Notes about Sexuality and Religion

by Timothy Taylor.

Taylor suggests that sexual tastes, prejudices, knowledge and politics not only lie deep in our evolutionary heritage, but also in many instances have actually directed fundamental biological adaptations

https://archive.org/details/prehistoryofsexf00tay_zn9/

Goodreads:
He makes the startling claim that although humans have used contraceptives from the very earliest times to separate sex from reproduction, techniques to maximize population growth were developed only when farming began–a revolution involving control of animals’ sex lives, widespread oppression of women, and an attitude to nature that continues to have devastating ecological consequences. He draws the radical conclusion that the evolution of our species has been shaped not only by the survival of the fittest but by the very sexual choices our ancestors made.

Kirkus:
Taylor’s opinions themselves are not always more credible than those he rebuts: His suggestion that language might have first been used to fake orgasm can hardly be supported or refuted by fossil evidence. Many of his claims show a nostalgic preference for the presumed sexual variety of prehistoric hunter-gatherers over the sexual repression he identifies with the agricultural revolution. And his conclusion—advocating breastfeeding and kilts over infant formula and pants—ends up sounding suspiciously trendy.

Publisher’s Weekly:
He traces sexual inequality to the invention of farming in the Near East 10,000 years ago, where the availability of animal milk allowed women to raise many children, tying themselves to hearth and home. Disputing feminist claims that Neolithic figurines of the “Great Earth Mother” emerged from a prehistoric matriarchy, he argues that the clay figurines do not symbolize motherhood, but rather suggest that dominant males practiced polygyny.

Cambridge Core:
On the one hand, Taylor’s argument is novel (though not perhaps as revolutionary as the book jacket suggests): contrary to the tenets of sociobiology, human sexual behaviours and practices have always been a matter of conscious and culturally-mediated choice and counter-choice rather than driven solely by some biological imperative. While clearly underpinning contemporary notions of biological sex, Taylor suggests that sexual tastes, prejudices, knowledge and politics not only lie deep in our evolutionary heritage, but also in many instances have actually directed fundamental biological adaptations (among them loss of body hair and the development of epigamic attributes).

I do, however, find problems with his often literal and unqualified ‘reading’ of clearly ambiguous classes of archaeological and historical data. For example, he sometimes reads prehistoric art too directly (rather than symbolically and/or metaphorically).
…

Furthermore, his fairly uncritical use of historical texts discounts the likely ethnocentric lens through which Hippocrates and Herodotus saw and described Scythian customs (for example). In so doing, Taylor may well be charged with finding perhaps a bit too much direct evidence for prehistoric transvestism, cross-gender dressing, bestiality, intersex (hermaphrodite) individuals, S&M and homosexual (and, by extension, lesbian) activities.

Yet interspersed among these more imaginable forays into the wonders of prehistoric sexual culture are many lucid and compelling ideas: the possibility that concomitant with (and perhaps even driving) the evolution of language was the ability to fake orgasms. Underlying this idea is the more general issue of the unique human ability to lie, fake or otherwise outwardly project sensibilities not actu-
…

Excerpts

page 8
Matriarchy as an early phase in human development was first envisaged by Victorian ethnographers. These men were deeply impressed, not to say shocked, by encounters with certain native peoples of the British Empire who enjoyed what we might think of today as a degree of sexual equality. They concluded that women must be in control because the men were not and somebody had to be. (Freud thought that 1930s America was a matriarchy!) These supposedly matriarchal peoples were considered “primitive”-on a low rung of a universal ladder of social betterment. Further, their particular social organization was thought to have been true prehistorically of all peoples in the world.

The idea of a prehistoric society ruled by women remains popular to this day. The influential theories of the late Marija Gimbutas of UCLA suggest that, in prehistoric Europe, the supreme deity was a mother goddess, “The Great Earth Mother,” and was represented during the last ice age, around 25,000 years ago, by little ivory and stone “Venus” figurines depicting fleshy naked women. But given that the widespread imagery of the Virgin Mary today does not demonstrate that the pope is a woman, the statuettes could be telling us something quite different. Indeed, in the light of other evidence from the Ice Age, I believe that they indicate that dominant males practiced polygyny-the taking of several wives.

