1taylor Timothy The Prehistory of Sex Four Million Years of H

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T H Y T A Y L
IN U.S.
$23.95
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$32.95
This lively and provocarivt rôok leaves no

stone unturned and no tar- jo untouched as
it pieces together evidence from highly
controversial artifacts and human remains to
decipher the mysteries of Stone Age sex.
Archaeologist Timothy Taylor paints a dramatic
and startling picture of our sexual evolution
as he follows human sexuality from its origins
four million years ago to modern times to
answer our most titillating questions about this
endlessly fascinating and powerful subject.
THE PREHISTORY OF SEX

Taylor draws on recent archaeological
discoveries such as skeletons of Amazon women,
golden penis sheaths, the charred remains
of aphrodisiac herbs, and a wealth of prehistoric
erotic art to trace practices such as contraception,
homosexuality, transsexuality, prostitution,
sadomasochism, and bestiality back to their
ancient origins. He makes the startling claim that
although humans have used contraceptives
from the very earliest times to separate sex from
reproduction, techniques to maximize population
growth were developed only when farming
—
began a revolution involving control of animals'
sex lives, widespread oppression of women, and
an attitude to nature that continues to have
devastating ecological consequences. He draws
the radical conclusion that the evolution of
our species has been shaped not only by the
survival of the fittest but by the very sexual
choices our ancestors made. And he links ancient
sexuality with our own in a contemporary
survey of artificial insemination, surrogate
pregnancies, drag queens, brothels, pornography,
and the spectre of racial dominance.
How has human sexuality ^hanged —and how

has it remained the s: êr the span of
millions of years? How '
M - Mdeas of eroticism,
ecstasy, immortality, an: ^
r y become linked
Digitized by the Internet Archive
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The Prehistory of Sex
^S^:
Four
Million
Years o f
Human
S EXU AL
Culture
Bantam Books
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London Sydney Auckland
^ms^^MS'zi-^m
;^s?m^^î:^m^rM'--p<
The
Prehistory
OF
S E X
Timothy Taylor
THE PREHISTORY OF SEX
A Bantam Book / September 1996
All rights reserved

Copyright © 1996 by Timothy Taylor.
Cover photo copyright © Erich Lessing / Art Resource.
Cover art: Thracian silver-gilt horse harness decoration, fourth century B.C.
From National Museum of History, Sofia, Bulgaria.
Book design by Ellen Cipriano.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or

by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.
For information address: Bantam Books.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data
Taylor, Timothy, 1960-

The prehistory of sex four : million years of human sexual
culture / Timothy Taylor,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-553-09694-X
1. Sex customs — History. I. Title.
GN484.3.T39 1996
306.7-dc20 96-10803
CIP
Puhiuhed ..limuLtaneoiufly in the United Stated and Canada
Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of

Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark,
consisting of the words "Bantam Books" and the portrayal of a
rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in
other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540

Broadway, New York, New York 10036.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

BVG 10 987654321
To Sarah
V^ on tents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Beyond Nature

1 Making the Beast with Two Backs:
The Evolution of Human Sexual Culture 19
2 Skull Sex and Brain Sex 52

3 Mysteries of the Organism 72
A Meet the Real Flintstones 97
5 Venus in Furs 115
6 The Milk ofthe Vulture Goddess 142
7 The Grave ofthe Golden Penis 167

8 Shamans and Amazons 193
9 The Return ofthe Beast with Two Backs:

Sex and the Prehistory of Race 227
Conclusion: Beyond Culture 261
Notes 269
Bibliography 301
Index MZ
Ill ustrations
(Fig. 0.1) The Iceman.

(Fig. 0.2) Homosexual anal sex (rear entry);
Moche culture pot.
(Fig. 0.3) Homosexual anal sex (face to face);
Viciis culture pot.
(Fig. 1.1) From Ape to Adam.

(Fig. 1.2) The Evolution of Early Man.
(Fig. 1.3) Human evolutionary tree.
(Fig. 1 .4) Arielle after a haircut.
(Fig. 1.5) The Nariokotome Boy.

(Fig. 1.6) The Ovahimba sling.
(Fig. 1.7) Lucy s pelvis.
(Fig. 1.8) Australopithecine birth mechanics.

