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Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality

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This review originally appeared in Seed Magazine: http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/sexy_beasts/

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.

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.

This was a terrific read -- a sweeping (and well written, and funny) look at recent anthropological, zoological, and biological research all leading to a mind-bender of a conclusion: our prehistoric ancestors were wall-to-wall horndogs, men and women alike, with "multi-male/multi-female" sexual relations the likely norm for 95 percent of anatomically modern humans' existence. The nuclear family centered on a pair-bonded husband and wife, and the monogamy that comes with it, probably only date to the last 8,000-10,000 years, since the advent of agriculture.

Ryan and Jethá dismantle the more common Men-are-from-Mars, Women-are-from-Venus view -- i.e. men have a biological imperative to impregnate as many women as possible while keeping their wives monogamous so they (the men) support only their own genetic offspring, while women want to bond with wealthy, high-status males for their resources, but also to sleep around with the bad boys for their genes. R&J make a strong case that this sort of arrangement could only make sense in post-agricultural societies where concepts of property and paternal lineage become important, but that it would be meaningless in the hunter-gatherer groups that were the only form of human society for almost 200,000 years. When they get into the section on "sperm competition," things get reaaaally trippy.

The book kind of leaves you hanging as far as what this information means for modern humans, but that's probably a virtue. We have after all changed quite a bit from prehistoric times, and it's not as though our evolutionary history has to dictate our moral or social behavior today. Nowhere do the authors say everybody should walk out of their marriages and form hippie communes or anything like that. Instead, they say their goal is to start a conversation -- about sex, and how our prehistoric urges may help explain why so many people have trouble staying with one partner over their whole lives. It's a conversation-starter, all right.

I was tempted to take one star away because I felt throughout like they weren't presenting opposing views in the best light, but hey, it's a polemic. And it's a fun one, too. So let the arguments begin.

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.

I'm a half hour home from church and working my laptop at this review, having finished this book at sunup. OK, dawn. It's pretty clear that with a ring or two of a church bell still in my ear and some altar incense yet wafting about my beard that I'm not supposed to like this book. But I do. A lot.

And Sex At Dawn is hard not to like mostly because it's about how we got here, and, well, about sex. But also it's just hard to argue with honest research, a good science and truthy talk about The Bonk and Love and all that helps you know yourself better. And because I'm one who needs to hear the Ryan/Jetha message: Hey you. lighten up about sex already. And while you're at it, give yourself a break.

Refreshing to hear that these married academician authors believe it's not just the church that has goofed us up and complicated our lives in the bedroom. Junk science needs to take a hit, too; alongside junk religion.

Reviewer context here: I went to school to be a preacher, morphing through decades from low church Evangelical to High Church married Orthodox clergyman priest and now layman. I've been rattling around churches for 50 years, the last 30 as Eastern Orthodox. So why do I like a book that pretty much says being a one woman man is a difficult exception, not a born to be norm? The honesty, writing style, good research and passion will attract you to this book, even if his conclusions are scary. Yet I'm beginning to agree that we might want to cut our polyamory neighbor a little slack.

As science writers these two have not only taken on the giants of Freud and Darwin and Patriarchy but traditional one marriage for life family structure that remains sacrosanct yet so rare and hard to do. People of faith are supposed to be all about traditional family values and mating for life. Well, many of us tried; maybe too hard.

Ryan explains some of the reasons we failed. You have to like that. As I moved through the chapters I found my thoughts and exclamations pretty much in line with fellow reader and sex advice man, the ever edgy Dan Savage: "Oh my God, I'm not crazy!" That's a lot how I felt, too, reading Sex at Dawn. In the light of this book it's hard to believe that Jimmy Carter once thought it necessary to come out in Playboy as an erotic and human person just to get elected.

Psychologist, teacher, self-professed professional writer Ryan did most the work here alongside his MD Psychiatrist co-author wife who speaks six languages, seven if sexuality is a language. These two could be the new academic poster children for hunter-gatherer polyamory and group styled marriages. Ryan notes this group marriage trend seems back for a second run since its debut in the 70s, echoing Tristan Taormino in Opening Up that it was All American WWII flyboys--see my sheepish Amazon Review of Opening Up--that led the way with the group take care of my wife if I'm dead family thing in the US, in keeping Onan in the Old Testament and with our prehistoric forbears on the hunt it up, gather it up African savanna so many years ago. Again, a basic big theme in this book is: Hey, let's try to lighten up some about sex. Ryan: "...one of the central points we wanted to make is that most of us take sex way too seriously. We need to chill out. Like music, sex can be sacred, but it doesn't always have to be. Sometimes we hear God in a Bach toccata, but sometimes we are just dancing and having a good time listening to the Rolling Stones. Nothing sacred about it."

