Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality Read Online Free PDF

such feelings are only natural. Experts opine that women need commitment to feel sexual intimacy because “that’s just the way they are.” Some of the most prominent evolutionary psychologists insist that science has confirmed that we are, at base, a jealous, possessive, murderous, and deceitful species just barely saved by our precarious capacity to rise above our dark essence and submit to civilized propriety. To be sure, we humans have hankerings and aversions deeper than cultural influence, at the core of our animal being. We don’t argue that humans are born “blank slates,” awaiting operating instructions. But how something “feels” is far from a reliable guide to distinguishing biological truth from cultural influence.
    Go looking for a book about human nature and you’ll be confronted by Demonic Males, Mean Genes, Sick Societies, War Before Civilization, Constant Battles, The Dark Side of Man, and The Murderer Next Door. You’ll be lucky to escape alive! But do these blood-splattered volumes offer a realistic depiction of scientific truth, or a projection of contemporary assumptions and fears onto the distant past?
    In the following chapters, we reconsider these and other aspects of social behavior, rearranging them to form a different view of our past. We believe our model goes much farther toward explaining how we got to where we are today and most importantly, why many, if not most, sexually dysfunctional marriages are nobody’s fault. We’ll show why a great deal of the information we receive about human sexuality—particularly that received from some evolutionary psychologists—is mistaken, based upon unfounded, outdated assumptions going back to Darwin and beyond. Too many scientists are hard at work trying to complete the wrong puzzle, struggling to force their findings into preconceived, culturally approved notions of what they think human sexuality should be rather than letting the pieces of information fall where they may.
    Our model might strike you as absurd, salacious, insulting, scandalous, fascinating, depressing, illuminating, or obvious.
    But whether or not you are comfortable with what we present here, we hope you’ll keep reading. We are not advocating any particular response to the information we’ve put together.
    Frankly, we’re not sure what to do with it ourselves.
    Undoubtedly, some readers will react emotionally to our
    “scandalous” model of human sexuality. Our interpretation of the data will be dismissed and derided by stalwart souls defending the ramparts of the standard narrative. They’ll be shouting, “Remember the Alamo!” But our advice, as we lead you through this story of unwarranted assumptions, desperate conjecture, and mistaken conclusions, is to forget the Alamo, but always remember the Yucatán.

    CHAPTER TWO
    What Darwin Didn’t Know
    About Sex
    We are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it.
    CHARLES DARWIN, The Descent of Man
    A fig leaf can hide many things, but a human erection isn’t one of them. The standard narrative of the origins and nature of human sexuality claims to explain the development of a deceitful, reluctant sort of sexual monogamy. According to this oft-told tale, heterosexual men and women are pawns in a proxy war directed by our opposed genetic agendas. The whole catastrophe, we’re told, results from the basic biological designs of males and females.* Men strain to spread their cheap and plentiful seed far and wide (while still trying to control one or a few females in order to increase their paternity certainty). Meanwhile, women are guarding their limited supply of metabolically expensive eggs from unworthy
    suitors.
    But
    once
    they’ve
    roped
    in
    a
    provider-husband, they’re quick to hike up their skirts (when ovulating)
    for
    quick-and-dirty
    clandestine
    mating
    opportunities with square-jawed men of obvious genetic superiority. It’s not a pretty