Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (11 page)

Orangutans are solitary and show little bonding of any kind. Male orangutans do not tolerate each other’s presence. An adult male establishes Orangutan a large territory where several females live.

Each has her own range.
Mating is dispersed,
infrequent and often violent.

Gibbons establish nuclear family units; each Gibbon

couple maintains a territory from which other pairs are excluded.
Mating is monogamous.

* Unless you’re sticking with the standard model, in which case humans are classified as monogamous or polygynous, depending on the source.

Doubting the Chimpanzee Model

There are, however, some serious problems with turning to chimpanzee behavior to understand prehistoric human societies. While chimps are extremely hierarchical, groups of human foragers are vehemently egalitarian. Meat sharing is precisely the occasion when chimp hierarchy is most evident, yet a successful hunt triggers the leveling mechanisms most important to human foraging societies. Most primatologists agree about the prominence of power-consciousness in chimpanzees. But it may be premature to generalize from observations made at Gombe, given that observations made at different sites—Taï, on the Ivory Coast of western Africa, for example—suggest some wild chimps handle the sharing of meat in ways more reminiscent of human foragers.

Primatologist Craig Stanford found that while the chimps at Gombe are “utterly nepotistic and Machiavellian” about meat distribution, the chimps at Taï share the meat among every individual in the hunting group, whether friend or foe, close relative or relative stranger.8

So, while data from the chimps studied by Goodall and others at Gombe appear to support the idea that a ruthless and calculating selfishness is typical of chimpanzee behavior, information from other study sites may contradict or undermine this finding. Given the difficulties inherent in observing chimpanzee behavior in the wild, we should be cautious about generalizing from the limited data we have available on free-ranging chimps. And given their indisputable intelligence and social nature, we should be equally suspicious of data collected from captive chimps,

which would appear to be no more generalizable than human prisoner behavior would be to humans.

There are also questions concerning how violent chimps are if left undisturbed in their natural habitat. As we discuss in Chapter 13, several factors could have profoundly altered the chimps’ observed behavior. Cultural historian Morris Berman explains that if we “change things such as food supplies, population densities, and the possibilities for spontaneous group formation and dissolution, … all hell breaks loose—no less for apes than for humans.”9

Even if we limit ourselves to the chimpanzee model, the dark self-assurance of modern-day neo-Hobbesian pessimists may be unfounded. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, for example, might be a bit less certain in his gloomy assessment of human nature: “Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to
teach
generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.”10 Maybe, but cooperation runs deep in our species too. Recent findings in comparative primate intelligence have led researchers Vanessa Woods and Brian Hare to wonder whether an impulse toward cooperation might actually be the key to our species-defining intelligence. They write, “Instead of getting a jump start with the most intelligent hominids surviving to produce the next generation, as is often suggested, it may have been the more sociable hominids—because they were better at solving problems together—who achieved a higher level of fitness and allowed selection to favor more sophisticated problem-solving over time.”11 Humans got smart, they hypothesize, because our ancestors learned to cooperate.

Innately selfish or not, the effects of food provisioning and habitat depletion on both wild chimpanzees and human foragers suggest that Dawkins and others who argue that humans are
innately
aggressive, selfish beasts should be careful about citing these chimp data in support of their case.

Human groups tend to respond to food surplus and storage with behavior like that observed in chimps: heightened hierarchical

social

organization,

intergroup

violence,

territorial perimeter defense, and Machiavellian alliances. In other words, humans—like chimps—tend to fight when there’s something worth fighting over. But for most of prehistory, there was no food surplus to win or lose and no home base to defend.

In Search of Primate Continuity

Two elements women share with bonobos are that their
ovulation is hidden from immediate detection and that they
have sex throughout their cycle. But here the similarities end.

Where are our genital swellings, and where is the sex at the
drop of a hat?

FRANS DE WAAL12

Sex was an expression of friendship: in Africa it was like
holding hands…. It was friendly and fun. There was no
coercion. It was offered willingly.

PAUL THEROUX13

Whatever one concludes about chimp violence and its relevance to human nature, our other closest primate cousin, the bonobo, offers a fascinating counter-model. Just as the chimpanzee seems to embody the Hobbesian vision of human origins, the bonobo reflects the Rousseauian view. Although best known today as the proponent of the
Noble Savage,
Rousseau’s autobiography details a fascination with sexuality that suggests that he would have considered bonobos kindred souls had he known of them. De Waal sums up the difference between these two apes’ behavior by saying that “the chimpanzee resolves sexual issues with power; the bonobo resolves power issues with sex.”