Whatever the figurines actually represented, it is clear that “prehistoric society” was not uniform. Once culture was invented, cultural variation blossomed.
…

page 9
A major event in the development of sexual inequality occurred, I argue, when farming was invented, a system by which people could produce food when they wanted it rather than relying, like every other mammalian species, on natural availability. In the Near East and Europe this process began around 10,000 years ago, when people began to settle down in permanent villages-the “Neolithic revolution.” Ironically, although women were central to its early development, farming quickly led to their general oppression. The domestication of animals and the availability of animal milk in addition to breast milk meant that women could raise children in quicker succession than before, becoming ever more tied to hearth and home in the process.
…

page 10
Anthropologist Ernest Gellner has noted, “What the human species does share genetically is an unbelievable degree of behavioral plasticity or volatility …. But possibly the most important sociological fact about mankind is that this plasticity is very seldom much in evidence within single on-going communities.” Culture, a product of consciousness and free will, paradoxically involves elaborate systems of prohibition. Different societies have different codes of sexual conduct, but in every society individuals transgress. The idea that there is a sexual line that must not be crossed but in practice often is, is far older than the story of Eve’s temptation by the serpent.
…

page 20
We did not reach our present incarnation because men were great hunters who needed to become naked to lose heat (the man-the-hunter theory), or because we evolved in the sea where large maternal breasts served as infant buoyancy aids (the aquatic theory), or because women and children were provided with meat by men who were provided with sex (the monogamy theory). Instead, I believe, our evolution was a complicated and chancy matter in which sexual attraction and the emergence of culture played crucial roles. Many of the most striking evolutionary changes in humans probably have to do with sexual selection, like the favoring of features such as nakedness that were deemed attractive rather than being of any great inherent or natural benefit.
…

page 24
For humans, the argument runs, the longer the penis is, the closer the sperm can be placed to the mouth of the cervix, and the more of a previous male’s sperm will be physically displaced. But this argument makes no sense. The vagina is highly elastic, and it expands to accommodate virtually any size penis; the penis, for its part, ejaculates with force and direction that are independent of its size. The great apes, who have multiple partners and who evolved large testicles to produce copious quantities of sperm (chimps produce about three times more than humans, relative to body weight), do not have large penises.

What is important about the human penis is not its mechanical fertilizing capacity when erect but its flaccid visibility. Various methods of penis lengthening are used around the world, but none, not even modern surgical penile augmentation, has much effect on the size of the erection. In modern surveys looking at the reasons men undergo penile augmentation surgery, very few respondents cite pressure from a heterosexual partner, such as a wife. It is not so much sexual pleasure as prowess in the locker room that men buy when they undergo this procedure. Having a big one is part of male-male competition and, perhaps, bonding. Still, this is not to say that female preferences played no part in the evolution of bigger penises in humans.
…

page 25
Once the penis became a visual criterion of manhood, its evolutionary growth was guaranteed. In any generation there will always be some women who favor bigger penises, and few or none who positively favor smaller ones, so a trend toward greater length was established. The upper limit of penis size was set by considerations of physical comfort during intromissive sex, and by the basic mechanics of penile erection.

In a completely naked ape, however, the unruly nature of the male penis, coupled with its obvious visibility, could have made it a liability. Primate sexual and social behavior is very complex and is based on the evolution of Machiavellian intelligence-the ability to mask one’s true emotions and feign others that may be strategically advantageous. Jane Goodall in particular has described this among the chimpanzees of Gombe. Having an erect penis clearly signals sexual interest, whether the mind wills it or not. Although pygmy chimps sit and lean back to deliberately display their erections when courting, their fur and their gait probably allow them to hide an erection better than a fully bipedal, upright walking primate can.
…

page 27
The evolution of nakedness has also been explained in relation to hunting, notably by zoologist Desmond Morris in his 1967 book The Naked Ape. Morris argued that nakedness was a cooling device (although he recognized that lions and cheetahs hunt well in their fur). Humans would have needed to lose their fur, he concluded, since the

essential difference between the hunting ape and his carnivore rivals was that he was not physically equipped to make lightning dashes after his prey …. But this is never-theless precisely what he had to do. He succeeded because of his better brain, leading to more intelligent manoeuvring and more lethal weapons, but despite this such efforts must have put a huge strain on him …. By losing the heavy coat of hair and by increasing the number of sweat glands all over the body surface, considerable cooling could be achieved.

…

page 28
The basic flaws in Morris’s hunting-and-hair-loss theory are twofold. First, men were not compelled to make such extreme efforts. Early humans probably scavenged as much as they hunted, and when they did hunt, they probably used stealth, deception, ambush, and missiles more than speed on the ground in order to catch and kill prey. Second, as Darwin noted, despite great variations in the degree of hairiness of particular peoples, women are universally less hairy than their menfolk. Darwin concluded two things from this observation: that the loss of hair occurred at an early time, before people had dispersed out of Africa; and that the selection pressure must have operated primarily on women. If Morris is correct, women would be universally hairier than men – not having hunted, they would have retained more of their useful protective fur.
…

page 43
Despite some strongly argued doubts, the existence of Broca’s area-the brain structure responsible for language in humans – convinces several scholars, including myself, that the Nariokotome boy could talk (although the musculature of his rib cage suggests that he may not have had as much breathing control as we have today). In The Language Instinct Steven Pinker quotes Lily Tomlin’s guess for the first words: “What a hairy back!” From what I have said about the extension of sexual skin, this is less likely than it first appears. I want to return to the old Hollywood idea that the first words were actually grunts … but off-screen, and mock-orgasmic.

