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the “courted” to make a deep commitment to rear their young together for years and years.
    “O, I willingly stake all for you,” declared Walt Whitman. Men and women needed to say these words over a million years ago.
    The Mind Evolved by Daylight
    Of course, our Homo erectus forebears had other vital reasons to develop uniquely human capacities. Nariokotome Boy and his relatives needed to feel empathy for a wounded comrade, patience for a cranky child, understanding for a disgruntled teen, and to develop the social graces to get along with obstreperous or pompous members of the group. They were a band. They had to move together through the grass, a killing field for predators. So those who could perceive dangers, remember past calamities, devise strategies, articulate choices, make decisions, judge distances, foresee obstacles, and persuade comrades with convincing postures and compelling words disproportionately survived. The human mind evolved by daylight.
    But after dark they must have assembled around the firelight to roast their meat, sharpen spears, rock their cooing infants, and imitate the ostrich, hog, or panther as the old folks slept. They must have sung of courage, fortitude, and conquest, leapt and wrestled to show endurance, wept to show compassion, and clowned to parade their wit. Many also slipped away to cuddle. By moonlight, our outstanding aptitudes also took their human shape.
    Marching toward Modernity
    As time passed, our forebears left increasing evidence of their courting life. By 500,000 years ago, someone in what is now Ethiopia had a brain volume of roughly 1,300 cubic centimeters, within the modern human range. He or she certainly had a complex brain—and a mind capable of passionate romantic love.
    About 250,000 years ago, a man living in what we know as England meticulously chipped a symmetrical hand axe around a fossil shell he had found embedded in a lump of flint. Perhaps it was a gift to a beloved or an advertisement to show a lover his tool-making prowess. In fact, scientists now maintain that the huge seventeen-inch hand axes our forebears chipped for over a million years were too big to serve on the hunt or to gather vegetables or roots. Because many are unwieldy and meticulously fashioned, they may well have been used to impress and woo. 20
    Sixty thousand years ago people living in the Zagros Mountains of northeastern Iraq buried someone in a shallow grave one June day and covered the corpse with hollyhocks, grape hyacinth, bachelor’s buttons, and yellow flowering groundsel. Perhaps one of them yearned to see a beloved one in an afterlife. At this same time, someone in France scraped lumps of hematite and manganese to make earthy red and gray-white powders. With these, a woman may have decorated her hips and breasts for a summer dance.
    By thirty thousand years ago, Cro-Magnon people sported totally modern human skulls, as well as brains like yours and mine. Now they would decorate just about everything they touched. Skilled artists descended into huge caverns beneath France and Spain to draw magnificent bulls, reindeer, ibexes, rhinos, lions, bears, and magical beasts on dank cave walls. These black, red, and yellow creatures pound along these grottos with such vigor they almost come alive. Breaking the utter silence of these vaults, musicians played flutes and drums. Hundreds stenciled their handprints on craggy walls. Sculptors left behind small bison of fired clay. And footprints in some caverns still tell of those who danced in the flickering light of oil lamps.
    From Europe to Siberia, people also carved grotesquely buxom, faceless female fertility symbols out of stone, as well as realistic figurines of women they must have known. Hunters engraved the handles of ivory tools with graceful horses. And men and women bedecked themselves with beads, bracelets, and probably tattoos, as well as caps, headbands, and gowns. Wall paintings even suggest that women coiffed their