Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality [Hardcover]

Christopher Ryan (Author), Cacilda Jethá (Author)

Book Description

Release date: June 29, 2010

Since Darwin's day, we've been told that sexual monogamy comes naturally to our species. Mainstream science--as well as religious and cultural institutions--has maintained that men and women evolved in families in which a man's possessions and protection were exchanged for a woman's fertility and fidelity. But this narrative is collapsing. Fewer and fewer couples are getting married, and divorce rates keep climbing as adultery and flagging libido drag down even seemingly solid marriages.
How can reality be reconciled with the accepted narrative? It can't be, according to renegade thinkers Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá. While debunking almost everything we "know" about sex, they offer a bold alternative explanation in this provocative and brilliant book.
Ryan and Jethá's central contention is that human beings evolved in egalitarian groups that shared food, child care, and, often, sexual partners. Weaving together convergent, frequently overlooked evidence from anthropology, archaeology, primatology, anatomy, and psychosexuality, the authors show how far from human nature monogamy really is. Human beings everywhere and in every era have confronted the same familiar, intimate situations in surprisingly different ways. The authors expose the ancient roots of human sexuality while pointing toward a more optimistic future illuminated by our innate capacities for love, cooperation, and generosity.
With intelligence, humor, and wonder, Ryan and Jethá show how our promiscuous past haunts our struggles over monogamy, sexual orientation, and family dynamics. They explore why long-term fidelity can be so difficult for so many; why sexual passion tends to fade even as love deepens; why many middle-aged men risk everything for transient affairs with younger women; why homosexuality persists in the face of standard evolutionary logic; and what the human body reveals about the prehistoric origins of modern sexuality.
In the tradition of the best historical and scientific writing, Sex at Dawn unapologetically upends unwarranted assumptions and unfounded conclusions while offering a revolutionary understanding of why we live and love as we do.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Sex At Dawn is the single most important book about human sexuality since Alfred Kinsey unleashed Sexual Behavior in the Human Male on the American public in 1948.” (Dan Savage )

“Funny, witty, and light ... Sex at Dawn is a scandal in the best sense, one that will have you reading the best parts aloud and reassessing your ideas about humanity’s basic urges well after the book is done.” (Newsweek )

“Sex At Dawn challenges conventional wisdom about sex in a big way... This is a provocative, entertaining, and pioneering book. I learned a lot from it and recommend it highly.” (Andrew Weil, M.D., author of Healthy Aging )

“Sex At Dawn is a provocative and engaging synthesis... that has the added benefit of being a joy to read.... A book sure to generate discussion, and one likely to produce more than a few difficult conversations with family marriage counselors.” (Eric Michael Johnson, Seed Magazine )

“You clearly have an exciting book on your hands, whether people agree with it or not: these are issues that will need debating over and over before we will arrive at a resolution.” (Frans de Waal, author of The Age of Empathy )

“A wonderfully provocative and well-written book which completely re-evaluates human sexual behaviour and gets to the root of many of our social and psychological ills.” (Steve Taylor, author of The Fall and Waking From Sleep )

“One of the most original books I’ve read in years, Sex at Dawn manages to be both enormously erudite and wildly entertaining—even, frequently, hilarious. . . . A must-read for anyone interested in where our sexual impulses come from.” (Tony Perrottet, author of Napoleon's Privates )

“This paradigm-shifting book is a thoroughly original discussion of the origins and nature of human sexuality... These authors have a gift for making complex material reader-friendly, filling each chapter with humor and passion as well as dozens of revolutionary insights.” (Stanley Krippner, Ph.D. )

“Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha have written the essential corrective to the evolutionary psychology literature...” (Stanton Peele, Ph.D. )

From the Back Cover

Since Darwin's day, we've been told that sexual monogamy comes naturally to our species. Mainstream science—as well as religious and cultural institutions—has maintained that men and women evolved in families in which a man's possessions and protection were exchanged for a woman's fertility and fidelity. But this narrative is collapsing. Fewer and fewer couples are getting married, and divorce rates keep climbing as adultery and flagging libido drag down even seemingly solid marriages.

