Sex at Dawn

As Beckerman and Valentine explain, “It is difficult to come to any conclusion except that partible paternity is an ancient folk belief capable of supporting effective families, families that provide satisfactory paternal care of children and manage the successful rearing of children to adulthood.”³

When an anthropologist working in Paraguay asked his Ache subjects to identify their fathers, he was presented with a mathematical puzzle that could be solved only with a vocabulary lesson. The 321 Ache claimed to have over six hundred fathers. Who’s your daddies?

It turns out the Ache distinguish four different kinds of fathers. According to the anthropologist Kim Hill, the four types of fathers are:

• Miare: the father who put it in;

• Peroare: the fathers who mixed it;

• Momboare: those who spilled it out; and

• Bykuare: the fathers who provided the child’s essence.⁴

Rather than being shunned as “bastards” or “sons of bitches,” children of multiple fathers benefit from having more than one man who takes a special interest in them. Anthropologists have calculated that their chances of surviving childhood are often significantly better than those of children in the same societies with just one recognized father.⁵

Far from being enraged at having his genetic legacy called into question, a man in these societies is likely to feel gratitude to other men for pitching in to help create and then care for a stronger baby. Far from being blinded by jealousy as the standard narrative predicts, men in these societies find themselves bound to one another by shared paternity for the children they’ve fathered together. As Beckerman explains, in the worst-case scenario, this system may provide extra security for the child: “You know that if you die, there’s some other man who has a residual obligation to care for at least one of your children. So looking the other way or even giving your blessing when your wife takes a lover is the only insurance you can buy.”⁶

Lest any readers feel tempted to file this sort of behavior under B.A.D. (Bizarre And Distant), similar examples can be found quite close to home.

The Joy of S.E.Ex.

Understanding is a lot like sex; it’s got a practical purpose, but that’s not why people do it normally.

FRANK OPPENHEIMER

Desmond Morris spent months observing a British pro soccer team in the late 1970s and early 1980s, later publishing his thoughts in a book called The Soccer Tribe. As his title suggests, Morris found the behavior of the teammates to be strikingly similar to what he’d encountered among tribal groups in previous research. He noted two behaviors particularly salient in both contexts: group leveling and nonpossessiveness.

“The first thing you notice when footballers talk among themselves,” Morris wrote, “is the speed of their wit. Their humour is often cruel and is used to deflate any team-mate who shows the slightest signs of egotism.” But echoes of prehistoric egalitarianism reverberate beyond ego deflation in the locker room, extending to sexuality as well. “If one of them scores (sexually), he is not possessive, but is only too happy to see his team-mates succeed with the same girl.” While this may strike some as unfeeling, Morris assured his readers that this lack of jealousy was “simply a measure of the extent to which selfishness is suppressed between team-mates, both on the field and off it.”⁷

For professional athletes, musicians, and their most enthusiastic female fans, as well as both male and female members of many foraging societies, overlapping, intersecting sexual relationships strengthen group cohesion and can offer a measure of security in an uncertain world. Sometimes, perhaps most of the time, human sex isn’t just about pleasure or reproduction. A casual approach to sexual relationships in a community of adults can have important social functions, extending far beyond mere physical gratification.

Let’s try putting this liquid libido into dry, academic terms: we hypothesize that Socio-Erotic Exchanges (S.E.Ex. for short) strengthen the bonds among individuals in small-scale nomadic societies (and, apparently, other highly interdependent groups), forming a crucial, durable web of affection, affiliation, and mutual obligation.