This idea goes down sideways for many of us All Things Are Serious All The Time church folk; that some things out there might fall between the black and white sacred/profane labels. But, to be honest, taking ourselves so seriously about all things getting naked hasn't seemed to help us church folk much in the success department. Church and God people need to get real and hear these authors. Publications such as Christianity Today (a trade rag for Evangelical pastors) have long reminded us that US studies have shown that Evangelicals in this country have sex outside of marriage as much or even a tad more than "unbelievers". God knows, we divorce at the same rate. Or worse.

But the Sex At Dawn authors seem to offer hope for all here; that we are wired in our primate animal selves other than some smiley Tonic Key of Monogamy. We are more Play It Again Sam minor key creatures, likely to stray as not. As much as we'd like it to be otherwise. Yes, we are often loving and having sex while not always resolving to the tonic note. Ryan helped me explain to myself why I feel what I feel so often and to feel good about my eroticism. And about giving myself a break about being divorced and remarried. The authors here are like the yoga teacher who keeps reminding you to give yourself a hug at the end of session: "Be kind to yourself right now. Even in your weaknesses and sore spots and confused spots. Be kind."

I totally nubbed a number two pencil writing notes in the margins of this NYT best seller, finding zinger moments every ten pages or so. Does hubby turn his head when Young Thing passes by? Does the Goodwife smile or scowl? Can they talk about it? This book might actually help save a worn marriage or two as couples who have been together a long time try to understand each other sexually. I found particularly profound the comment of one reader: "I'm a 63 year old widow...I wish I could live my life over with this information." Ouch.

Pretty serious about sex? Read this book. You can keep all the meaning you need. (Heck, maybe add some. He's got 90 pages of notes.) But you'll now have more smirk and lightness to go with the meaning. I'd recommend this work to mid-lifers, to married folk or those long partnered, also for the I've failed once but maybe let's try it again Match Dot Com folk.

The book is a thoughtful stereotype buster that will get us thinking and talking about how we mate and why we love. I found solid science on every page but with a writing style that was surprisingly funny and wonderfully snarky. Anthropology, evolutionary psychology, history, culture--I found useful things...like info on penis size and ape love hookups and why womenfolk still risk calling out for God at the height of Meg Ryan (not related?) deli moment I'll have what she's having bliss.

Indeed, your best ape ancestor self wants this book on your coffee table.

Ryan wants readers to think that he is challenging culturally imposed ideas of 'natural' monogamy in humans and revealing our supposed natural promiscuity. But then he attacks evolutionary psychology that also points out that humans are not naturally monogamous because, he says, they paint this promiscuity as a battle of the sexes when, he says, there is no natural battle between the sexes.

There are so many errors in this book it is difficult to know where to start. Ryan does not understand sexual selection and the significance of differential reproductive success or its reality. There are vast amounts of robust evidence supporting sexual selection but the author does not appear to have understood it. And increasing evidence for sexual conflict over mating. See eg:Sexual Conflict: (Monographs in Behavior and Ecology)

When the author gets to apes he then gets more things wrong. For example, he has mis-read and mis-represents relations between communities of chimpanzees. He confuses the fact that female chimpanzees (like bonobos) leave their natal group to breed in a different group with non-violent relations between the communities. All group-living animals have one or both sexes transferring elsewhere to breed. He twists this to make the totally erroneous point that relations between communities of chimpanzees are therefore not violent/antagonistic. If he had read the literature he would have realized that males stay in their natal group and there are never friendly interactions between males from different communities. Not even in bonobos. That bonobo females may socialize across communities when they meet is because they likely will have been born or spent some time in these other groups or will in the future. The males have not.
Also, the Tai study which showed females mating outside their breeding community has since been put down to error in DNA testing (Vigilant, Hofreiter, Seidel and Boesch, 2001, "Paternity and relatedness in wild chimpanzee communities")

The wider issue of the misrepresentation of bonobo sexual behavior also really needs to be addressed. Chimpanzee and bonobo females have been shown to copulate about the same number of times over time but for chimpanzees it is concentrated in narrower windows while for bonobo it is spread out especailly in the long interbirth interval between fertile periods. And bonobo sexuality per se has been vastly exaggerated - most of it is nothing more than a very brief touching of genitals - we, like chimpanzees, hug rather than stroke the genitals.
There is no evidence to support a bonobo-type sexual bonding in females in human prehistory, weak male bonding, sexual interaction with infants, and the mother-son the strongest bond.