Language can be elaborated only where there is a conscious awareness of alternatives for action. Given the Machiavellian intelligence of the Gombe chimps, who use the “snake call” as a decoy to steal food, and given the sexual enthusiasm of our closest living relatives, the bonobos, it is plausible that the two came together in hominids to produce the mental ground conditions necessary for language.

The sexual embrace is a physical and social contact with possibilities for interpersonal closeness as well as for deception. It provided particularly good opportunities for developing what Nick Humphrey terms introspection-the ability to understand another’s feelings by analogy with what one can monitor of one’s own feelings under the same circumstances. It also provides ideal conditions under which to influence or exploit the other person by consciously projecting misleading information about one’s own inner state. The presence of cognitive choices during sex creates a world in which effectively linguistic statements can be made. Faking orgasm, like developed language, is apparently unique to humans.
…

page 40
Although we usually refer to early, deliberately shaped stone artifacts as “tools,” it is quite possible that some of them were more specifically weapons. Most of the early hominid species seem to have been markedly sexually dimorphic in terms of overall stature-the males much bigger in relation to the females than they are today. This dimorphism would normally imply polygyny, that males competed with each other to be selected by females, resulting in the strongest males having sexual and reproductive relationships with several females, and the smallest, weakest males losing out altogether. Significantly, however, there is no marked difference between male and female canine teeth – in stark contrast to gorillas and chimpanzees, where the males use their large canines competitively in displays and fights with other males for the control of harems.

The absence of big canines has been used to support the influential monogamy theory, promoted by Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University. Lovejoy assumes that monogamy emerged as the primary pattern for human sexual relationships. The only way our early ancestors could have survived, he believes, was if each woman and her offspring were exclusively provided for by her hunter-mate. Among the many curiosities about the monogamy theory, not least is the fact that the current level of monogamy globally is largely the result of the influence of Judeo-Christian values during the past five hundred years. Although some of the largest population blocs have adopted monogamy, a majority of individual societies worldwide still practice some form of polygamy. There is thus no evidence for monogamy ever having “evolved” in any species-wide sense among humans.
…

page 49
The crucial jump occurred between 2.5 and 1.6 million years ago, at a time when there was considerable competition between several different species of hominid. The ability to use a grammatical language, to forward plan, and to organize a social division of labor, may have emerged together and within a short space of time as brain size increased above some crucial threshold. Such abilities would have given the ancestral human line the edge over their close rivals. But the human brain continued to increase in size during later evolution too, when those rivals had already become extinct.

Why this brain-size increase should have continued in the absence of interspecies competition and after the emergence of speech is unclear. The growth may have been driven by competition between human groups, but larger brains may also have been sexually selected.
…

page 58 – 61
One of the most detailed ancient descriptions of female sexual and reproductive physiology was written by the ancient Greek medic Hippocrates of Cos and his followers. Hippocrates was born around 460 B.C., at a time when many oral traditions were being committed to writing for the first time. The Hippocratic medics were not a legally recognized profession, and they competed for business with many other healers and trainers. Hippocrates’ knowledge was probably based not only on his own firsthand experiences in his practice but on the unwritten knowledge of midwives and wise women…
…

Hippocrates saw female sexual physiology as active-so active that he envisioned the womb as able to move around the body in search of moisture, sometimes getting stuck and sometimes drying out and traveling to the liver. Such apparently bizarre beliefs have caused most modern scholars to reject Hippocratic gynecology a pure fantasy. Yet his basic facts were correct, even if his explanation was not. In the condition known as endometriosis, part of the uterine lining can detach itself and migrate to other parts of the abdomen and, more rarely, beyond, to the arms, lungs, head, and so on; there is no reason why it should not attach itself to the liver. Endometriosis is a painful condition (often causing monthly inflammation of the affected area) that ancient Greek healers could have attempted to treat surgically or herbally, and Hippocrates may well have examined the affected tissues postmortem.

Hippocrates described female orgasm in some detail:

It is my contention that when during intercourse the vagina is rubbed and the womb is disturbed, an irritation is set up in the womb which produces pleasure and heat in the rest of the body. A woman also releases something from her body, sometimes into the womb – which then becomes moist – and sometimes externally as well, if the womb is open wider than normal. Once intercourse has begun, she experiences pleasure throughout the whole time, until the man ejaculates. If her desire for intercourse is excited, she emits before the man, and for the remainder of the time does not feel pleasure to the same extent.

This last is a clear reference to female ejaculation, the existence of which has often been questioned in modern medicine (mostly by men), though it has always been real enough for those who experience it.

Hippocrates believed that a woman could work her cervix to regulate the uptake of sperm:

When a woman has intercourse, if she is not going to conceive, then it is her practice to expel the sperm produced by both partners whenever she wishes to do so. If however she is going to conceive, the sperm is not expelled, but remains in the womb. For when the womb has received the sperm it closes up and retains it …. If the woman is experienced in matters of childbirth, and takes note of when the sperm is retained, she will know the precise day on which she has conceived.