How can reality be reconciled with the accepted narrative? It can't be, according to renegade thinkers Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethå. While debunking almost everything we "know" about sex, they offer a bold alternative explanation in this provocative and brilliant book.

Ryan and Jethå's central contention is that human beings evolved in egalitarian groups that shared food, child care, and, often, sexual partners. Weaving together convergent, frequently overlooked evidence from anthropology, archaeology, primatology, anatomy, and psychosexuality, the authors show how far from human nature monogamy really is. Human beings everywhere and in every era have confronted the same familiar, intimate situations in surprisingly different ways. The authors expose the ancient roots of human sexuality while pointing toward a more optimistic future illuminated by our innate capacities for love, cooperation, and generosity.

With intelligence, humor, and wonder, Ryan and Jethå show how our promiscuous past haunts our struggles over monogamy, sexual orientation, and family dynamics. They explore why long-term fidelity can be so difficult for so many; why sexual passion tends to fade even as love deepens; why many middle-aged men risk everything for transient affairs with younger women; why homosexuality persists in the face of standard evolutionary logic; and what the human body reveals about the prehistoric origins of modern sexuality.

In the tradition of the best historical and scientific writing, Sex at Dawn unapologetically upends unwarranted assumptions and unfounded conclusions while offering a revolutionary understanding of why we live and love as we do.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1 edition (June 29, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061707805
• ISBN-13: 978-0061707803
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (312 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #96,912 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Christopher Ryan, Ph.D.
Christopher received a BA in English and American literature from Hobart College in 1984 and an MA and Ph.D. in research psychology at Saybrook University twenty years later. He spent the intervening decades traveling around the world, living in unexpected places working at very odd jobs (e.g., gutting salmon in Alaska, teaching English to prostitutes in Bangkok and self-defense to land-reform activists in Mexico, managing commercial real-estate in New York's Diamond District, helping Spanish physicians publish their research). Somewhere along the way, he decided to pursue doctoral studies in psychology. Drawing upon his multi-cultural experience, Christopher's research focused on trying to distinguish the universally human from the cultural. His doctoral dissertation analyzes the prehistoric roots of human sexuality, and was guided by the world-renowned psychologist, Stanley Krippner.

Based in Barcelona since the mid 1990s, Christopher has lectured at the University of Barcelona Medical School and worked as a consultant at various local hospitals. He's given presentations around the world (in both English and Spanish), and published peer commentaries, scientific and popular articles as well as book chapters. His work can be found in publications such as Behavioral and Brain Sciences (Cambridge University Press), SAGA: Best New Writing on Mythology (White Cloud Press), and a text book used in medical schools and teaching hospitals throughout Spain and Latin America.

Check out Christopher's blog at http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/sex-dawn

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Cacilda Jethá, M.D.
Cacilda Jethá has an Indian face, a European education, and an African soul. She was born in Mozambique to a family that had immigrated two generations earlier from Goa, India. As a child, she fled civil war to Portugal, where she received most of her education and medical training before returning to Mozambique in the late 1980s. A young physician determined to help heal her country, Cacilda spent seven years as the only physician serving some 50,000 people in a vast rural district in the north of the country. While there, Cacilda also conducted research (funded by the World Health Organization) on the sexual behavior of rural Mozambicans in order to help design more effective AIDS prevention efforts.

After almost a decade in Mozambique, Cacilda returned to Portugal, where she completed her medical residency training in both psychiatry (at the prestigious Hospital de Julio de Matos in Lisbon) and occupational medicine.

She and Christopher Ryan currently reside together in Barcelona, Spain, where she is a practicing psychiatrist at Hospital San Joan de Déu and in private practice. She speaks Portuguese, French, Spanish, Catalán, English, and some rusty Swahili.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

375 of 415 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Sexy Beasts July 4, 2010

By Eric Johnson

Format:Hardcover

This review originally appeared in Seed Magazine: [...]

