The Promise of Promiscuity
Modern men and women are obsessed with the sexual; it is the only realm of primordial adventure still left to most of us. Like apes in a zoo, we spend our energies on the one field of play remaining; human lives otherwise are pretty well caged in by the walls, bars, chains, and locked gates of our industrial culture.
EDWARD ABBEY
As we consider alternate views of prehistoric human sexuality, keep in mind that the core logic of the standard narrative pivots on two interlocking assumptions:
• A prehistoric mother and child needed the meat and protection a man would provide.
• A woman would have had to offer her own sexual autonomy in exchange, thus assuring him that it was his child he was supporting.
The standard narrative is founded upon the belief that the exchange of protein and protection for assured paternity was the best way to increase the odds of a child’s survival to reproductive age. Survival of offspring is, after all, the primary engine of natural selection as described by Darwin and subsequent theorists. But what if risk to offspring were mitigated more effectively by behavior that encouraged the opposite arrangement? What if, rather than one man agreeing to share his meat, protection, and status with a particular woman and her child, sharing were generalized? What if group-wide sharing offered a more effective approach to the risks our ancestors encountered in the prehistoric world? And in light of these risks, what if paternity uncertainty were more beneficial to the child’s chances of survival, as more men would take an interest in him or her?
Again, we’re not suggesting a nobler social system, just one that might have been better suited to meeting the challenges of prehistoric conditions and more effective in helping people survive long enough to reproduce.
This sharing-based social life is far from uniquely human. For example, vampire bats in Central America feed on the blood of large mammals. But not every bat finds a meal each night. When they return to their dens, those bats who have had a good night regurgitate blood into the mouths of bats who have not had as much luck. Recipients of such largess are likely to return the favor when the conditions have reversed themselves, but are less likely to give blood to bats who have denied them in the past. As one reviewer put it, “The key to this bit for bat process is the individual bat’s ability to remember the history of its relationships with all other bats living in its den. This mnemonic requirement has driven the evolution of vampire bat brains, which possess the largest neocortex of all known bat species.”21
We hope the thought of vampire bats coughing up (coughing down?) blood for their non-blood relatives is graphic enough to convince you that sharing isn’t innately “noble.” Some species, in some conditions, have simply found that generosity is the best way to reduce risk in an uncertain ecological context. Homo sapiens appears to have been such a species until relatively recent times.22
The near universality of fierce egalitarianism among foragers suggests there was really little choice for our prehistoric ancestors. Archaeologist Peter Bogucki writes, “For Ice Age mobile hunting societies, the band model of social organization, with its obligatory sharing of resources, was really the only way to live.”23 It makes perfect Darwinian sense to suppose that prehistoric humans would choose the path that offered the best chance of survival—even if that path required egalitarian sharing of resources rather than the self-interested hoarding of resources many contemporary Western societies insist is basic human nature. After all, Darwin himself believed a tribe of cooperative people would vanquish one composed of selfish individualists.
Are we preaching far-fetched flower-power silliness? Hardly. Egalitarianism is found in nearly all simple hunter-gatherer societies that have been studied anywhere in the world—groups facing conditions most similar to those our ancestors confronted 50,000 or 100,000 years ago. They’ve followed an egalitarian path not because they are particularly noble, but because it offers them the best chance of survival. Indeed, under these conditions, egalitarianism may be the only way to live, as Bogucki concluded. Institutionalized sharing of resources and sexuality spreads and minimizes risk, assures food won’t be wasted in a world without refrigeration, eliminates the effects of male infertility, promotes the genetic health of individuals, and assures a more secure social environment for children and adults alike. Far from utopian romanticism, foragers insist on egalitarianism because it works on the most practical levels.