For balance see these Yale lectures on the "Evolution of Sex and Reproductive Strategies" at [...]
# Evolution of Sex and Reproductive Strategies
# Sex and Violence Among the Apes
# From Ape to Human


As for partible paternity, in the Ache, for example, early death of men is common and a child whose father dies is often killed so having more than one father is a practical matter that means there is a provider for a child. More than two different potential fathers is very bad for women and their children and the sex with more than the husband is normally kept very discreet and not openly tolerated. Hardly a system preferable to our own.

The misrepresentation of Mosuo culture is a disgrace.
See the [...] "myths and misperceptions":

"To set the record straight; while promiscuity is certainly not frowned on like it is in most other cultures, most Mosuo women tend to form more long-term pairings, and not change partners frequently. It might be better described as a system of "serial monogamy", wherein women can change partners, but tend to do so relatively rarely; and while with one partner, will rarely invite another. I've personally met many Mosuo who have had a "walking marriage" relationship with the same man for twenty or more years."

Also this from[...] "Description of the Mosuo Minority":

"It has been theorized that the "matriarchal" system of the lower classes may have been enforced (or at least encouraged) by the higher classes as a way of preventing threats to their own power. Since leadership was hereditary, and determined through the male family line, it virtually eliminated potential threats to leadership by having the peasant class trace their lineage through the female line. Therefore, attempts to depict the Mosuo culture as some sort of idealized "matriarchal" culture in which women have all the rights, and where everyone has much more freedom, are often based on lack of knowledge of this history; the truth is that for much of their history, the Mosuo "peasant" class were subjugated and sometimes treated as little better than slaves."

As for copulation calls, I suggest people read the literature for themselves. Chimpanzees are quite complex and signalling to females (avoiding the wrath of females) is important. Bonobos don't really have them. Monogamous species don't need them because they do not live in social groups which means that while there is no need to signal to other males there is also no need to signal to the mate that she prefers him or needs mate-guarding as their isolation makes that obvious.

It is quite probable that should a species live in multi-male/multi-female groups, form pair-bonds and have 'fathers' and mate-guarding that a female will use a copulation call to signal to her mate that he satisfies her, she does not want another, he's the best etc etc. Sperm competition exists when females cannot choose pre-copulation (there's a lot of sexual coercion in primates see eg Sexual Coercion in Primates and Humans: An Evolutionary Perspective on Male Aggression Against Females) ie are not able to reject males. The best form of sperm competition for males is to keep that of other males out of the female in the first place. The best form form females is to only mate with desired male(s) and not have to mate with all-comers.

If a species evolves pair-bonding within a multi-male/multi-female setting there is no reason to presume that a copulation call cannot be used to reassure the mate and to be used to inform others that it is a satisfactory and established pair-bond. I suspect that pair-bonded birds in colonies make their mating obvious to others with calls etc and are not inviting others. Females, if they have the opportunity, do not simply submit to being mated by all and sundry. It just happens that they often have not had the choice.

There are just too many things in this book where the author is either simply blinded by his wishful thinking or has an agenda and is deliberately being economical with the truth.

Ryan says he does not know what should be done with the information he presents. I have one suggestion LOL.
No, we are not monogamous. Neither are we naturally that fond of healthy eating, or restraint in consumerism or the selfish exploitation of our planet. Simply indulging our natural drives is hardly something to be proposed without serious understanding of factors which Ryan has failed to properly understand or present. The book is so unbalanced it is in danger of toppling out of the reader's hands.

What is true about any species is that's its future is its offspring. This book has a hell of a lot to say about the sexual gorging of adults and next to nothing to say about children. Interestingly, evolutionary biology describes the male (usually) as putting his efforts into mating and the female (usually) into parenting.
Ryan is clearly far more a predictable male serving the demands of selfish genes that are fighting for a future via sperm (rather than via eggs) than he could ever consciously realize or, no doubt, accept. But selfish genes are pretty good at fooling the body - and mind - of their temporary home.

"Cheating Rumors Fly About 'The Bachelor''s fiancée": this pops up as I log on to type this. Why do Jake and Vienna spark headlines-- until the next couple, next week? What lures them to stray? After nearly two million years in the making, must we roam as randily as our bonobo cousins? After a hundred centuries of civilization and two millennia of convention, why hasn't monogamy won us over?

