Sex at Dawn

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 from a gorilla-like mating system where an alpha male fought to win and maintain a harem of females to one in which most males had sexual access to females. Few, if any experts dispute the fossil evidence for this shift.

But we part company from those who support the standard narrative when we look at what this shift signifies. The standard narrative holds that this is when long-term pair bonding began in our species: if each male could have only one female mate at a time, most males would end up with a girl to call their own. Indeed, where there is debate about the nature of innate human sexuality, the only two acceptable options appear to be that humans evolved to be either monogamous (M-F) or polygynous (M-FFF+)—with the conclusion normally being that women generally prefer the former configuration while most men would opt for the latter.

But what about multiple mating, where most males and females have more than one concurrent sexual relationship? Why—apart from moral disgust—is prehistoric promiscuity not even considered, when nearly every relevant source of evidence points in that direction?

After all, we know that the foraging societies in which human beings evolved were small-scale, highly egalitarian groups who shared almost everything. There is a remarkable consistency to how immediate return foragers live—wherever

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they are. The !Kung San of Botswana have a great deal in common with Aboriginal people living in outback Australia and tribes in remote pockets of the Amazon rainforest. Anthropologists have demonstrated time and again that immediate-return hunter-gatherer societies are nearly universal in their fierce egalitarianism. Sharing is not just encouraged; it’s mandatory. Hoarding or hiding food, for example, is considered deeply shameful, almost unforgivable behavior in these societies.

Foragers divide and distribute meat equitably, breastfeed one another’s babies, have little or no privacy from one another, and depend upon each other for survival. As much as our social world revolves around notions of private property and individual responsibility, theirs spins in the opposite direction, toward group welfare, group identity, profound interrelation, and mutual dependence.

Though this may sound like naive New Age idealism, whining over the lost Age of Aquarius, or a celebration of

prehistoric communism, not one of these features of pre-agricultural societies is disputed by serious scholars. The overwhelming consensus is that egalitarian social organization is the de-facto system for foraging societies in all environments. In fact, no other system could work for foraging societies. Compulsory sharing is simply the best way to distribute risk to everyone’s benefit: participation

mandatory. Pragmatic? Yes. Noble? Hardly.

We believe this sharing behavior extended to sex as well. A great deal of research from primatology, anthropology, anatomy, and psychology points to the same fundamental conclusion: human beings and our hominid ancestors have spent almost all of the past few million years or so in small, intimate bands in which most adults had several sexual relationships at any given time. This approach to sexuality probably persisted until the rise of agriculture and private property no more than ten thousand years ago. In addition to voluminous scientific evidence, many explorers, missionaries, and anthropologists support this view, having penned accounts rich with tales of orgiastic rituals, unflinching mate sharing, and an open sexuality unencumbered by guilt or shame.