P A R T IV
Bodies in Motion
Love’s mysteries in souls do grow, But yet the body is his book.
JOHN DONNE (1572–1631)
Everybody has a story to tell. So does every body, and the story told by the human body is rated XXX.
Like any narrative of prehistory, ours rests on two types of evidence: circumstantial and material. We’ve already covered a good bit of the circumstantial evidence. As for more tangible material evidence, the song says, “What goes up must come down,” but unfortunately for archaeologists and those of us who rely on their findings, what goes down rarely comes back up. And even when it does, ancient social behavior is hard to see reflected in bits of bone, flint, and pottery—fragments that represent only a fraction of what once existed.
At a conference not long ago, the subject of our research came up over breakfast. Upon hearing that we were investigating human sexual behavior in prehistory, the professor sitting across the table from us scoffed and asked (rhetorically), “So what do you do, close your eyes and dream?” While one should never scoff with a mouthful of scone, he had a point. As social behavior presumably doesn’t leave physical artifacts, any theorizing must amount to little but “dreaming.”
Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould was an early scoffer at the notion of evolutionary psychology, asking, “How can we possibly know in detail what small bands of hunter-gatherers did in Africa two million years ago?”1 Richard Potts, director of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program, agrees, warning, “Many characteristics of early human behaviour are … difficult to reconstruct, as no appropriate material evidence is available. Mating patterns and language are obvious examples … [they] leave no traces in the fossil record.” But he then adds, as if under his breath, “Questions of social life … may be accessible from studies of ancient environments, or from certain aspects of anatomy and behaviour that leave material evidence.”2
Certain aspects of anatomy and behaviour that leave material evidence…. Can we glean reliable information about the contours of ancient social life—even sexual behavior—from present-day human anatomy?
Yes we can.