This process can be attested by modern experience. During orgasm the top of the vagina balloons out to form a kind of pool for the semen, into which the cervix dips, drawing it up into the uterus. This action is aided by the semen itself, which contains the fatty acid prostaglandin that causes vaginal spasming.

Hippocrates’s description of women with active reproductive anatomy fits with the findings of the Liverpool-based researchers Robin Baker and Mark Bellis, who have studied the way in which women can manipulate sperm within their bodies, rejecting it (“flow-back”) when they do not want to conceive and sucking it up (“up-suck”) when they do. Baker and Bellis are convinced that female masturbation plays an important part in the process, generating uterine contractions that help a woman to keep a particular man’s sperm in play for several days after intercourse. The control of orgasm and up-suck also allows a woman with more than one partner to have a surprising measure of control over whom she conceives by.

The Hippocratic view, based as it was on a long tradition of female body knowledge, and Baker and Bellis’s research both suggest that the clitoris has a functional dimension. Its situation, toward the top of the pubic area and a little away from the vaginal opening, allows comfortable masturbation without the risk of infection from the insertion of fingers or objects. Gould’s idea of the clitoris and the female orgasm as functionless can in fact be reversed, so that male orgasm becomes the spandrel. While a penis seems necessary for normal insemination, it does not need to spasm to ejaculate; it could just produce a directed flow, as with urine. The characteristic spasming of male orgasm may therefore be a pale neuromuscular reflection of vaginal “up-suck.”
…

page 77
Sperm Competitions

Marriage and mating patterns in humans differ widely, and to a degree independently of each other. In a marriage of whatever sort – monogamous (two people, generally of different biological sex), polygynous (a man with several wives), or polyandrous (a woman with several husbands)-the prescription and proscription of various sexual and reproductive relationships and practices are not necessarily adhered to in practice. In tests of genetic paternity recently conducted by Robin Baker and Mark Bellis, they found that around 10 percent of children had been sired by someone other than their ostensible fathers-although the fathers consciously believed these children to be their own.

Baker and Bellis believe that male biological mechanisms are geared to the expectation of cuckoldry. Human males have relatively large testicles and produce far more sperm than they seem to need. In normal conception a single egg is fertilized by a single sperm. So what are the other 2,249,999 sperm from an average 2.25-million- sperm ejaculation up to?
…

page 80
In most species early learning appears to be crucial. A male chimpanzee who before the age of six is denied all sexual knowledge, whether through watching sexual acts or through a degree of participation and experimentation, will never be able to have intercourse with a female, irrespective of how receptive and helpful she is or how physically excited he himself may become. He simply has no idea what to do, as his responses were not developed during a crucial phase of his life.
…

page 81
A more significant reason evolutionary science has ignored the bonobos for so long-according to Alison Jolly and other researchers-is our sexual puritanism. “The sexual promiscuity of pygmy chimpanzees makes Sodom and Gomorrah look like a Vicar’s tea party.” Bonobos have sex most of the time. Aside from adult heterosexual activities, females indulge in a lot of genital rubbing with each other (GG, which is called tribadism in humans). Males indulge in “penis fencing” and rub their swollen rumps together, back to back. Most shockingly to human eyes, adults and children have a lot of sex. In fact, infants are often initiated by their mothers – the only observed taboo is on sex between mothers and any sons over six years of age. Sex is a natural part of childhood for bonobos, researchers believe, and it mingles imperceptibly with care, play, all the other elements of growing up. Sex for bonobos appears to be a fairly quick, perfunctory, and relaxed activity that functions as a social cement.

page 82
In an article entitled “Sex the Invisible,” Ernestine Friedl surveyed the worldwide ethnographic literature and concluded that “hidden coitus may safely be declared a near universal.” She went on to discuss various sociobiological explanations for its hiddenness. But her initial premise remains unproven, since the potential problem is actually the ethnographic literature itself. From A.D. 1400 onward, when Catholic merchants set out to explore the seaways of the world, the very earliest accounts of “natives” that they wrote often contain descriptions of or oblique references to open sexuality.

