Lewis Henry Morgan
To white people, he was known as Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881), a railroad lawyer with a fascination for scholarship and the ways in which societies organize themselves.24 The Seneca tribe of the Iroquois Nation adopted Morgan as an adult, giving him the name Tayadaowuhkuh, which means “bridging the gap.” At his home near Rochester, New York, Morgan spent his evenings studying and writing, trying to bring scientific rigor to understanding the intimate lives of people made distant by time or space. The only American scholar to have been cited by each of the other three intellectual giants of his century, Darwin, Freud, and Marx, many consider Morgan the most influential social scientist of his era and the father of American anthropology. Ironically, it may be Marx and Engels’s admiration that explains why Morgan’s work isn’t better known today. Though he was no Marxist, Morgan doubted important Darwinian assumptions concerning the centrality of sexual competition in the human past. This stance was enough to offend some of Darwin’s defenders—though not Darwin himself, who respected and admired Morgan. In fact, Morgan and his wife spent an evening with the Darwins during a trip to England. Years later, two of Darwin’s sons stayed with the Morgans at their home in upstate New York.
Morgan was especially interested in the evolution of family structure and overall social organization. Contradicting Darwinian theory, he hypothesized a far more promiscuous sexuality as having been typical of prehistoric times. “The husbands lived in polygyny [i.e., more than one wife], and the wives in polyandry [i.e., more than one husband], which are seen to be as ancient as human society. Such a family was neither unnatural nor remarkable,” he wrote. “It would be difficult to show any other possible beginning of the family in the primitive period.” A few pages later Morgan concludes that “there seems to be no escape” from the conclusion that a “state of promiscuous intercourse” was typical of prehistoric times, “although questioned by so eminent a writer as Mr. Darwin.”25
Morgan’s argument that prehistoric societies practiced group marriage (also known as the primal horde or omnigamy—the latter term apparently coined by French author Charles Fourier) so influenced Darwin’s thinking that he admitted, “It seems certain that the habit of marriage has been gradually developed, and that almost promiscuous intercourse was once extremely common throughout the world.” With his characteristic courteous humility, Darwin agreed that there were “present day tribes” where “all the men and women in the tribe are husbands and wives to each other.” In deference to Morgan’s scholarship, Darwin continued, “Those who have most closely studied the subject, and whose judgment is worth much more than mine, believe that communal marriage was the original and universal form throughout the world…. The indirect evidence in favour of this belief is extremely strong….”26
Indeed it is. And the evidence—both direct and indirect—has grown much stronger than Darwin, or even Morgan, could have imagined.
But first, a word about a word. Promiscuous means different things to different people, so let’s define our terms. The Latin root is miscere, “to mix,” and that’s how we mean it. We don’t imply any randomness in mating, as choices and preferences still exert their influence. We looked for another term to use in this book, one without the derogatory sneer, but the synonyms are even worse: sluttish, wanton, whorish, fallen.
Please remember that when we describe the sexual practices in various societies around the world, we’re describing behavior that is normal to the people in question. In the common usage, promiscuity suggests immoral or amoral behavior, uncaring and unfeeling. But most of the people we’ll be describing are acting well within the bounds of what their society considers acceptable behavior. They’re not rebels, transgressors, or utopian idealists. Given that groups of foragers (either those still existing today or in prehistoric times) rarely number much over 100 to 150 people, each is likely to know every one of his or her partners deeply and intimately—probably to a much greater degree than a modern man or woman knows his or her casual lovers.
Morgan made this point in Ancient Society, writing, “This picture of savage life need not revolt the mind, because to them it was a form of the marriage relation, and therefore devoid of impropriety.”27
Biologist Alan F. Dixson, author of the most comprehensive survey of primate sexuality (called, unsurprisingly, Primate Sexuality), makes a similar point concerning what he prefers to call “multimale-multifemale mating systems” typical of our closest primate relations: chimps and bonobos. He writes, “Mating is rarely indiscriminate in multimale-multifemale primate groups. A variety of factors, including kinship ties, social rank, sexual attractiveness and individual sexual preferences might influence mate choice in both sexes. It is, therefore, incorrect to label such mating systems as promiscuous.”28
So, if promiscuity suggests a number of ongoing, nonexclusive sexual relationships, then yes, our ancestors were far more promiscuous than all but the randiest among us. On the other hand, if we understand promiscuity to refer to a lack of discrimination in choosing partners or having sex with random strangers, then our ancestors were likely far less promiscuous than many modern humans. For this book, promiscuity refers only to having a number of ongoing sexual relationships at the same time. Given the contours of prehistoric life in small bands, it’s unlikely that many of these partners would have been strangers.
* Our use of the word “design” is purely metaphorical—not meant to imply any “designer” or intentionality underlying evolved human behavior or anatomy.