Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality |  | Authors: Christopher Ryan, Cacilda Jethá
Publisher: Harper
Category: Book
List Price: $25.99
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Rating:  38 reviews
Sales Rank: 786
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 416
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.4
ISBN: 0061707805
Dewey Decimal Number: 306.7
EAN: 9780061707803
ASIN: 0061707805
Publication Date: June 29, 2010
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Product Description
Since Darwin's day, we've been told that sexual monogamy comes naturally to our species. Mainstream science--as well as religious and cultural institutions--has maintained that men and women evolved in families in which a man's possessions and protection were exchanged for a woman's fertility and fidelity. But this narrative is collapsing. Fewer and fewer couples are getting married, and divorce rates keep climbing as adultery and flagging libido drag down even seemingly solid marriages.
How can reality be reconciled with the accepted narrative? It can't be, according to renegade thinkers Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá. While debunking almost everything we "know" about sex, they offer a bold alternative explanation in this provocative and brilliant book.
Ryan and Jethá's central contention is that human beings evolved in egalitarian groups that shared food, child care, and, often, sexual partners. Weaving together convergent, frequently overlooked evidence from anthropology, archaeology, primatology, anatomy, and psychosexuality, the authors show how far from human nature monogamy really is. Human beings everywhere and in every era have confronted the same familiar, intimate situations in surprisingly different ways. The authors expose the ancient roots of human sexuality while pointing toward a more optimistic future illuminated by our innate capacities for love, cooperation, and generosity.
With intelligence, humor, and wonder, Ryan and Jethá show how our promiscuous past haunts our struggles over monogamy, sexual orientation, and family dynamics. They explore why long-term fidelity can be so difficult for so many; why sexual passion tends to fade even as love deepens; why many middle-aged men risk everything for transient affairs with younger women; why homosexuality persists in the face of standard evolutionary logic; and what the human body reveals about the prehistoric origins of modern sexuality.
In the tradition of the best historical and scientific writing, Sex at Dawn unapologetically upends unwarranted assumptions and unfounded conclusions while offering a revolutionary understanding of why we live and love as we do. (edited by author)
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 38
 Sexy Beasts July 4, 2010
Eric Johnson (Vancouver, BC)
77 out of 86 found this review helpful
This review originally appeared in Seed Magazine: http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/sexy_beasts/
When we think of the first swinger parties most of us imagine 1970s counter-culture, we don't picture Top Gun fighter pilots in World War II. Yet, according to researchers Joan and Dwight Dixon, it was on military bases that "partner swapping" first originated in the United States. As the group with the highest casualty rate during the war, these elite pilots and their wives "shared each other as a kind of tribal bonding ritual" and had an unspoken agreement to care for one another if a woman's husband didn't make it back home. Like the sexy apes known as bonobos, this kind of open sexuality served a social function that provided a way to relieve stress and form long-lasting bonds.
For the husband and wife team Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá in their new book Sex At Dawn, this example is one of many that suggests the human species did not evolve in monogamous, nuclear families but rather in small, intimate groups where "most mature individuals would have had several ongoing sexual relationships at any given time." We are the descendants of these multimale-multifemale mating groups and, even though we've constructed a radically different society from our hunter-gatherer forebears, the behavioral and psychological traits our species evolved in the distant past still manifest themselves today. Ryan, a psychologist, and Jethá, a psychiatrist, argue that understanding human sexual evolution this way helps to explain our species' unique creativity inside (as well as outside) the marriage bed. It may also shed light on why fidelity has been such a persistent problem for both men and women throughout recorded history.
For Ryan and Jethá there is little doubt that human beings are an exceedingly sexual species. As an example they detail how in 1902 the first home-use vibrator was patented and approved for domestic use in the United States. Fifteen years later there were more vibrators than toasters in American homes (today this number could be as high as fifty million nationwide). In 2006, according to U.S. Pornography Industry Revenue Statistics, people around the world--the majority of whom were probably men--spent an estimated $97 billion on pornographic material ($13.3 billion in the U.S. alone), a figure that exceeded the annual revenue of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Apple, and Netflix combined. To judge human sexuality based on consumption patterns, as Stephen Colbert would say, "the market has spoken." When this is combined with estimates that people engage in hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of copulations per child born (more than any primate, including chimpanzees and bonobos) there's little denying that the human animal is one sexy beast.