Many peoples of the world, prior to European colonization and its attendant Christian missions, seem to have openly celebrated their sexuality, at least on occasion. Days of sexual license, where adults had sex with as many partners as they wished quite publicly, seem to have occurred among North American Indian groups like the Huron.
…

page 83
In many societies children observe adult sexual activity. Jean Liedloff, in The Continuum Concept, writes that the Yequana Indians of Amazonia consider the presence of infants during lovemaking a matter of course, and she claims that children who do not witness it miss out on an “important psycho-biological link” with their parents. These same Amazonian parents also teach their children head hunting, however.
…

page 93
Malinowski’s views were disputed by other Europeans resident in Melanesia, who believed that the natives used herbal remedies. One magistrate wrote that he had “been informed by many independent and intelligent natives that the female of the species is specially endowed or gifted with ejaculatory powers, which may be called upon after an act of coition to expel the male seed. It is understandable that such powers might be increased by use and practice, and I am satisfied that such a method does exist.” This description is almost identical to the description of volitional control described by Hippocrates.
…

page 99 – 101
At Middle Stone Age sites in southern Africa dating from sometime after 300,000 B.P., red ocher begins to be found. Archaeologist Ian Watts has documented six certain and five possible instances of the deliberate use of ocher in the following period, down to around 130,000-110,000 B.C., after which its use suddenly becomes very widespread. The standard archaeological interpretation of red ocher is that it was used for curing hides, since iron oxide (the coloring component of the ocher) can stop the action of the enzyme collagenase, which starts the decay process in leather. But among hunter-gatherer groups in the savannah region, as Watts notes, the use-life of most hide items is shorter than the time it takes for collagenase to render them unusable. He proposes instead that the ocher was used in the artful creation of “sham menstruation.” This part of his work is closely connected to a research group, led by Chris Knight of the University of East London, that have developed the “sex strike theory” of human cultural evolution.

The Sex Strike Theory

The sex strike theory, developed within a revolutionary Marxist framework and inspired by a rather idiosyncratic reading of Richard Dawkins’s “selfish gene” theory, holds that reproductive conflict lies at the heart of human social relations. Marx and Engels believed that prehistoric communities lived in a state of primitive communism, but that it did not last very long. Classes emerged with cities and writing and set up a dialectical process of conflict and social contradiction whose ultimate resolution was envisaged as the communist ideal.

Today, now that the immense timescale of human prehistory has been recognized, orthodox Marxists are left without any real theory for social change during some of the most significant periods of human development. The sex strike theory is an elaborate attempt to see men’s and women’s genes as the conflicting class-agents that powered the “human symbolic evolution” – the period in which art first emerged.

The sex strike theory has been well received by a number of sociobiologists and social anthropologists, although less so by archaeologists. The central belief is that among archaic sapiens, women, incapacitated by babies, needed the men to go off and hunt and bring back game animals that they could all eat. In such circumstances the women, according to the sex strike theorists, had two options. The first was to live in subservient polygyny of a type in which a dominant man had several wives and divided his time among them. The sex strike theorists feel that this option would have given women too little male support and have been bad for the group as a whole, as subservient males would have hung around on the margins of the community, contributing little. Therefore, they believe that the women organized things so that each of them could be provisioned by a single, faithful male – as in the Lovejoy scenario-in order to maximize the amount of nutrition and child care they got. According to the theory, they first had to synchronize their menstrual cycles, so that they all became fertile at the same time, thus apparently thwarting any incipient polygynists (although why this should actually work is not clear). Second, in order to obtain food, they periodically persuaded the men that sex was off. The obvious time they did this – according to sex strike theorists – was when they were all menstruating.

In order not to misrepresent the complexities and nuances of this theory, I present it here in the words of a sympathetic reviewer, Robin Dunbar of the University of Liverpool. As Dunbar puts it:

As meat came to provide an increasingly important element in the diet of the ancestral hominids, the females, with their increasingly large brained offspring, came to be progressively more dependent on the hunting activities of the males. However, like the males of most primates, the hominid males were not especially interested in the females’ problems in rearing offspring: their primary interest was simply in sex, and if meat offerings provided them with greater access to sex (the so-called “prostitution theory” of human social evolution), then they were prepared to trade meat for sex, but that was that.

But because “the females’ heavy reproductive burden” required more meat, they came up with the “organized policy of sex strikes.”

Red ocher has a place in this strange scenario, albeit slightly inconsistently. According to Camilla Power -a member of the East London group-menstruation, which signals a “sex strike,” also signals impending fertility. Thus, men would wish to hang around menstruating women in order to get them pregnant (although they would also be prepared to disappear again, once their genetic seeds were sown). In Chris Knight and Charles Maisels’s words, menstruation

page 102

signals a female’s imminent fertility-and hence by contrast the infertility of neighbouring females not displaying such blood. Logically in selfish gene terms, fitness-maximizing males ought to have been attracted by any such fertile female within the local area, competing to bond with her rather than with pregnant or breast-feeding females. Mothers with heavy childcare burdens, lacking the menstrual signal, would then have lost out at the very moment they needed help most.

To get around this,

When not really fertile, females signalled as if they were, acting within kin-coalitions of both fertile and non-fertile individuals even to the point of borrowing one another’s blood or similar coloured pigments. Such strategies were designed to thwart male philanderers, not collude with dominant males.

Thus, conclude Knight and Maisels, “selfish genes in the case of our species have clearly led to the emergence of human solidarity.”