Psychologist Christopher Ryan and psychiatrist Cacilda Jethá present their findings about the prehistoric roots of our sexuality. They counter colleagues, clerics, and counselors who demand fidelity as our inborn, "natural" order. Ryan and Jethá assert that we carry within us another urge as we generate generations. "Multiple mating" occupied (at least) 95% of our ancestral experience. This replaces the accepted account in academia for men as "serial monogamists." For millions of years, most of our male and female predecessors "had several sexual relationships at any given time."(12)

Ryan and Jethá argue that we carry these patterns from foragers, who shared mates as they did goods and as they raised their young. It took a village to raise a child because any fertile father or mother in the village might have created that child. Before the fetishizing of paternity that accompanied the rise of agriculture, the surplus of wealth, and the imposition of fidelity to legitimize inheritance, foragers imprinted their wayward ways within us. The authors show why we, like Jake and Vienna, keep losing the battle of the sexes-- as if "cheating" can ever win us the dating and mating game-- against the innate urge to share ourselves intimately.

Part One explains why Darwin lacked sexual insight, and how Victorian inhibitions and his wife's censorship prevented biologists from advancing their own understanding of primate prototypes and parallels for human sexuality. Part Two applies anthropology. The authors dismiss "Flintstonization," our "widespread tendency to project contemporary cultural proclivities into the distant past."(32) Scientists who insist on "innate monogamy" perpetuate a primal myth similar to the Fall of Adam and Eve: "sexual deceit, prohibited knowledge, and guilt."(35)

The "double standard" of a caddish male and jealous female tells but half the story. It cuts out the woman's leading role as the mistress of her own reproductive and romantic fate. Helen Fisher and similarly acclaimed authorities "begin by assuming that long-term sexual monogamy forms the nucleus of the one and only natural, eternal human family structure and reason backwards from there."(75)

Instead, Ryan and Jethá emphasize in our desires and design a "natural structure." They advance a model of "diffuse nurturing," with all men called <em>father</em> and all women as <em>mother</em>. Such societies exist among today's foragers. "Could it be that the atomic isolation of the husband-wife nucleus with an orbiting child is in fact a culturally imposed aberration for our species -- as ill-suited to our evolved tendencies as corsets, chastity belts, and suits of armor?" (109) Might other familiar headlines-- of exhausted parents, broken families, and hostile children-- "be predictable consequences of what is, in truth, a distorted and distorting family structure inappropriate for our species?"

Using cross-cultural comparisons with foragers, Ryan and Jethá disprove any "universal" model of family structure or sexual behavior. "Societies in which women have lots of autonomy and authority tend to be decidedly male-friendly, relaxed, tolerant, and plenty sexy." (133) Men and women can get along, after all, if power and decision-making complement one another.

Why have such models been ignored or opposed? Western academics filter them through biases towards patriarchy; they perceive a matriarchy by distorting a mirror image that no society has been able to match. Ryan and Jethá correct this "confirmation bias" that leads scholars to look for "pair-bonding" as equivalent to lifelong marriage. They remind us how "mate" and "mating" convey, as does "love," (or "sleeping with" or "making love") our own socially constructed phenomena. Inspired by sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, the authors confirm that "human sexuality developed primarily as a bonding mechanism in interdependent bands where paternity certainty was a nonissue." (149) Many women in foraging societies never needed to barter their favors for child care, protection, food, or male fidelity.

Part Three detours into material foundations for such societies, not as we assume so poor, nasty, brutish, or short in lifespan (as Hobbes famously defined the primitive state). Communal belonging likely produced for many of our forebears less stress than we suffer. Conflicts could be avoided or neutralized.

An ancestral, open, relaxed sexuality gave way, with agriculture and wealth accumulation, to more toil, greater disease, and endemic inequality. Men enforced "an exchange of protein and protection for assured paternity." (99) We lost, as we turned civilized, our "innate capacity for love and generosity." Perhaps we bargained it away for refrigeration and dentistry, but we also produced slavery, discrimination, pain imposed upon women, and institutionalized fear of their sexual sway.

Part Four shifts back to our physical design. Why do we sexually endure a "symmetry of dual disappointment"? "It's as if we've been sitting down to dinner together, millennium after millennium, but half of us can't stop wolfing everything down in a few frantic, sloppy minutes, while the other half are still setting the table and lighting candles." (245)

Ingredients for boiling males and simmering females stir deep inside us. The authors teach us how we're engineered for "sperm competition" by penile streamlining, female capacity for multiple orgasm, and "female copulatory vocalization" as a way for letting the neighbors know that while one suitor might be soon spent, others might wait their roll on the savanna. By "sequential sex," the ready and willing woman could receive her multiple mates. Their ejaculated "post-copulatory" contributions maximized at a "cellular level" her fertility. Her body by "choosing among potential fathers" at a mechanical, non-conscious level of paternity -- as researchers now comprehend -- deepens profoundly the meaning of "natural selection."

