Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (13 page)

But after the Fall, the good times were over. Food, previously the gift of a generous world, now had to be earned through hard work. Women suffered in giving birth. And sexual

pleasure—formerly

guilt-free—became

a

source

of

humiliation and shame. Although the biblical story has it that the first humans were expelled from the garden, the narrative clearly got reversed somewhere along the line. The curse suffered by Adam and Eve centers around the exchange of the arguably low-stress, high-pleasure life of foragers (or bonobos) for the dawn-to-dusk toil of a farmer in his garden.

Original sin represents the attempt to explain why on Earth our ancestors ever accepted such a raw deal.1

The story of the Fall gives narrative structure to the traumatic transition from the take-it-where-you-find-it hunter-gatherer existence to the arduous struggle of agriculturalists.

Contending with insects, rodents, weather, and the reluctant Earth itself, farmers were forced to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow rather than just finding the now-forbidden fruit and eating it hand to mouth, as their ancestors had done forever. No wonder foragers have almost never shown any interest in learning farming techniques from Europeans. As one forager put it, “Why should we plant, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?”

Books like this one, concerning human nature, are beacons for trouble. On one hand, everybody’s an expert. Being human, we all have opinions about human nature. Such an understanding seems to require little more than a modicum of common sense and some attention to our own incessant cravings and aversions. Simple enough.

But making sense of human nature is anything but simple.

Human nature has been landscaped, replanted, weeded, fertilized, fenced off, seeded, and irrigated as intensively as any garden or seaside golf course. Human beings have been under cultivation longer than we’ve been cultivating anything else. Our cultures domesticate us for obscure purposes, nurturing and encouraging certain aspects of our behavior and tendencies while seeking to eliminate those that might be disruptive. Agriculture, one might say, has involved the domestication of the human being as much as of any plant or other animal.2

Our sense of the full range of human nature, like our diet, has been steadily reduced. No matter how nourishing it might be, anything wild gets pulled—though as we’ll see, some of the weeds growing in us have roots reaching deep into our shared past. Pull them if you want, but they’ll just keep coming back again and again.

What gets cultivated—in soil and minds—is not necessarily beneficial to the individuals in a given society. Something may benefit a culture overall, while being disastrous to the majority of the individual members of that society.

Individuals suffer and die in wars from which a society may benefit greatly. Industrial poisons in the air and water, globalized trade accords, genetically modified crops … all are accepted by individuals likely to end up losing in the deal.

This disconnect between individual and group interests helps explain why the shift to agriculture is normally spun as a great leap forward, despite the fact that it was actually a disaster for most of the individuals who endured it. Skeletal remains taken from various regions of the world dating to the transition from foraging to farming all tell the same story: increased famine, vitamin deficiency, stunted growth, radical reduction in life span, increased violence … little cause for celebration. For most people, we’ll see that the shift from foraging to farming was less a giant leap forward than a dizzying fall from grace.

On Getting Funky and Rockin’ Round

the Clock

If you ever doubt that human beings are, beyond everything, social animals, consider that short of outright execution or physical torture, the worst punishment in any society’s arsenal has always been exile. Having run short of empty places to exile our worst prisoners, we’ve turned to internal exile as our harshest punishment: solitary confinement. Sartre got it backwards when he proclaimed,
“L’enfer, c’est les
autres”
(Hell is other people). It’s the
absence
of other people that is hellish for our species. Human beings are so desperate for social contact that prisoners almost universally choose the company of murderous lunatics over extended isolation. “I would rather have had the worst companion than no companion at all,” said journalist Terry Anderson, recalling his seven-year ordeal as a hostage in Lebanon.3

Evolutionary theorists love to seek explanations for species’

most outstanding features: the elk’s antlers, the giraffe’s neck, the cheetah’s breakaway speed. These features reflect the environment in which the species evolved and the particular niche it occupies in this environment.

What’s our species’s outstanding feature? Other than our supersized male genitalia (see Part IV), we’re not very impressive from a physical perspective. With less than half our body weight, the average chimp has the strength of any four or five mustachioed firefighters. Plenty of animals can run faster, dive deeper, fight better, see farther, detect fainter smells, and hear tonal subtleties in what sounds like silence to us. So what do we bring to the party? What’s so special about human beings?

Our endlessly complex interactions with each other.

We know what you’re thinking: big brains. True, but our unique brains result from our chatty sociability. Though debate rages concerning precisely why the human brain grew so large so quickly, most would agree with anthropologist Terrence W. Deacon when he writes, “The human brain has been shaped by evolutionary processes that elaborated the capacities needed for language, and not just by a general demand for greater intelligence.”4

In a classic feedback loop, our big brains both serve our need for complex, subtle communication
and
result from it.