When we think of the first swinger parties most of us imagine 1970s counter-culture, we don't picture Top Gun fighter pilots in World War II. Yet, according to researchers Joan and Dwight Dixon, it was on military bases that "partner swapping" first originated in the United States. As the group with the highest casualty rate during the war, these elite pilots and their wives "shared each other as a kind of tribal bonding ritual" and had an unspoken agreement to care for one another if a woman's husband didn't make it back home. Like the sexy apes known as bonobos, this kind of open sexuality served a social function that provided a way to relieve stress and form long-lasting bonds.

For the husband and wife team Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá in their new book Sex At Dawn, this example is one of many that suggests the human species did not evolve in monogamous, nuclear families but rather in small, intimate groups where "most mature individuals would have had several ongoing sexual relationships at any given time." We are the descendants of these multimale-multifemale mating groups and, even though we've constructed a radically different society from our hunter-gatherer forebears, the behavioral and psychological traits our species evolved in the distant past still manifest themselves today. Ryan, a psychologist, and Jethá, a psychiatrist, argue that understanding human sexual evolution this way helps to explain our species' unique creativity inside (as well as outside) the marriage bed. It may also shed light on why fidelity has been such a persistent problem for both men and women throughout recorded history....

For Ryan and Jethá there is little doubt that human beings are an exceedingly sexual species. As an example they detail how in 1902 the first home-use vibrator was patented and approved for domestic use in the United States. Fifteen years later there were more vibrators than toasters in American homes (today this number could be as high as fifty million nationwide). In 2006, according to U.S. Pornography Industry Revenue Statistics, people around the world--the majority of whom were probably men--spent an estimated $97 billion on pornographic material ($13.3 billion in the U.S. alone), a figure that exceeded the annual revenue of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Apple, and Netflix combined. To judge human sexuality based on consumption patterns, as Stephen Colbert would say, "the market has spoken." When this is combined with estimates that people engage in hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of copulations per child born (more than any primate, including chimpanzees and bonobos) there's little denying that the human animal is one sexy beast.

But why should a species often described as monogamous be so hypersexual? Monogamous animals by definition don't have to compete for reproduction and, as a result, are generally characterized by a low level of sexual activity. But according to Ryan and Jethá humans top a very short list of species that engage in sex for pleasure. "No animal spends more of its allotted time on Earth fussing over sex than Homo sapiens," they write. In fact, the animal world is filled with species who confine their sexual behavior to just a few periods each year, the only times when conception is possible. Among apes the only monogamous species are the gibbons whose infrequent, reproduction-only copulations make them much better adherents of the Vatican's guidelines than we are. In this way, Ryan and Jethá argue, repressing our sexuality should not be confused with reining in an "animal" nature; rather, it is denying one of the most unique aspects of what it means to be human.

The suggestion that humans did not evolve as a monogamous species is not as radical an idea as it may sound. In The Descent of Man Charles Darwin wrote, "Those who have most closely studied the subject [particularly the anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan] believe that communal marriage was the original and universal form throughout the world." Yet ever since the nineteenth century anthropologists have struggled over how to identify the mating system of human beings. In 1967 George P. Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas reported that only 14.5% of modern preindustrial societies could be classified as monogamous. Yet, in the West, researchers commonly refer to humans as "serially monogamous," based on the pattern of repeated monogamous marriages throughout men and women's lifetimes. But with over half of divorces occurring because of infidelity and one in 25 dads unknowingly raising children that they didn't father, this is not a picture that fits comfortably with monogamy of any sort, serial or otherwise.