This book moves briskly, but not all the sections show strong transitions. I sense Ryan's jocular tone balances his partner Jethá's sober data. Their chapters cram dense learning with a lively array of anecdotes and statistics on this endlessly engaging topic. You will learn how Pope John XXI died, whither the preference for "gangbang" over "reverse gangbang" among adult online offerings, why women's sense of smell may be better than men's, hear Mark Twain's rejoinders to morality, and tally Tiger Woods' scorecard. Despite casual organization, the verve and range of Ryan and Jethá's study ambitiously challenges norms of evolutionary psychologists.

The authors wonder if we might be moving into polyamorous relationships again today, as the nuclear family weakens. Instinctive patterns rewarding a non-moralized, positive promiscuity may in time, once and if our morality adapts, replace our rigid monogamy. They suggest sexual openness as an alternative to either male-female monogamy or the other configuration for "long-term pair bonding" as accepted by scientists in "the standard narrative," that of polygyny-- one man, many women.

Most adults lived in small bands, no more than "Dunbar's number" of 150, for nearly all of our evolution. Trusting their clan, people indulged several sexual relationships at once. This cohesive pattern endures in primitive societies studied today. While agriculture and privatization of property led to its suppression among ancient and modern cultures, its model of "open sexuality unencumbered by guilt or shame" offers us a rationale for Jake and Vienna's split. Part Five answers why even when bonded to one partner, couples may seek satisfaction elsewhere.

"Erotic plasticity" uncouples females from the male tendency, after a brief chance for open identity in their formation, to conform to a homosexual or heterosexual norm. Females throughout their lives show more acceptance of "variety and change" in mates of either sex. Males crave "necessary spice" -- if sprinkled by a partner in a different kitchen. Homosexuals (in too-rapid an authorial aside), persist due to a simple desire for bonding, one that can elude reproductive demands.

Couples seek emotional and sexual adventure so affairs go on; non-monogamy need not equate with debauchery. Our dominant culture that refuses to entertain "swingers" as other than as on a '70s sitcom episode suppresses even its therapists. Nowadays, when few would convince a gay man or lesbian to stop being such, our experts keep demanding divorce or "death-do-us part" as the only solutions to the embedded boredom, dissatisfaction, and incompatibility within many a "conventional marriage." The bonds of wedlock can be loosened, Ryan and Jethá whisper, without being broken.

"Novelty itself is the attraction," they insist, for male resistance to "monotomy," monogamy added to matrimony. They tell female readers this is an inexorable result of what another equation sums up in Spanish, where <em>"esposas"</em> means "wife" -- and "handcuffs." Where does this leave those vowed as pair-bonded? Ryan and Jethá hope this book will "provoke the sorts of conversations that make it a bit easier for couples to make their way across this difficult emotional terrain together, with a deeper, less judgmental understanding of the ancient roots of these inconvenient feelings and a more informed, mature approach to dealing with them." (305)

They don't dispense pat predictions about how "a more relaxed and tolerant approach to fidelity" might play out. A glance at polyamorous families and a remonstrance to therapists who force couples into "love it or leave it" hints at how this struggle towards acceptance might happen -- and how vehement the opposition might well be. Ryan and Jethá compare the slow advances granted to gay rights and same-sex marriage. Ryan and Jethá realize the odds against such tolerance attained by advocates of "free love," however ethically conceived by those daringly liberated.

Ryan and Jethá urge us "to seek peace with the truths of human sexuality." (310) They conclude this book with a (too brief) look at alternatives few promote even among the psychological and psychiatric professions. "But this we know: vehement denial, inflexible religious or legislative dictate, and medieval stoning rituals in the desert have all proved powerless against our prehistoric predilections."

They glimpse a future oriented towards love, cooperation, and generosity. Still, I reckon that, even in the most liberated of communities, free minded folks may likely hide their "low-key alternatives to standard, off-the-shelf monogamy." (308) Unlike our lusty ancestors, most mature moderns seem to draw the curtains, dim the lights, and lower the volume of "copulatory vocalizations." At least in my neighborhood.