But why should a species often described as monogamous be so hypersexual? Monogamous animals by definition don't have to compete for reproduction and, as a result, are generally characterized by a low level of sexual activity. But according to Ryan and Jethá humans top a very short list of species that engage in sex for pleasure. "No animal spends more of its allotted time on Earth fussing over sex than Homo sapiens," they write. In fact, the animal world is filled with species who confine their sexual behavior to just a few periods each year, the only times when conception is possible. Among apes the only monogamous species are the gibbons whose infrequent, reproduction-only copulations make them much better adherents of the Vatican's guidelines than we are. In this way, Ryan and Jethá argue, repressing our sexuality should not be confused with reining in an "animal" nature; rather, it is denying one of the most unique aspects of what it means to be human.
The suggestion that humans did not evolve as a monogamous species is not as radical an idea as it may sound. In The Descent of Man Charles Darwin wrote, "Those who have most closely studied the subject [particularly the anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan] believe that communal marriage was the original and universal form throughout the world." Yet ever since the nineteenth century anthropologists have struggled over how to identify the mating system of human beings. In 1967 George P. Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas reported that only 14.5% of modern preindustrial societies could be classified as monogamous. Yet, in the West, researchers commonly refer to humans as "serially monogamous," based on the pattern of repeated monogamous marriages throughout men and women's lifetimes. But with over half of divorces occurring because of infidelity and one in 25 dads unknowingly raising children that they didn't father, this is not a picture that fits comfortably with monogamy of any sort, serial or otherwise.
However, by looking at modern indigenous societies and comparing the findings of anthropologists with the latest results in behavioral psychology and biology, Ryan and Jethá piece together a remarkably coherent pattern from an otherwise fractured understanding of human sexuality. From societies that believe that multiple men are necessary for a successful pregnancy (what researchers refer to as "partible paternity") to those where not having an extra-marital tryst will cause a man to be labeled "stingy of one's genitals" by his female suitors, the authors conclude that marriage may be an established social arrangement among many hunter-gatherers but it's one in which sexuality is decidedly fluid. A range of physiological evidence from Western populations is further offered to support this position, from the year-round libido in both sexes, to the unusually large size of men's genitalia compared to other apes, to the shifting sexual strategy during various stages in women's reproductive cycle (and lest we forget multiple female orgasms?). All suggest that our species is adapted for several concurrent sexual partners.
This is, of course, not a new idea in human evolutionary research. Primatologist Sarah Hrdy advocated a promiscuous mating system for humans in The Woman That Never Evolved (1999) while psychologist David Barash and psychiatrist Judith Lipton detailed their own argument in The Myth of Monogamy (2001). In Sex At Dawn Ryan and Jethá cover some similar ground as these previous authors but provide a great deal of additional material that was unavailable a decade ago. They also emphasize the ways in which monogamy has been used as a means of controlling women in patriarchal societies and make a number of insightful connections between the invention of agriculture 12,000 years ago and how sedentary societies influence the structure of human mating. However, with a relaxed writing style and numerous examples from modern popular culture, their discussion of these topics remains readily accessible even to those who may be encountering such ideas for the first time.
Sex At Dawn is a provocative and engaging synthesis of the latest research on human sexual evolution that has the added benefit of being a joy to read. While the authors' conclusion that healthy relationships can be both committed and open may come as a shock to some readers, others will likely find it refreshingly honest. As their example of WWII fighter pilots emphasizes, human sexuality has numerous social as well as emotional functions and there has never been only a single path chosen by the human species. In offering a fresh look at a fascinating and controversial topic Sex At Dawn is a book sure to generate discussion, and one likely to produce more than a few difficult conversations with family marriage counselors.
Eric Michael Johnson received his masters degree in primate behavior and is now pursuing his PhD in the history of science. He writes on issues of science, politics, and history at The Primate Diaries.