However, by looking at modern indigenous societies and comparing the findings of anthropologists with the latest results in behavioral psychology and biology, Ryan and Jethá piece together a remarkably coherent pattern from an otherwise fractured understanding of human sexuality. From societies that believe that multiple men are necessary for a successful pregnancy (what researchers refer to as "partible paternity") to those where not having an extra-marital tryst will cause a man to be labeled "stingy of one's genitals" by his female suitors, the authors conclude that marriage may be an established social arrangement among many hunter-gatherers but it's one in which sexuality is decidedly fluid. A range of physiological evidence from Western populations is further offered to support this position, from the year-round libido in both sexes, to the unusually large size of men's genitalia compared to other apes, to the shifting sexual strategy during various stages in women's reproductive cycle (and lest we forget multiple female orgasms?). All suggest that our species is adapted for several concurrent sexual partners.

This is, of course, not a new idea in human evolutionary research. Primatologist Sarah Hrdy advocated a promiscuous mating system for humans in The Woman That Never Evolved (1999) while psychologist David Barash and psychiatrist Judith Lipton detailed their own argument in The Myth of Monogamy (2001). In Sex At Dawn Ryan and Jethá cover some similar ground as these previous authors but provide a great deal of additional material that was unavailable a decade ago. They also emphasize the ways in which monogamy has been used as a means of controlling women in patriarchal societies and make a number of insightful connections between the invention of agriculture 12,000 years ago and how sedentary societies influence the structure of human mating. However, with a relaxed writing style and numerous examples from modern popular culture, their discussion of these topics remains readily accessible even to those who may be encountering such ideas for the first time.

Sex At Dawn is a provocative and engaging synthesis of the latest research on human sexual evolution that has the added benefit of being a joy to read. While the authors' conclusion that healthy relationships can be both committed and open may come as a shock to some readers, others will likely find it refreshingly honest. As their example of WWII fighter pilots emphasizes, human sexuality has numerous social as well as emotional functions and there has never been only a single path chosen by the human species. In offering a fresh look at a fascinating and controversial topic Sex At Dawn is a book sure to generate discussion, and one likely to produce more than a few difficult conversations with family marriage counselors.

Eric Michael Johnson received his masters degree in primate behavior and is now pursuing his PhD in the history of science. He writes on issues of science, politics, and history at The Primate Diaries. Read more ›

382 of 423 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Amusing but flawed. March 26, 2011

By Metepeira

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This is an amusing and light read, salted with sarcastic quips and, of course, covering a salacious topic. It endeavors to refute the "common wisdom" of just about every field (history, biology, anthropology, etc.) on the subject of human mating systems, and while it appears to succeed here and there, it is largely done by attacking an exaggerated straw man, or by refuting overstatements made in popular science books or in newspaper articles. The lion's share of sources includes the likes of Matt Ridley, Desmond Morris, E. O. Wilson, and Richard Dawkins -- authors who (1) are rarely actively pursuing primary scientific research in what they write about, and (2) are writing for the general public, with, naturally, a tendency to exaggerate and generalize -- so these popular texts are easy targets. At times, Ryan and Jethá demonstrate an imperfect understanding of evolution (e.g. no evolutionary biologist needs to ask the rhetorical question at the end of the middle paragraph on p. 53); at other times they allow inconsistencies to slip by unaddressed. For example, if the true state of hunter-gatherer humans is to share everything, show no jealousy, and for women not to barter with sex, how is it that the bride and groom at a Canela marriage must be instructed not to be jealous (p. 138), or that a Canela bride-to-be participates in orgies in exchange for meat (p. 120)? Overall, it's an entertaining, quick read, but not without flaws in some of its claims and conclusions.

The biggest shortcoming of this book is its epistemological framework: it seeks to uncover our true "human nature," but "human nature" itself is a flawed concept, and early sociobiologists were long-ago admonished for using this term. Biologists know that phenotype (i.e.... what gets expressed) is a function of genotype (the genes), the environment (the sum of all external influences, food, temperature, etc), and ontogeny (our development). In its simplest form, any given genotype has a phenotype that responds in complex and varied ways relative to the environment -- this is known as a "norm of reaction" ([...]). When barley is grown a low altitude it behaves very differently form when it's grown a high altitude -- so it makes little sense to ask "what is the true nature of barley" because there is no such thing. Seeking the "true nature" of a species is a holdover from ancient notions of Greek essentialism, which we now know is fundamentally wrong. It is just as "natural" for an all-sharing-commune to also share sex freely, or for a married couple (where the husband invests considerable paternal care) to desire sexual exclusivity (even if this is not always achieved), or for new brides to willingly join in the polygynous family of a wealthy and powerful man -- i.e., depending on the environment, we should expect humans to behave quite differently, and each case is just as "natural" as any other. There is no single "human nature" to be discovered -- at best, we can say that there is a norm-of-reaction to be discovered.

