Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (12 page)

that

chimpanzees

lost

this

repetitive

microsatellite than for both humans and bonobos to independently develop the same mutation.”20

But there is intense resistance to the notion that relatively low levels of stress and a surfeit of sexual freedom could have characterized the human past. Helen Fisher acknowledges these aspects of bonobo life as well as their many correlates in human behavior, and even makes a sly reference to Morgan’s
primal horde:

These creatures travel in mixed groups of males, females, and young…. Individuals come and go between groups, depending on the food supply, connecting a cohesive community of several dozen animals. Here is a primal horde…. Sex is almost a daily pastime…. Females copulate during most of their menstrual cycles—a pattern of coitus more similar to women’s than any other creature’s….

Bonobos engage in sex to ease tension, to stimulate sharing during meals, to reduce stress while traveling, and to reaffirm friendships during anxious reunions. “Make love, not war” is clearly a bonobo scheme.21

Fisher then asks the obvious question, “Did our ancestors do the same?” She seems to be preparing us for an affirmative answer by noting that bonobos “display many of the sexual habits people exhibit on the streets, in the bars and restaurants, and behind apartment doors in New York, Paris, Moscow, and Hong Kong.” “Prior to coitus,” she writes,

“bonobos often stare deeply into each other’s eyes.” And Fisher assures her readers that, like human beings, bonobos

“walk arm in arm, kiss each other’s hands and feet, and embrace with long, deep, tongue-intruding French kisses.”22

It seems that Fisher, who shares our doubts about other aspects of the standard narrative, is about to reconfigure her arguments concerning the advent of long-term pair bonding and other aspects of human prehistory to better reflect these behaviors shared by bonobos and humans. Given the prominent role of chimpanzee behavior in supporting the standard narrative, how can we
not
include the
equally
relevant
bonobo data in our conjectures concerning human prehistory? Remember,
we are genetically equidistant from
chimps and bonobos.
And as Fisher notes, human sexual behavior has more in common with bonobos’ than with that of any other creature on Earth.

But Fisher balks at acknowledging that the human sexual past could have been like the bonobo present, explaining her last-minute 180-degree turnaround by saying, “Bonobos have sex lives quite different from those of other apes.” But this isn’t true because humans—whose sexual behavior is so similar to that of bonobos, according to Fisher herself—
are
apes.
She continues, “Bonobo heterosexual activities also occur throughout most of the menstrual cycle. And female bonobos resume sexual behavior within a year of parturition.” Both these otherwise unique qualities of bonobo sexuality are shared by only one other primate species:
Homo sapiens.
But still, Fisher concludes, “Because pygmy chimps [bonobos]

exhibit these
extremes of primate sexuality
and because biochemical data suggest [they] emerged as recently as two million years ago, I do
not
feel they make a suitable model for life as it was among hominids twenty million years ago

[emphasis added].”23

This passage is bizarre on several levels. After writing at length about how strikingly similar bonobo sexual behavior is to that of human beings, Fisher executes a double backflip to conclude that they
don’t
make a suitable model for our ancestors. To make matters even more confusing, she shifts the whole discussion to twenty million years ago as if she’d been talking about the last common ancestor of
all apes
as opposed to that shared by chimps, bonobos, and humans, who diverged from a common ancestor only
five
million years ago.

In fact, Fisher wasn’t talking about such distant ancestors.

The Anatomy of Love,
the book from which we’ve been quoting, is a beautifully written popularization of her groundbreaking academic work on the “evolution of serial pair-bonding” in humans (not
all apes)
within the past few million years. Furthermore, note how Fisher refers to the very qualities bonobos share with humans as “extremes of primate sexuality.”

Further hints of neo-Victorianism appear in Fisher’s description of the transition our ancestors made from the treetops to life on land: “Perhaps our primitive female ancestors living in the trees pursued sex with a variety of males to keep friends. Then, when our forbears were driven onto the grasslands of Africa some four million years ago and pair bonding evolved to raise the young, females turned from open promiscuity to clandestine copulations, reaping the benefits of resources and better or more varied genes as well.”24 Fisher
assumes
the advent of pair bonding four million years ago despite the absence of any supporting evidence. Continuing this circular reasoning, she writes: Because bonobos appear to be the smartest of the apes, because they have many physical traits quite similar to people’s, and because these chimps copulate with flair and frequency, some anthropologists conjecture that bonobos are much like the African hominoid prototype, our last common tree-dwelling ancestor. Maybe pygmy chimps are living relics of our past. But they certainly manifest some fundamental differences in their sexual behavior. For one thing, bonobos do not form long-term pair-bonds the way humans do. Nor do they raise their young as husband and wife. Males do care for infant siblings, but monogamy is no life for them.

Promiscuity is their fare.25

Here we have crystalline expression of the Flintstonizing that can distort the thinking of even the most informed theorists on the origins of human sexual behavior. We’re confident Dr.

Fisher will find that what she calls “fundamental differences”

in sexual behavior are not differences at all when she looks at the full breadth of information we cover in following chapters. We’ll show that husband/wife marriage and sexual monogamy are
far
from universal human behaviors, as she and others have argued. Simply because bonobos raise doubts about the naturalness of human long-term pair bonding, Fisher and most other authorities conclude that they cannot serve as models for human evolution. They begin by assuming that long-term sexual monogamy forms the nucleus of the one and only natural, eternal human family structure and reason backwards from there. Yucatán be damned!

