Sex at Dawn

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

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embrace with long, deep, tongue-intruding French kisses.”

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

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[emphasis added].”

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

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well.” 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