in agricultural communities brought radical changes to women’s ability to survive.
Suddenly, women lived in a world where they had to barter their reproductive capacity for access to the resources and protection they needed to survive. But these conditions are very different from those in which our species had been evolving previously.
It’s important to keep in mind that when viewed against the full scale of our species’ existence, ten thousand years is but a brief moment. Even if we ignore the roughly two million years since the emergence of our Homo lineage, in which our direct ancestors lived in small foraging social groups, anatomically modern humans are estimated to have existed as long as 200,000 years.* With the earliest evidence of agriculture dating to about 8000 BCE, the amount of time our species has spent living in settled agricultural societies represents just 5 percent of our collective experience, at most.
As recently as a few hundred years ago, most of the planet was still occupied by foragers.
So in order to trace the deepest roots of human sexuality, it’s vital to look beneath the thin crust of recent human history.
Until agriculture, human beings evolved in societies organized around an insistence on sharing just about everything. But all this sharing doesn’t make anyone a noble savage. These pre-agricultural societies were no nobler than you are when you pay your taxes or insurance premiums.
Universal, culturally imposed sharing was simply the most effective way for our highly social species to minimize risk.
Sharing and self-interest, as we shall see, are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, what many anthropologists call fierce egalitarianism was the predominant pattern of social organization around the world for many millennia before the advent of agriculture.
But human societies changed in radical ways once they started farming and raising domesticated animals. They organized themselves around hierarchical political structures, private property, densely populated settlements, a radical shift in the status of women, and other social configurations that together represent an enigmatic disaster for our species: human population growth mushroomed as quality of life plummeted. The shift to agriculture, wrote author Jared Diamond, is a “catastrophe from which we have never recovered.”6
Several types of evidence suggest our pre-agricultural (prehistoric) ancestors lived in groups where most mature individuals would have had several ongoing sexual relationships at any given time. Though often casual, these relationships were not random or meaningless. Quite the opposite: they reinforced crucial social ties holding these highly interdependent communities together.7
We’ve found overwhelming evidence of a decidedly casual, friendly prehistory of human sexuality echoed in our own bodies, in the habits of remaining societies still lingering in relative isolation, and in some surprising corners of contemporary Western culture. We’ll show how our bedroom behavior, porn preferences, fantasies, dreams, and sexual responses all support this reconfigured understanding of our sexual origins. Questions you’ll find answered in the following pages include:
• Why is long-term sexual fidelity so difficult for so many couples?
• Why does sexual passion often fade, even as love deepens?
• Why are women potentially multi-orgasmic, while men all too often reach orgasm frustratingly quickly and then lose interest?
• Is sexual jealousy an unavoidable, uncontrollable part of human nature?
• Why are human testicles so much larger than those of gorillas but smaller than those of chimps?
• Can sexual frustration make us sick? How did a lack of orgasms cause one of the most common diseases in history, and how was it treated?
A Few Million Years in a Few Pages
In a nutshell, here’s the story we tell in the following pages: A few million years ago, our ancient ancestors (Homo erectus) shifted