Humans have clearly evolved complex and distinct behaviors capable of responding differently in each distinct environment. That by itself is remarkable, and although Ryan and Jethá are convincing when then claim that bonobo-like behaviors were common in human pre-history, they fail to show that human pre-history did not also include quasi-monogamy (as is now dominant), serial-monogamy, and various degrees of polygyny. Given the wide range of habitats that humans lived in (tundra, boreal forest, rain forest, savannah, estuaries, island archipelagoes, etc) it certainly should not surprise us that humans have adapted to a multitude of different circumstances. Ryan and Jethá argue that a history of intense sperm competition is written on our bodies -- and that may well be true, but it's not incompatible with quasi-monogamy, serial-monogamy, or polygyny. Who can say how many children, born to the king's concubines, were actually fathered by the game-keeper? And if, as some studies claim, some 10% to 20% of kids are not actually the children of the fathers who think they are his children, that by itself is more than enough selection pressure to evolve larger testicles. Finally, the two-fold size difference in European and Asian testicles would seem to imply that some radically different mating systems were present in the pre-agricultural years during the separation of these two populations.

Finally, Ryan and Jethá are guilty of the naturalistic fallacy -- believing that what is "natural" is also good. They may deplore the frustrated husbands who seek out porn to quiet their bonobo impulses, but how about the frustrated bullies who suffer in prison for merely exercising their evolution-given muscles to resolve a dispute? Surely many a dispute in pre-history was resolved by men using brute force to the reproductive advantage of the winner, which is why men are more muscular than women. Does that make it unfair for us to outlaw crime or domestic abuse? Why should promiscuity be any more "natural" than bulling?

Nonetheless, the general point that humans need to learn to relax about social morays is a good one. We are certainly capable of far greater latitude in our mating behaviors than what our priests, politicians, and grandmothers would have us believe. The advent of reliable contraception and an increasing number of self-sufficient women in the workplace ought to allow society to attenuate urges of sexual jealousy and liberalize our relationships -- but without having to give up our privacy, possessions, and suburban homes in favor of communes. Read more ›

66 of 71 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Much that is True, but Remember: Is does not Imply Ought September 21, 2011

By Herbert Gintis

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Sex at Dawn is a popular exposition of the simple and compelling thesis that a casual sexuality was the norm for our hunter-gatherer forbears, and that faithful pair-bonding in the form of monogamous marriage is alien to our sexual natures as human beings. The authors hold that the shift to the norm of faithful pair bonding arose only upon the advent of settled agriculture some 10,000 years ago. Moreover, they argue, "promiscuous impulses remain our biological baseline, our reference point" (p. 46), and society would be better off if we acknowledged the ubiquity of these impulses and offered them social approbation.

Ryan and Jethá justify their position mostly by deploying anecdotal and unsystematic anthropological evidence, and the authors have no anthropological credentials. Their style of argumentation is highly informed and informative for novices (I am not an anthropologist, but I have read widely in the professional anthropological literature), but it is completely unsystematic, and hence untrustworthy. I call it "Google research" because the data appears to flow from Googling one or two terms, such as "sex anthropology" and "human sex primate sex" and then cherry-picking the millions of citations.