One of the most obvious problems with the sex strike theory is that menstruation does not actually signal fertility; ovulation generally occurs in midcycle. The sham menstruation in the sex strike theory is the corollary of concealed ovulation-a feature that sociobiologists think emerged in humans naturally rather than culturally but for the same purpose-to keep men guessing. The idea of concealed ovulation is popular among animal behaviorists and sociobiologists. According to Richard Alexander and Katherine Noonan, concealed ovulation meant that females were able “to force” desirable males to stick around and not be promiscuous, as the males would not know when ovulation occurred; “thus concealment of ovulation could only evolve in a group-living situation in which the importance

page 103
of parental care in offspring reproductive success was increasing … these two circumstances together describe a large part of the uniqueness of the social environment of humans during their divergence from other primates.”

A second theory, developed by Nancy Burley, is that because human females had the intellectual capacity to practice contraception, they avoided the pains of childbirth as far as they could and stopped well short of having the maximum number of children that they were physically capable of producing. Because these women left fewer descendants, natural selection somehow, according to Burley, evolved a mechanism to thwart them by giving them a reproductive cycle recalcitrant to birth control-one in which the time of ovulation was not known.

Body Knowledge

Both the sex strike theory and Burley’s theory have their problems. As Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has pointed out, what is termed concealed ovulation is not unique to humans, and plenty of nonreproductive, outside-estrus sexual activity goes on among many primates. Burley assumes that the only method of contraception available to early human females was the rhythm method, yet hunter-gatherer women today use a variety of methods to space births judiciously at a rate of around one every five years to an average of four or five live births per woman. This birthrate does not translate into a demographic explosion because of the high early mortality among hunter-gatherers.

In short, it is simply not true that concealed ovulation causes more babies to be born. Human evolutionary success did not – in early prehistory, at least – depend on producing massive numbers of offspring but focused on intensive, high-quality infant care. The main point against Burley’s theory, however, has escaped most behavioral scientists: ovulation is not really concealed in humans at all. Many women know when they are ovulating.
…

page 118 – 119
While Gimbutas’s own research was scholarly, that of many of her followers and of those inspired by her work has been less carefully argued. Works such as The Ancient Religion of the Great Cosmic Mother of All and The Great Cosmic Mother, both by Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor, make very broad generalizations about prehistory that have been taken as gospel by the large number of people who are, understandably, unfamiliar with the difficulties of archaeological interpretation. Thus, for example, Nickie Roberts, at the beginning of her otherwise excellent book on the history of prostitution (which I use as an authority for parts of Chapter 6), tells us that:

Sjöo and Mor show that the power of the Stone Age goddess went far beyond the simplistic notion of fertility … she was all-encompassing, and thus expressed the original power which animated the universe and the whole of nature … the Great Goddess was creator, preserver and destroyer of all life … culture, religion and sexuality were intertwined, springing as they did from the same source in the goddess. Sex was sacred by definition, and the shamanic priestesses led group sex rituals in which the whole community participated, sharing in ecstatic union with the life force.

Roberts captions a picture of the Venus of Willendorf with the statement, “In the beginning was matriarchy.”

If this were true, we should expect the Goddess to be doing something, as the vigorous goddesses of India do-slaying, giving birth, making love, and so on. However, the Ice Age Venuses are almost completely passive.
…

page 136
My guess is that the paintings were made by men (as I said, due to the absence of active female depictions in the caves) and were meant to be seen by boys during their rite of passage to manhood. This interpretation is not new, but it has a lot to commend it. It explains the pains taken to create the art, in that to serve as a men’s initiation, it had to be concealed from women. This point has been well made by Joan Bamberger, whose fascinating observations on the “myth of matriarchy” helped bring many of the strands of thought in this chapter together.

Bamberger claims that myths of matriarchy-stories of prior rule by women-are relatively widespread in patriarchal societies, and that they function as social charters justifying male power. She cites two myths from Amazonia, both recorded in the early part of this century.
…

page 138
The common thread in these myths, Bamberger notes, is that a claim of past misdemeanors is used against women as a justification for denying them initiation: “The utility of a myth that accounts for the origin of the men’s lodge, separating men from women in action and in space, is easily demonstrated. As part of a cultural code distinguishing men from women in moral terms, the myth incorporated values that permit males a higher authority in social and political life.” At puberty boys are physically separated from their mothers, so as to be taught esoteric lore. At the end of their liminal initiation period, they are introduced ceremonially into the society of adult men. The girls, on the other hand, are inculcated with lifelong prohibitions and restrictions on their behavior. They are threatened with punishments for transgressing, punishments that are actually translated into action among the Kayapo of central Brazil, where the men’s house is the scene of the ritualized gang rape of young girls.
…

page 142 – 143
the wild. The effects of settling down to invest in the land were revolutionary, both from a social and an ecological point of view. I argue that while hunter-gatherer sex had been modeled on an idea of sharing and complementarity, early agriculturalist sex was voyeuristic, repressive, homophobic, and focused on reproduction. Afraid of the wild, farmers set out to destroy it.
…

page 146
During the glacial period, when survival depended on big-game hunting, the nutritional contribution from gathering may have been relatively small. Women could not hunt big game while they were pregnant, and they may have had to be relatively fat to bring a child to term under the extreme conditions. Men would have been able to take advantage of this vulnerability, as they have been on many occasions throughout prehistory and history.