A real mind-bender July 11, 2010
Scarpy (The District)
20 out of 23 found this review helpful
This was a terrific read -- a sweeping (and well written, and funny) look at recent anthropological, zoological, and biological research all leading to a mind-bender of a conclusion: our prehistoric ancestors were wall-to-wall horndogs, men and women alike, with "multi-male/multi-female" sexual relations the likely norm for 95 percent of anatomically modern humans' existence. The nuclear family centered on a pair-bonded husband and wife, and the monogamy that comes with it, probably only date to the last 8,000-10,000 years, since the advent of agriculture.
Ryan and Jethá dismantle the more common Men-are-from-Mars, Women-are-from-Venus view -- i.e. men have a biological imperative to impregnate as many women as possible while keeping their wives monogamous so they (the men) support only their own genetic offspring, while women want to bond with wealthy, high-status males for their resources, but also to sleep around with the bad boys for their genes. R&J make a strong case that this sort of arrangement could only make sense in post-agricultural societies where concepts of property and paternal lineage become important, but that it would be meaningless in the hunter-gatherer groups that were the only form of human society for almost 200,000 years. When they get into the section on "sperm competition," things get reaaaally trippy.
The book kind of leaves you hanging as far as what this information means for modern humans, but that's probably a virtue. We have after all changed quite a bit from prehistoric times, and it's not as though our evolutionary history has to dictate our moral or social behavior today. Nowhere do the authors say everybody should walk out of their marriages and form hippie communes or anything like that. Instead, they say their goal is to start a conversation -- about sex, and how our prehistoric urges may help explain why so many people have trouble staying with one partner over their whole lives. It's a conversation-starter, all right.
I was tempted to take one star away because I felt throughout like they weren't presenting opposing views in the best light, but hey, it's a polemic. And it's a fun one, too. So let the arguments begin.
It's an Anthropologically Sound Argument July 24, 2010
Davidicus Marcus (Virgin Islands)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I was surprised by this book, since I thought (and hoped) it was going to be rather salacious, which I was looking forward to, and I wasn't expecting such a well-referenced discussion. And that's what it is, really, a discussion -- which is why it was so entertaining as well as informed. The authors certainly did their homework and backed up their arguments very well, indeed. Not to say that there won't be a few holes shot through it by the big names that they took to task (Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Helen Fisher, et al.), but all in all, the research was well done (they give plenty of references), their arguments are well-reasoned (when they can't supply factual evidence and have to revert to circumstantial), and best of all, they maintained a sense of humor throughout.
No kidding... it's a sound argument (not so much AGAINST monogamy, but more to point out it's failings in the post agricultural, modern, and 'civilized' Western world today) -- that there is a lot of damage caused by the forceful social maintenance of proprietary rights in the face of, and against, the evolutionary burden we have been dealt (male and female), both physically and psychologically when it comes to relations between the sexes.
I can just imagine what some of my professors would have said and done differently had they had these data and arguments at hand a quarter of a century ago. The authors also mentioned some of my favorite anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists, like Marvin Harris and Richard Wright..., and even Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, and Jerry Seinfeld got a lick or two in there.
Highly entertaining, readable, and most important, thought-provoking. Points out our cultural evolutionary future... square-heads, tight-ass conservatives, and raging moralists be damned. I highly recommend that you read it... today.
Fascinating book that reexamines what human nature really is August 21, 2010
LaurinoJ
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book helped me to see that much of what we think of as Human Nature is just a relic of the time when humans switched from a society of foragers to one based on agriculture. An excellent deconstruction of many of the myths that lead to so much unhappiness in human relationships. I wouldn't have wanted to go through life without at least knowing these theories concerning the true nature of our species.
Also this is a great complement to a book by Steve Taylor named The Fall that examines the results of the switch to an agricultural society.
The Fall: The Insanity of the Ego in Human History and the Dawning of A New Era
Very interesting ideas August 24, 2010
Ann W. Howell
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book is a different look at Human Sexual Behavior and I, for one, believe it. The book is written in a humorous style that puts forth its serious ideas in an amusing and easy reading way. I am a middle aged white woman and my college student, possible Anthropology major, daughter is also reading it. Our sexual discussions have really gotten interesting. It's my new way of looking at life.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 38
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