Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (16 page)

“consolidating relationships between persons of different

[clans]” and “promoting enduring relationships based on mutual affection.” He found that “many lovers are very fond of one another and regard separation as a privation to avoid.”27

Rather than risk overwhelming you with dozens more examples of this community-building, conflict-reducing human sexuality, we’ll conclude with just one more.

Anthropologists William and Jean Crocker visited and studied the Canela people—also of the Brazilian Amazon region—for more than three decades, beginning in the late 1950s. They explain:

It is difficult for members of a modern individualistic society to imagine the extent to which the Canela saw the group and the tribe as more important than the individual. Generosity and sharing was the ideal, while withholding was a social evil. Sharing possessions brought esteem. Sharing one’s body was a direct corollary. Desiring control over one’s goods and self was a form of stinginess. In this context, it is easy to understand why women chose to please men and why men chose to please women who expressed strong sexual needs.

No one was so self-important that satisfying a fellow
tribesman was less gratifying than personal gain
[emphasis in original].28

Recognized as a way to build and maintain a network of mutually beneficial relationships, nonreproductive sex no longer requires special explanations. Homosexuality, for example, becomes far less confusing, in that it is, as E. O.

Wilson has written, “above all a form of bonding …

consistent with the greater part of heterosexual behavior as a device that cements relationships.”29

Paternity certainty, far from being the universal and overriding obsession of all men everywhere and always, as the standard narrative insists, was likely a nonissue to men who lived before agriculture and resulting concerns with passing property through lines of paternal descent.

* In a personal communication, Don Pollock makes an interesting point about the notion of multiple fatherhood, writing, “I have always found the Kulina notion that more than one man may be a ‘biological’ father to a child to be, ironically, similar to the genetic reality: in a small, genetically homogeneous population (or close to it, after many generations of in-marrying), every child has close genetic similarities to all of the men with whom his or her mother had sexual relations—even to those the mother was not involved with.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Mommies Dearest

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and
daughters of life’s longing for itself.

KAHLIL GIBRAN

The diffused sense of parental responsibility resulting from these intersecting webs of sexual interaction extends to mothers as well as fathers. Anthropologist Donald Pollock tells us that while the Kulina believe the fetus to have originally been formed of accumulated semen
(men’s milk,
in Kulina), they attribute the baby’s growth after birth to
women’s milk.
“Any number of women might nurse the child,” he writes. “It is particularly common for a group of sisters … to share nursing functions; it is not unknown for the mother’s mother to allow an infant to nurse, even if the grandmother is no longer lactating, to quiet a crying child whose mother is occupied.” When he asked whether these other women were also mothers of the child, Pollock was told this was “obviously so.”1

Recalling his childhood among the Dagara, in Burkina Faso, author and psychologist Malidoma Patrice Somé remembers how freely children wandered into houses throughout the village. Somé explains that this “gives the child a very broad sense of belonging,” and that “everybody chips in to help raise the child.” Apart from the many obvious benefits to parents, Somé sees distinct psychological advantages for the children, saying, “It’s very rare that a child feels isolated or develops psychological problems; everyone is very aware of where he or she belongs.”2

Though Somé’s account may sound like idealized memory, what he describes is still standard village life in most of rural Africa, where children are welcome to wander in and out of the homes of unrelated adults in villages. Though a mother’s love is no doubt unique, women (and some men) the world over are eager to coo over unrelated babies, not just their own—an eagerness common to other social primates, none of whom, by the way, are monogamous. This deeply felt, broadly shared willingness to care for unrelated children lives on in the modern world: the bureaucratic ordeal of adoption rivals or exceeds the stress and expense of childbirth, yet millions of couples eagerly pursue its uncertain rewards.

Scientists focused only on the nuclear family miss the central role of alloparenting in our species.* Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, author of
Mothers and Others,
laments, “Infant-sharing in other primates and in various tribal societies has never been accorded center stage in the anthropological literature. Many people don’t even realize it goes on. Yet … the consequences of cooperative care—in terms of survival and biological fitness of mother and infant—turn out to be all to the good.”3

Darwin

entertained

the

radical

possibility

that

the

mother-child bond may have been less important to

“barbarous” individuals than their bond with the greater group. Commenting on the customary use of familial terms like
mother, father, son,
and
daughter
in reference to all group members, he suggested, “The terms employed express a connection with the tribe alone, to the exclusion of the mother. It seems possible that the connection between the related members of the same barbarous tribe, exposed to all sorts of danger, might be so much more important, owing to the need of mutual protection and aid, than that between the mother and her child….”4

When seventeenth-century Jesuit missionary Paul Le Jeune lectured a Montagnais Indian man about the dangers of the rampant infidelity he’d witnessed, Le Jeune received a lesson on proper parenthood in response. The missionary recalled, “I told him that it was not honorable for a woman to love any one else except her husband, and that this evil being among them, he himself was not sure that his son, who was there present, was his son. He replied, ‘Thou hast no sense. You French people love only your own children; but we all love all the children of our tribe.’ “5

Though it seems like common sense to most of us, our own biology-based

kinship

system

is

another

case

of

Flintstonization. We simply
assume
our own conception of family reflects something eternal and universal in human nature. But as we’ve seen, there isn’t even agreement among all people that one sex act is sufficient to result in pregnancy.

