a quick trip

to the Yucatan.