Sex at Dawn

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.

The social lives of foragers are characterized by a depth and intensity of interaction few of us could imagine (or tolerate). For those of us born and raised in societies organized around the interlocking principles of individuality, personal space, and private property, it’s difficult to project our imaginations into those tightly woven societies where almost all space and property is communal, and identity is more collective than individual. From the first morning of birth to the final mourning of death, a forager’s life is one of intense, constant interaction, interrelation, and interdependence.

In this section, we’ll examine the first element in Hobbes’s famous dictum about prehistoric human life. We’ll show that before the rise of the state, prehistoric human life was far from “solitary.”

Societies Mentioned in Text

CHAPTER SIX Who’s Your Daddies?

In view of the frequent occurrence of modern domestic groups that do not consist of, or contain, an exclusive pair-bonded father and mother, I cannot see why anyone should insist that our ancestors were reared in monogamous nuclear families and that pair-bonding is more natural than other arrangements.

MARVIN HARRIS¹

The birds and the bees are different in the Amazon. There, a woman not only can be a little pregnant, most are. Each of the societies we’re about to discuss shares a belief in what scientists call “partible paternity.” These groups have a novel conception of conception: a fetus is made of accumulated semen.

Anthropologists Stephen Beckerman and Paul Valentine explain, “Pregnancy is viewed as a matter of degree, not clearly distinguished from gestation ... all sexually active women are a little pregnant. Over time ... semen accumulates in the womb, a fetus is formed, further acts of intercourse follow, and additional semen causes the fetus to grow more.” Were a woman to stop having sex when her periods stopped, people in these cultures believe the fetus would stop developing.

This understanding of how semen forms a child leads to some mighty interesting conclusions regarding “responsible” sexual behavior. Like mothers everywhere, a woman from these societies is eager to give her child every possible advantage in life. To this end, she’ll typically seek out sex with an assortment of men. She’ll solicit “contributions” from the best hunters, the best storytellers, the funniest, the kindest, the best-looking, the strongest, and so on—in the hopes her child will literally absorb the essence of each.

Anthropologists report similar understandings of conception and fetal development among many South American societies, ranging from simple hunter-gatherers to horticulturalists. A partial list would include the Ache, the Arawete, the Bari, the Canela, the Cashinahua, the Curripaco, the Ese Eja, the Kayapo, the Kulina, the Matis, the Mehinaku, the Piaroa, the Piraha, the Secoya, the Siona, the Warao, the Yanomami, and the Ye’kwana—societies from Venezuela to Bolivia. This is no ethnographic curiosity, either—a strange idea being passed among related cultures. The same understanding is found among cultural groups that show no evidence of contact for millennia. Nor is partible paternity limited to South America. For example, the Lusi of Papua New Guinea also hold that fetal development depends on multiple acts of intercourse, often with different men. Even today, the younger Lusi, who have some sense of the modern understanding of reproduction, agree that a person can have more than one father.