Despite their lack of systematic research, the authors' conclusions from the anthropological literature are usually not far from the truth. The notion that we can infer from our genetic predispositions how we should behave, however, is simply illogical. Humans form strong pair bonds and humans, like members of almost every other species that forms strong pair bonds (including, for instance, almost all nesting birds) often cheat on their partners. But this fact does not imply that this behavior should be morally sanctioned or social encouraged.... The most we can legitimately conclude from the evidence is that it is probably in the interest of a healthy and happy populace that lapses in fidelity be treated leniently.

Ryan and Jethá site several instances of societies which follow their ideal of relaxed sexuality, but they go too far in claiming that pair bonding is an effect of modern society in general and settled agriculture in particular. Pair bonding appears to be quite universal throughout human societies, whether in the form of monogamy, polyandry, or polygamy. By contrast, there is no pair-bonding primate species in Africa and only such species in Asia. It thus is plausible that pair bonding is a strong part of our genetic predisposition as a species, but that it arose rather late in our evolution as a species. This is not Ryan and Jethá's story, but it is fairly close, and I think much more defensible.

Amusingly, while Ryan and Jethá spout facts that are well known in the literature, they set themselves up as brave iconoclasts, overturning what they call the "standard narrative of human sexual evolution" (p. 7), which with its emphasis on the centrality of faithful pair-bonding. The standard story, they claim "hides the truth of human sexuality behind a fig leaf of anachronistic Victorian discretion repackaged as science" (p. 35). The fact is that there is no standard narrative that I know of in the contemporary scientific literature. Rather, human sexuality is clearly highly plastic, and we can learn little from other species because sexuality is even more plastic across primate species. The authors' mocking of anthropological opinion is particularly disingenuous because most of their argumentation is based on the work of professional anthropologists.

Sexual behaviors that we share with all or most primate species are likely to represent genetic predispositions. There is no question but that each primate species has a genetically specified range of sexual behaviors. We know this because this range of behaviors does not vary much across even widely separated groups. However, primate sexuality is highly variable across species. Therefore we cannot say that we are more like the polymorphically sexual Bonobos and the promiscuous chimpanzees than other more sexually discriminate primate species. However, true monogamy is very rare in both primates and sexually mating species in general, and the physiology of human male genitals suggests much male sperm competition, which strongly supports the thesis that strong pair bonds were regularly accompanied by a significant level of extra-pair copulations.

Some of the points the authors raise involve interesting questions that I cannot resolve. They assert that early human males were not concerned with parentage, which would make us unlike any other species I can think of. Of course, this position is necessary for Ryan and Jethá because it alone is compatible with the relaxed and tolerant attitude towards extra pair copulations that they consider the human norm. I rather suspect that humans are more like other pair-bonding species, in which males attempt to be promiscuous but are deterred by their mates, and females are carefully policed to reduce their opportunities for extra-pair mating. Despite the efforts of all parties in pair-bonded species, lots of extra-pair mating takes place, but sexuality is hardly tolerant and relaxed. However, there are several so-called "partible paternity" societies in which fathering is widely shared by males, who are tolerant of their mate's extra-pair sexuality. While this fatherly behavior must be taught to young men and is highly socially controlled the existence of these societies clearly shows that humans are capable of embracing a wide range of socio-sexual norms, however frequently they are honored in the breach.

Ryan and Jethá believe that it is an important part of their argument that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were fundamentally peaceful, war playing little role in everyday life and social organization. "hierarchical, aggressive, and territorial behavior is of recent origin for our species. It is...an adaptation to the social world that arose with agriculture." (p. 76). The reason, they argue, is that without private property, there was nothing to fight over. I believe this is just dead wrong. The archeological evidence points to a high level of warfare in hunter-gather societies. The goals of violent inter-group aggression were attaining valued, currently highly productive territory (e.g., a mountain pass) and obtaining women for mating, gathering, and child-rearing (see my book with Samuel Bowles, A Cooperative Species, Princeton 2011). The authors' evidence is scattered and mostly anecdotal, whereas our analysis is quite systematic, drawing on a large body of statistical evidence.

Ryan and Jethá are rather sloppy writers but they are good story-tellers, so this book is definitely worth reading. Read more ›