Though bonobos surpass even chimps in the frequency of their sexual behavior, females of both species engage in multiple mating sessions in quick succession with different males. Among chimpanzees, ovulating females mate, on average, from six to eight times per day, and they are often eager to respond to the mating invitations of any and all males in the group. Describing the behavior of female chimps she monitored, primatologist Anne Pusey notes, “Each, after mating within her natal community, visited the other community while sexually receptive … They eagerly approached and mated with males from the new community.”14

This extra-group sexual behavior is common among chimpanzees, suggesting that intergroup relations are not as violent as some claim. For example, a recent study of DNA samples taken from hair follicles collected from chimpanzee nests at the Taï study area in Ivory Coast showed that
more
than half the young
(seven of thirteen) had been fathered by males from outside the female’s home group. Were these chimps living in a perpetual war zone, it’s unlikely these females would have been free to slip away easily enough to account for over half their pregnancies. Ovulating female chimps (despite the heightened male monitoring predicted by the standard model) eluded their male protectors/captors long enough to wander over to the other groups, mate with unfamiliar males, and then saunter back to their home group.

This sort of behavior is unlikely in a state of perpetual high alert.

Whatever the truth regarding relations between unprovisioned groups of chimpanzees in the wild, unconscious bias rings out in passages like this one: “In war as in romance, bonobos and chimpanzees appear to be strikingly different. When two bonobo communities meet at a range boundary at Wamba …

not only is there no lethal aggression as sometimes occurs in

chimps, there may be socializing and even sex between females and the enemy community’s males.”15

Enemy?
When two groups of intelligent primates get together to socialize and have sex with each other, who would think of these groups as
enemies
or such a meeting as
war?
Note the similar assumptions in this account: “Chimpanzees give a special call that alerts others at a distance to the presence of food. As such, this is food sharing of sorts,
but it need not be
interpreted as charitable.
A caller faced with more than enough food will lose nothing by sharing it and may benefit later when another chimpanzee reciprocates [emphasis added].”16

Perhaps this seemingly cooperative behavior “need not be interpreted as charitable,” but what’s the unspoken problem with such an interpretation? Why should we seek to explain away what looks like generosity among nonhuman primates, or other animals in general? Is generosity a uniquely human quality? Passages like these make one wonder why, as Gould asked, scientists are loath to see primate continuity in our positive impulses even as many clearly yearn to locate the roots of our aggression deep in primate past.

Just imagine that we had never heard of chimpanzees or
baboons and had known bonobos first. We would at present
most

likely

believe

that

early

hominids

lived

in

female-centered societies, in which sex served important
social functions and in which warfare was rare or absent.

FRANS DE WAAL17

Because they live only in a remote area of dense jungle in a politically volatile country (Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire), bonobos were one of the last mammals to be studied in their natural habitat. Although their anatomical differences from common chimps were noted as long ago as 1929, until bonobos’ radically different behavior became apparent,

they

were

considered

a

subgroup

of

chimpanzee—often called “pygmy chimps.”

For bonobos, female status is more important than male hierarchy, but even female rank is flexible and not binding.

Bonobos have no formalized rituals of dominance and submission like the status displays common to chimps, gorillas, and other primates. Although status is not completely absent, primatologist Takayoshi Kano, who has collected the most detailed information on bonobo behavior in the wild, prefers

to

use

the

term

“influential”

rather

than

“high-ranking” when describing female bonobos. He believes that females are respected out of affection, rather than because of rank. Indeed, Frans de Waal wonders whether it’s appropriate to discuss hierarchy at all among bonobos, noting,

“If there is a female rank order, it is largely based on seniority rather than physical intimidation: older females are generally of higher status than younger ones.”18

Those looking for evidence of matriarchy in human societies might ponder the fact that among bonobos, female

“dominance” doesn’t result in the sort of male submission one might expect if it were simply an inversion of the male power structures found among chimps and baboons. The female bonobos use their power differently than male primates.

Despite their submissive social role, male bonobos appear to be much better off than male chimps or baboons. As we’ll see in later discussions of female-dominated societies, human males also tend to fare pretty well when the women are in charge. While Sapolsky chose to study baboons because of the chronically high stress levels males suffer as a result of their unending struggles for power, de Waal notes that bonobos confront a different sort of existence, saying, “in view of their frequent sexual activity and low aggression, I find it hard to imagine that males of the species have a particularly stressful time.”19

Crucially, humans and bonobos, but not chimps, appear to share a specific anatomical predilection for peaceful coexistence. Both species have what’s called a
repetitive
microsatellite
(at gene AVPR1A) important to the release of oxytocin. Sometimes called “nature’s ecstasy,” oxytocin is important in pro-social feelings like compassion, trust, generosity, love, and yes, eroticism. As anthropologist and author Eric Michael Johnson explains, “It is far more parsimonious