When the ice melted, however, women gained the potential to be increasingly autonomous at a basic nutritional level. In principle, they could simply walk away. Although men could use violence or the threat of violence as coercion against them, they had lost their basic economic lever-which may be reflected in the relative egalitarianism of the Mesolithic period. Such egalitarianism, if it existed, did not last. The growing population of the Near East introduced yet another economic factor into the equation that was eventually to reforge women’s economic inequality in bonds so durable that they persist into the present day: farming, and its concomitant rules of production and property.
…

page 149
One of Gimbutas’s followers, meteorologist-turned-ancient-mysteries-researcher George Terence Meaden (whose work she endorsed) has claimed that the farming cultures of Britain-like those who built Stonehenge-were a “classless, balanced society” that enjoyed “the serenity of the Age of Goddess.” This notion has a wide appeal and has found a place as “fact” in the writings of feminist sociologists and New Age mystics alike. This chapter shows why they are misguided. I believe that the first farmers in Europe had a fundamentally exploitative attitude toward everything, including sex – being violent, unbalanced people, whose idea of a good time was felling trees, erecting great stone phalluses, and sanctifying them with sacrificial victims, often women and children.
…

page 151
Australian archaeologist and prehistorian V. Gordon Childe thought that there had been three great revolutions in human affairs: the Farming or “Neolithic” Revolution, the Urban Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution. Each was accompanied by population increase, political centralization, and an extension of human control over the environment.
…

page 154
There is much debate among archaeologists about how “revolutionary” Neolithic farming actually was. My view is that the significance of the change can hardly be overestimated. At different times within the last 10,000 to 12,000 years, the switch to farming seems to have occurred independently, in five or six different parts of the world, including China, India, and the Americas.
…

page 159
I would rather have one of British artist Damien Hirst’s sheep pickled in formaldehyde in my living room than protruding vulture-beaked breasts; it would be less disturbing. The Çatal Hüyük evidence hints at a society whose attitudes toward children were far more complex and perhaps more systematically exploitative than those of the preceding Paleolithic and Mesolithic periods. This is borne out to some degree by other evidence from Neolithic Europe.
…

page 162
The size of an LBK longhouse was probably related to the sort of family that lived in it, although parts of the house could have been used for stalling animals. A comparison of one-family housing in different societies today shows that matrilocal extended families tend to construct bigger houses than patrilocal families. One reason is that in societies where men marry into a community from the outside so that sisters stay together in a community with their various husbands, the women are more likely to share tasks under one roof. In societies where women marry into a new community, brothers tend to maintain their own separate households within the village.
…

page 164 – 165
The idea that longhouses were the focus of extended matrilocal families is supported by evidence that the inner, domestic sphere was at the cultural heart of the earliest farming communities. It has been argued that the advent of permanent houses meant that sex became more private, allowing an intimacy between two people that had been denied in the open mobile communities of the hunter-gatherers. It seems to me, however, that the reverse is likely to have been the case. Among pastoral steppe dwellers today, a couple merely places a marker on the ground and retreats into the lush grass beyond it to ensure perfect privacy. But the big-family atmosphere of the longhouse, with a hostile forest beyond, must have provided the perfect structure for elders to monitor the reproductive lives of their sons and daughters.

The voyeuristic side of sex was probably encouraged by the close proximity of animals. Children’s first ideas about sex must have come from observing stud animals, the behavior of bulls with their harems.
…

page 175
The control of animal sexuality by men may have had its analogue in control of the sexuality of human females. The rise of the idea of property, in land, in herds, and in women, would have placed new emphasis on exclusive rights of sexual access, as promised by certain forms of marriage. In an exploitative economy, virginity may have been valued in both land and women. Early farming societies were probably the first to formulate rape laws, not so much to protect women as to defend property and lines of inheritance. The penis as an image, so obvious in ice age art but virtually absent from the surviving archaeological record of the Mesolithic period, again comes to the fore in the Neolithic.
…

page 207
The prostitutes in a given place were not necessarily of local origin. Herodotus, writing of the Thracians in the fifth century B.C., says that they sold their daughters into slavery in Greece; the most attractive or skilled women may well have been traded elsewhere. Careful analysis of skeletal pitting can now prove that syphilis was present in Roman Europe; it must have been spread in part through the brothel network, although its incidence seems to have stayed fairly low.

