P A R T III
The Way We Weren’t
A central theme in our argument is that human sexual behavior is a reflection of both evolved tendencies and social context. Thus, a sense of the day-to-day social world in which human sexual tendencies evolved is essential to understanding them. It’s hard to imagine the communal, cooperative social configurations we’ve described surviving long in the kind of world Hobbes envisioned, characterized by “bellum omnium contra omnes” (the war of all against all). But the false view of prehistoric human life summed up in Hobbes’s pithy dictum “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” is still almost universally accepted.
Having established that prehistoric human life was highly social and decidedly not solitary, we now briefly address the other elements in Hobbes’s description in the following four chapters, before continuing with a more direct discussion of overtly sexual material. We hope readers primarily interested in sex will bear with us because what might at first seem a detour is in fact a shortcut to a clearer vision of the day-to-day lives of our ancestors, a vision that will help you make better sense of the material that follows, as well as of your own world.