I sometimes try to imagine what would have happened if we’d
known the bonobo first and chimpanzee only later or not at
all. The discussion about human evolution might not revolve
as much around violence, warfare, and male dominance, but
rather around sexuality, empathy, caring, and cooperation.

What a different intellectual landscape we would occupy!

FRANS DE WAAL,
Our Inner Ape

The weakness of the “killer ape theory” of human origins becomes clear in light of what’s now known about bonobo behavior. Still, de Waal makes a good case that even without the data that became available in the 1970s, the many flaws in the chimp-fortified Hobbesian view eventually would have emerged. He calls attention to the fact that the theory confuses predation with aggression, assumes that tools originated as weapons, and depicts women as “passive objects of male competition.” He calls for a new scenario that

“acknowledges and explains the virtual absence of organized warfare among today’s human foragers, their egalitarian tendencies, and generosity with information and resources across groups.”26

By projecting recent post-agricultural preoccupations with female fidelity into their vision of prehistory, many theorists have Flintstonized their way right into a cul-de-sac. Modern man’s seemingly instinctive impulse to control women’s sexuality is not an intrinsic feature of human nature. It is a response

to

specific

historical

socioeconomic

conditions—conditions very different from those in which our species evolved. This is key to understanding sexuality in the modern world. De Waal is correct that this hierarchical, aggressive, and territorial behavior is of recent origin for our species. It is, as we’ll see, an adaptation to the social world that arose with agriculture.

From our perspective on the far bank, Helen Fisher, Frans de Waal, and a few others seem to have ventured out onto the bridge that crosses over the rushing stream of unfounded assumptions about human sexuality—but they dare not cross it. Their positions seem, to us, to be compromises that strain against the most parsimonious interpretation of data they know as well as anyone. Confronted with the unignorable fact that human beings sure don’t
act
like a monogamous species, they make excuses for our “aberrant” (yet perplexingly consistent) behavior. Fisher explains the phenomenon of worldwide marital breakdown by arguing that the pair bond evolved to last only until the infant grows to a child who can keep up with the foraging band without fatherly assistance.

For his part, de Waal still argues that the nuclear family is

“intrinsically human” and the pair-bond is “the key to the incredible level of cooperation that marks our species.” But he then suggestively concludes that “our success as a species is intimately tied to the abandonment of the bonobo lifestyle and to a tighter control over sexual expressions.”27

“Abandonment?” Since it’s impossible to abandon what one never had, de Waal would presumably agree that hominid sexuality was, at some point, profoundly similar to that of the relaxed, promiscuous bonobo—although he never says so explicitly. Nor has he ventured to say when or why our ancestors abandoned that way of being.28

Table 2: Comparison of Bonobo, Chimp, and Human Socio-sexual Behavior and Infant Development29

Human and bonobo females
copulate throughout
menstrual cycle,
as well as during
lactation
and
pregnancy.

Female chimps are sexually active only 25–40 percent of their cycle.

Human and bonobo infants develop much more slowly
than chimpanzees,
beginning to play with others at about 1.5 years, much later than chimps.

Like humans,
female bonobos return to the group
immediately after giving birth and copulate within
months.
They exhibit little fear of infanticide, which has never been observed in bonobos—captive or free-living.

Bonobos and humans enjoy many different copulatory
positions,
with ventral-ventral (missionary position) appearing to be preferred by bonobo females and rear-entry by males, while chimps prefer rear-entry almost exclusively.

Bonobos and humans often gaze into each other’s eyes
when copulating and kiss each other deeply.
Chimps do neither.

The
vulva
is located between the legs and oriented toward the
front of the body in humans and bonobos,
rather than oriented toward the rear as in chimps and other primates.

Food sharing
is highly associated with sexual activity in humans and bonobos, only moderately so in chimps.

There is a high degree of
variability in potential sexual
combinations in humans and bonobos;
homosexual activity is common in both, but rare in chimps.

Genital-genital (G-G) rubbing
between female bonobos appears to affirm female bonding, is present in all bonobo populations studied (wild and captive), and is completely absent in chimpanzees. Human data on G-G rubbing are presently unavailable. (Attention: ambitious graduate students!)

While sexual activity in chimps and other primates appears to be primarily reproductive,
bonobos and humans utilize
sexuality for social purposes
(tension reduction, bonding, conflict resolution, entertainment, etc.).

P A R T II

Lust in Paradise (Solitary)

CHAPTER FIVE

Who Lost What in Paradise?

[Man] has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it
the supremest of all his delights, the one ecstasy that stands
first and foremost in the heart of every individual of his
race… sexual intercourse! It is as if a lost and perishing
person in a roasting desert should be told by a rescuer he
might choose and have all longed-for things but one, and he
should elect to leave out water!

MARK TWAIN,
Letters from the Earth

Turns out, the Garden of Eden wasn’t really a garden at all. It was anything but a garden: jungle, forest, wild seashore, open savanna, windblown tundra.
Adam and Eve weren’t kicked
out of a garden. They were kicked into one.

Think about it. What’s a garden? Land under cultivation.

Tended. Arranged. Organized. Intentional. Weeds are pulled or poisoned without mercy; seeds are selected and sown.

There’s nothing free or spontaneous about such a place.

Accidents are unwelcome. But the story says that before their fall from grace, Adam and Eve lived carefree, naked, and innocent—lacking nothing. Their world provided what they needed: food, shelter, and companionship.