I don’t have time to write anything even informal about most books I read (e.g. just finished Out of Oz by Gregory Maguire and The magician king by Lev Grossman but don’t have much original to say about those two excellent books). I finished Bonobo handshake : a memoir of love and adventure in the Congo by Vanessa Woods last fall and enjoyed it, but it also reminded me to get around to Sex at dawn : the prehistoric origins of modern sexuality by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, which had been on my list for some time. While both were worth the time, the second really hits my reading interest profile, so I’ll take the time to explain why.
Chimps and bonobos are our two closest relatives, about equally distant from humans on the primate branch. Chimps have long been the ruler against which anthropologist and social scientists have measured humans, though they do so in very un-natural circumstances. Zoos with their limited space and direct competition for food and other resources are not like the wild. In the same way, prisons are not good models for how humans behave in less confined and controlled situations. Even when studied in the wild, a kind of uncertainty principle is in effect. Researchers commonly use food to get the chimps to come and stay where they can be studied, but this deforms natural behavior. When such studies claim to tell us something about our ancient backgrounds as “killer apes”, they must be taken with a canister of salt.
Bonobos are kind of a mirror image of chimps. Chimpanzees mate only during fertile periods, like most mammals or gorillas. Bonobos mate whenever they feel like it, as do humans. (Warning – bonobos feel like it a lot). Chimpanzee males are much bigger than females as is true of gorillas and other animals which keep harems, while bonobo males are only slightly larger than females, again like humans. Chimpanzees are poster boys for nature as the war of all against all, a kind of Survivor reality show. Bonobos are like a hippie commune, with lots of cooperation, sex and no one being quite such who the daddy is.
Bonobo handshake is a personal narrative, covering Woods’ time as a volunteer working with bonobos in a sanctuary. This approach brings them up close and personal, with no doubt that they are closely related to humans. It also helps explain why they are so endangered, as are all primates except humans. As you might have guessed by this point, a Bonobo handshake involves sex and they do it to defuse situations, when they share food and just about every time they get together at all.
Sex at dawn is more of a hard science book, looking at what can be known about ancient humans and their sexuality, starting by our nearest cousins as a guide. Referencing dozens of studies of chimpanzees, bonobos, other primates and monkeys, the authors draw some conclusions and raise many more questions about where humans fit in all this. Are we more like chimpanzees or bonobos?
They next turn to pre-agricultural societies – the hunter-gatherers and foragers. Humans would have been foragers until the invention of agriculture, so most of our evolution was guided by those sets of rules and pressures. As it turns out, those societies, most of which are in the process of being wiped out, are more matriarchal, cooperative and much like bonobo society. The authors pinpoint the beginning of agriculture as a major change for human evolution. Humans get shorter, smaller and adults have a shorter life expectancy, though more children are born and survive, leading to population growth. At this point, Malthus becomes relevant.
The sections that deal with human anatomy and the detailed mechanics of sexual function in primates were the biggest news to me. Humans definitely seem to have evolved to live in multi-partner settings, both males and females. Evolution doesn’t retain things, especially sexual things, at random. The entire process appears to be fine tuned to handle lots of activity and many partners.
The bad news is that the last 10,000 years have turned this around, with an emphasis on property, collecting and limiting access to food and wealth, and a general downgrading of status for women. Since the invention of agriculture, we have lived in a male dominated society, where females are hoarded and considered to have small / no sex drive. The reality of the situation can be judged from the laws and cultural controls in place. If women really were inferior or subservient or not interested in sex, society wouldn’t need to work so hard to convince them of that. If men were naturally monogamous, then we wouldn’t have so make laws and constraints to make them so. That our culture has to work so hard to make it even remotely so is a sign of just how strong the countervailing forces are.
This has some implications for politics and culture in general. If humans evolved to be naturally cooperative and to put at a competitive disadvantage those who refused to share, that would be a long way from the libertarian view of the world. But where does this leave us? Science has little to tell us about how we should culturally evolve, but the authors make a stab at it. They suggest we acknowledge the reality of our nature and live culturally like foragers, a solution I don’t find realistic. Humans can’t go back to foraging unless we are willing to depopulate the Earth, so it would be just as realistic to acknowledge that evolution has poorly prepared for the world we live in and find ways to deal with that.
Of the two books, Sex at dawn hits my reading profile more directly. I want a book that teaches me something new, that reveals science I was unaware of and that provides history and context to support its narrative. After all, without context, history and science are really dry and dusty, but with them it provides a framework on which to hang further data.