Language, in turn, enables our deepest, most human feature: the ability to form and maintain a flexible, multidimensional, adaptive social network. Before and beyond anything else, Human beings are the most social of all creatures.

We have another quality that is
especially human
in addition to our disproportionately large brains and associated capacity for language. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is also something woven into our all-important social fabric: our exaggerated sexuality.

No animal spends more of its allotted time on Earth fussing over sex than
Homo sapiens
—not even the famously libidinous bonobo. Although we and the bonobo both average well into the hundreds, if not thousands, of acts of intercourse per birth—way ahead of any other primate—their “acts” are far briefer than ours. Pair-bonded “monogamous” animals are almost always hyposexual, having sex as the Vatican recommends: infrequently, quietly, and for reproduction only.

Human beings, regardless of religion, are at the other end of the libidinal spectrum: hypersexuality personified.

Human beings and bonobos use eroticism for pleasure, for solidifying friendship, and for cementing a deal (recall that historically, marriage is more akin to a corporate merger than a declaration of eternal love). For these two species (and apparently
only
these two species), nonreproductive sex is

“natural,” a defining characteristic.5

Does all this frivolous sex make our species sound

“animalistic”? It shouldn’t. The animal world is full of species that have sex only during widely spaced intervals when the female is ovulating. Only two species can do it week in and week out for nonreproductive reasons: one human, the other very humanlike. Sex for pleasure with various partners is therefore more “human” than animal.

Strictly reproductive, once-in-a-blue-moon sex is more

“animal” than human. In other words, an excessively horny monkey is acting “human,” while a man or woman uninterested in sex more than once or twice a year would be, strictly speaking, “acting like an animal.” Though many strive to hide their human libidinousness from themselves and each other, being a force of nature, it breaks through. Lots of upright, proper Americans were scandalized by the way Elvis moved his hips when he sang “rock and roll.” But how many realized what the phrase
rock and roll
meant? Cultural historian Michael Ventura, investigating the roots of African-American music, found that rock ‘n’ roll was a term that originated in the juke joints of the South. Long in use by the time Elvis appeared, Ventura explains the phrase

“hadn’t meant the name of a music, it meant ‘to fuck.’

‘Rock,’ by itself, had pretty much meant that, in those circles, since the twenties at least.” By the mid-1950s, when the phrase was becoming widely used in mainstream culture, Ventura says the disc jockeys “either didn’t know what they were saying or were too sly to admit what they knew.” Though crusty old Ed Sullivan would have been scandalized to realize what he was saying when he announced this new

“rock and roll all the kids are crazy about.” Examples of barely concealed sexual reference lurking just below the surface of common American English don’t stop there.

Robert Farris Thompson, America’s most prominent historian of African art, says that
funky
is derived from the Ki-Kongo
lu-fuki,
meaning “positive sweat” of the sort you get from dancing or having sex, but not working. One’s
mojo,
which has to be “working” to attract a lover, is Ki-Kongo for “soul.”
Boogie
comes from
mbugi,
meaning “devilishly good.” And both
jazz
and
jism
likely derive from
dinza,
the Ki-Kongo word for “to ejaculate.”6

Forget the billions pouring in from porn. Forget all the T &A on TV, in advertising, and in movies. Forget the love songs we sing on the way into relationships and the blues on the way out. Even if we include none of that, the percentage of our lives we human beings spend thinking about, planning, having, and remembering sex is incomparably greater than that of any other creature on the planet. Despite our relatively

low reproductive potential (few women have ever had more than a dozen or so children), our species truly can, and does, rock around the clock.

If I had had to choose my place of birth, I would have chosen
a state in which everyone knew everyone else, so that neither
the obscure tactics of vice nor the modesty of virtue could
have escaped public scrutiny and judgment.

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU,

“Discourse on the Origin of Inequality”
(1754) Rousseau was born in the wrong time, wrong place. If he’d been born in the same spot twenty thousand years earlier, among the artists sketching life-sized bulls on European cave walls, he’d have known every member of his social world.

Alternatively, born into his own era but in one of the many societies not yet altered by agriculture, he’d have found the close-knit social world for which he yearned. The sense of being alone—even in a crowded city—is an oddity in human life, included, like so much else, in the agricultural package.

Looking back from his overcrowded world, Thomas Hobbes imagined that prehistoric human life was unbearably solitary.

Today, separated from countless strangers by only thin walls, tiny earphones, and hectic schedules, we assume a desolate sense of isolation must have weighed on our ancestors, wandering over their windswept prehistoric landscape. But in fact, this seemingly common-sense assumption couldn’t be more mistaken.