Against social and cultural odds, Ryan and Jethá propose that we embrace a sexuality that does not diminish the energies wired into our essential selves. It might be too late for Jake and Vienna to kiss and make up. Savvier readers of this book -- rather than that headline -- may, however, reconcile themselves with these perplexing instincts, bred into us by our wandering progenitors over millions of years.

This text can be summarized to the following: Using a reductionist approach, we can separate the societal and biological influences to sexuality. Once we have done this, we can look at parts of sex that may be contradictory to our own nature and try to assess how paleo-lithic man thought of sexuality and how our bodies were engineered by the forces of evolution. With this lens, we can examine modern sexuality and critique what the authors call the "standard narrative". Essentially, the book boils down to a chapter by chapter deconstruction and attempt at disproving said standard narrative.

This book is currently receiving an insane amount of hype; as if they are uncovering some great hidden secrets about human sexuality. I think Dan Savage even came out saying this is the greatest sexuality book since Kinsey. I disagree with these claims, clearly the book is interesting and presents strong arguments against the standard narrative. However, it is not uncovering anything particularly new or presenting any world-changing findings. Rather, the book is a collection of facts and anecdotes, trying to construct a counterexample against the standard narrative. In this function, the authors do a reasonably good job. There are a few times throughout the book, their examples are a bit contradictory; for example, early on, the authors throw out the idea of even considering apes other than chimps or bonobos as a way to prove monogamy. However, later on, they use baboons and other apes to argue specific points. This bothered me a bit.

The book is very well written and reads quite quickly despite its length. The only part that I felt was missing was a critique to their argument, perhaps a chapter responding to their arguments. However, I suppose there will be articles and replies to this book posted online for me to read.

If you are limited on time, I suggest reading all of Part 1 and all of Part 5. You can skim the other parts but keep in mind that the book is presenting arguments to debunk the standard narrative, not necessarily prove that any existing model of sexuality is right or wrong.

Not as scholarly as I would have liked, and mostly old news if you're already familiar with "evolutionary psych" or human behavioral ecology studies published in the last 5-10 years. A great take-down of Trivers' and others' antiquated theories about paternity certainty, male parental investment, and the idea that both modern and pre-historical women are manipulative cheats, only after your wallet, in general. They also went after social scientists that use their popularity and success to make weird, moralized statements about "the society should be..." (Steven Pinker and a whole bunch of "monogamous pair-binding"- pushers), which was a fun read, if, still, old news if you're already familiar.

Could have used another edit though. Rather than presenting itself as a totally scholarly book and repeating itself over and over again (presumably so single chapters could be read and you'd still get their overall point), I wish it would have lopped off about 50 pages of redundancies. I also wish they'd paid more credit to evolutionary psychologists who put themselves out there in the 80's and 90's, and paved the way for these kinds of discussions to be had, rather than trying to distance themselves from them. I have no problem agreeing with 95% of this book, 90% of Pinker, 99% of EO Wilson, 85% of the Mean Genes guys, and 90% of Matt Ridley, etc. There is no need to be TOO snarky.

Drs. Ryan and Jethá have accomplished the rhetorical equivalent of barging into a cocktail party for evolutionary psychologists (EPers) and turning over every table, setting them all on fire, stripping naked, and having sex in front of the flames while the "oontz oontz oontz" of the dance music continues into the night and the shocked partygoers stare at the horny couple thinking "OK WTF do we do now?"

EPers HATE this book. Professional EPers merely hate it. Alternative-right sex-negative social darwinist armchair EPer scumbags REALLY hate it. People who think of themselves as successfully monogamous feel all butthurt that their sacred lifestyle is under attack. The other 97% of the population have to be thinking "excellent, let's call all our friends up and schedule an orgy on Friday."

Yes, this book oversimplifies the science on the subject. Pretty hilariously in spots. So what? It contains JOKES, for crying out loud. Good ones, I might add. And therefore this could not possibly be a serious review on the science, and anyone who decries it for representing itself as such is merely silly. No, this is not a work of hard science. It is more of a psycho-political work, much in the spirit of Fanon or Sartre, but applied to matters of the groin rather than colonialism and postmodern meaninglessness and other depressing stuff like that.

Really, there is only one point to this book: the human world post-agriculture is a stultifying, miserable, nightmarish place, and the highly industrialized world of the 21st Century is quadruply so, so you might as well not feel bad about being horny. And it's a great point. If you, yourself, are polyamorous, THIS is the book you should have your friends read, not "The Ethical Slut" or "Loving More" or any of that other self-congratulatory nonsense.