The concept of one-mother-per-child is running into trouble in Western societies too. “Motherhood is splintering,” writes William Saletan, the “human nature expert” at Slate.com.

“You can have a genetic mother, a gestational mother, an adoptive mother, and God knows what else. When one of your moms is Grandma, it’s even more confusing.” Speaking of surrogate mothers who gestate another woman’s fetus, Saletan argues that it makes sense for a woman’s mother to

offer to carry the baby: “When the surrogate is Grandma, the mess is less. Mother and daughter share a genetic bond to each other and to the child. They’re much more likely to work things out and give the child a stable family environment.”6

Perhaps. Either way, with widespread adoption, stepfamilies resulting from remarriage, and techniques such as surrogate gestation,

sperm

donation,

and

cryogenic

embryo

preservation,
Homo sapiens
is on the fast track away from

“traditional” family structures, perhaps headed toward more flexible arrangements reminiscent of the distant past.

Belief in partible paternity spreads fatherly feelings throughout a group, but this is just one of many mechanisms for enhancing group solidity. Anthropologists report numerous societies in which naming ceremonies and clan affiliations create obligations between individuals more binding than blood relations. Referring to the Matis people, with whom he lived, anthropologist Philippe Erikson notes,

“When it comes to defining kinship ties, relationships deriving from naming practices have absolute priority over any other considerations, such as genealogical connections.

When conflicts arise between the two modes of reckoning, sharing a name has precedence….”7

Some anthropologists question whether kinship is an important concept in band-level societies at all—however defined. They argue that since everyone in such a small-scale society is likely to be related to each other in some way, affinity tends to be measured in more fluid terms, such as friendship and sharing partners.

As Darwin understood, even the most direct and immediate kinship terminology is subject to cultural definition. “Fatherly behavior is expected of all the males of a local clan toward all the young of the clan,” says anthropologist Janet Chernela.

“Multiple aspects of caretaking, including affection and food-getting, are provided by all clansmen.”8 Anthropologist Vanessa Lea notes that, based upon her experience among the Mebengokre, “The allocation of responsibility is socially constructed and not an objective fact….”9 Among the Tukanoan, “Clan brothers provide for one another’s children as a collective. Through the pooling of the daily catch, each male regularly labors for all of the children of a village—his own offspring as well as those of his brothers.”10

This diffused approach to parenting isn’t limited to villages in Africa or Amazonia. Desmond Morris recalls an afternoon he spent with a female truck driver in Polynesia. She told him that she’d had nine children, but had given two of them to an infertile friend. When Morris asked how the kids felt about that, she said they didn’t mind at all, as “all of us love all of the children.” Morris recalls, “This last point is underlined by the fact that, when we reach the village … she passes the time by wandering over to a group of toddlers, lying down in the grass with them and playing with them exactly as if they were her own. They accept her instantly, without any questioning, and a passer-by would never have guessed that they were anything other than a natural family playing together.”11

“A natural family.” Perhaps this easy acceptance between adults and unrelated children, the diffuse nurturing found in societies where children refer to all men as
father
and all women as
mother,
societies small and isolated enough to safely assume the kindness of strangers, where overlapping sexual relationships leave genetic paternity unknowable and of little consequence … perhaps this
is
the “natural” family structure of our species.

Could it be that the atomic isolation of the husband-wife nucleus with an orbiting child or two is in fact a culturally imposed aberration for our species—as ill-suited to our evolved tendencies as corsets, chastity belts, and suits of armor? Dare we ask whether mothers, fathers, and children are all being shoe-horned into a family structure that suits none of us? Might the contemporary pandemics of fracturing families, parental exhaustion, and confused, resentful children be predictable consequences of what is, in truth, a distorted and distorting family structure inappropriate for our species?

Nuclear Meltdown

If the independent, isolated nuclear family unit is, in fact, the structure into which human beings most naturally configure themselves, why do contemporary societies and religions find it necessary to prop it up with tax breaks and supportive legislation while fiercely defending it from same-sex couples and

others

proposing

to

marry

in

supposedly

“nontraditional”ways? One wonders, in fact, why marriage is a legal issue at all—apart from its relevance to immigration and property laws. Why would something so integral to human nature require such vigilant legal protection?

Furthermore, if the nuclear triad is so deeply embedded in our nature, why are fewer and fewer of us choosing to live that way? In the United States, the percentage of nuclear family households has dropped from 45 to 23.5 since the 1970s.