The brothel tokens provide unambiguous evidence for the existence of an established repertoire of “sexual positions.”
…

page 210
Not all Iron Age men were rampaging macho boors. Although the Scythian nomads of the Black Sea steppes were one of the most ferocious military forces of the period, they were also, according to Hippocrates, “the most impotent of men,” especially the warrior elite. Not only did they spend “most of their time on their horses, so that they do not handle the parts but, owing to cold and fatigue forget about sexual passion”; they also wore pants, and the “constant jolting of their horses” made them unfit for intercourse. Hippocrates concluded that “the great majority among the Scythians become impotent, do women’s work, live like women and converse accordingly …they put on women’s clothes, holding that they have lost their man-hood.” That is, they were transvestites. Herodotus says that they suffered from the “female sickness.”

Was there any reality behind this description? From what we know about Hippocrates, it seems unlikely that he would make up factual evidence, although his explanation of underlying processes might not be acceptable in modern terms. The idea that the constant jolting of horses can make men unfit for intercourse mirrors a well-known modern complaint. In Australia it is known as “geographer’s balls,” brought on by the bumping of Land-Rovers across the outback. It is also documented among avid cyclists. Damage to the testes…
…

page 212
According to Hippocrates, the transvestite Scythians constituted a large part of the biologically male elite population – those who rode horses and were subsequently disabled by it. Herodotus, on the other hand, implies that they had a much more specialized role as prophets or soothsayers. Whoever the Enarees were, they cannot be simply identified as effeminate or homosexual men. There was gender-crossing but no gender-blurring in Scythia; one noble male who began to dress in Greek fashion, in long flowing robes rather than trousers, and to frequent taverns with Greek men, among whom homosexual behavior was a relative commonplace, was lynched by his Scythian peers on the ground that he had become effeminate. Clearly there was a crucial difference between effeminacy and “losing one’s manhood” to become a soothsayer.
…

page 245
Such niche-specialization, which was almost trivial at first, inexorably created “bottleneck” effects, wherein opportunities for mating with members of another group became rarer, and within-group idiosyncrasies in appearance gave rise to distinctive canons of beauty.

Sexual selection within groups, or between groups in the same niche, can rapidly change the outward appearance of a population. As Richard Dawkins strikingly puts it, “Nothing can stop the spread of DNA that has no beneficial effect other than making males beautiful to females”-and of course, vice versa. Add polygamy, and the process accelerates, as both males and females with a favored feature get better opportunities to breed-more choice in partners, and more partners. Disfavored appearances may simply have been excluded from the breeding pool, through infanticide or sexual avoidance.
…

page 249
Hominid development over the last four million years was a veritable evolutionary ferment. Types and species appeared and vanished at such a rate that many more forms probably still await our discovery. The rapid speciations, powered by sexual selection within possibly polygamous communities, mirror the later emergence of races among modern humans, for which similar mechanisms are implicated. It seems doubtful that Owen Lovejoy’s monogamy theory of human origins (see Chapter 1) could have genetically fixed the divergent trends among modern humans quickly enough for the races to look as different as they do today. Of course, most of the variation could have arisen during the most recent historical period, when we know that monogamy was not the global norm. But this possibility is not supported by studies that compare degrees of racial similarity with the timing of global colonization.

When modern humans started their global spread, probably out from Africa, bottlenecks became more frequent and more effective at bolstering emergent racial variations.
…

Notes

page 278
Gould’s view of the clitoris is in Gould 1995. The views of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Kinsey, and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy on vaginal versus clitoral orgasm are reprised in Gould 1995. The spandrel idea and the concept of exaptation [when a trait evolved for one function is later co-opted for a completely new use] (developed by Gould with Lewontin and Vrba, respectively) have recently been the subject of serious criticism by Dennett. Dennett says that “there will always be plenty of undesigned features in a system that is maximally well designed” (1995:276); Gould argues that such features may be a later focus of evolution; starting as unselected “exaptive” by-products, they can become adapted. But Dennett does not agree…
…

page 286 Frolov’s proposed [menstrual synchrony] lunar calendar is outlined in Renfrew and Bahn 1991: 346. See also Manson 1986.

It may appear inconsistent that I have recorded Hrdy’s observation that concealed ovulation is not unique to humans when I claim not to believe in concealed ovulation in humans. The problem is with the terminology; it seems better to talk of a group of primates, including humans, in whom ovulation is not primarily visually signaled, but among whom it is nonetheless signaled through changed behavior and smell (for smell, see Stoddart 1990).
…

page 292
“Learned helplessness” (Seligman 1975; Peterson, Maier, and Seligman 1993) is a very specific theory that I have probably misrepresented here, firstly by being too brief in describing it and secondly in trying to impute it to a prehistoric situation where it cannot be tested (although the theory has been applied, with the approbation of its pioneers, to the personality of Saint Paul as deduced from his New Testament writings (Peterson, Maier, and Seligman 1993: 248-49). Learned Helplessness: a Theory for the Age of Personal Control. New York: Oxford University
Press.
…