(Fig. 2.1) Coffm birth.
(Fig. 4.1) A 230,000-year-old sculpture from

Berekhat Ram, Israel.
(Fig. 4.2) IceAge triple burial.

(Fig. 5.1) The Venus of Willendorf.
(Fig. 5.2) Four Venus figurines; Avdeevo.
(Fig. S.5) Phallic baton; Dolni Vestonice.
(Fig. 5 A) Three rock-cut vulvas; Angles.
(Fig. 5.5) Rod; La Madeleine.
(Fig. 5.6) Phallic baton; Bruniquel.
(Fig. 5.7) Phallic baton; Le Placard.
(Fig. 5.8) Phallic baton; Predmost.
(Fig. 5.9) Double phallic baton; Gorge d'Enfer.
(Fig. 5.10) The Grimaldi "hermaphrodite."
I lluc) t rat io nd
(Fig. 5.11) The Lascaux shaft scene.

(Fig. 5.12) The "sorcerer" of Les Trois Freres.
(Fig. 5.13) Semi-human bison figure I;
Les Trois Freres.

(Fig. 5.14) Semi-human bison figure II;
Les Trois Freres.

(Fig. 5.15) Deer-woman; Laugerie- Basse.
(Fig. 5.16) Woman with breast straps; Kostienki.
(Fig. 5.17) Bound woman; Kostienki.
(Fig. 6.1) MesoKthic hunting camp.
(Fig. 6.2) The Addaura scene.
(Fig. G.'S) Fish-woman-man sculpture;
Lepenski Vir.
(Fig. 6. A) The "Great Goddess" of Qatal Hiiyiik.
(Fig. 6.6) Temple of the Vulture Goddess;

Qatal HiijAuk.
(Fig. 6.6) Masturbating female; Hagar Qim.
(Fig. 7.1) Goat suckling human infant.
(Fig. 7.2) A breast-shaped weaning vessel;

Barton-upon-Humber.
(Fig. 7 .Z) PloAving, hoeing, and infant- carrying;
Val Camonica.
(Fig. 7. A) Man having sex with donkey;
Val Camonica.
(Fig. 7.6) Skier attempting intercourse with
moose; Angara River.
(Fig. 7.6) The Grave of the Golden Penis.
(Fig. 7 .7) Masturbating male; Larisa.
(Fig. 7.8) Midwinter sunrise at New^grange,
Ireland.
(Fig. 7.9) Standing stone; Kintraw^.

(Fig. 8.1) The Letnitsa sex scene.
(Fig. 8.2) Burial of an "Amazon."
(Fig. 8.3) Roman brothel tokens.
(Fig. 8.4) The missionary position; Sanzeno.
(Fig. 8.5) A competitive sex game; Brezje.

Iliud t ratio nd xi
(Fig. 8.6) The "priestess" of the Sokolova Mogila.

(Fig. 8.7) Androgynous figure; Letnitsa.
(Fig. 8.8) Goddess on the Gundestrup Cauldron.

(Fig. 8.9) Androgynous horned figure;
Gundestrup.
(Fig. 8.10) Tantric transvestite; Mohenjo-Daro.
(Fig. 8.1 1) Androgynous and part-bestial figure;
Gundestrup.
(Fig. 8.12) The Men-an-Tol, Cornwall.
(Fig. 8.13) The Cerne Abbas Giant, Dorset.
(Fig. 9.1) Sexual anatomy of two nineteenth-
century San women.
(Fig. 9.2) "The Racial Elements of European
History."
(Fig. 10.1) Trash, a New York drag king.
A, knowledgnients
This book is based on a certain amount of firsthand archaeological

experience and research, but it depends to a far greater degree on the
work and opinions, published or otherwise, of others. The ideas and
supporting research of Sarah Wright, my wife, have been crucial
from beginning to end. Special thanks are also due to my research
assistant, Alison Deegan, my colleagues Christopher Kniisel and
Charlotte Roberts, and my former students David Lucy, Patrick
Ouinney, and Stuart Reevell, for all their contributions, criticisms,
and support. Clive Gamble kindly read the text in one of its drafts
and offered valuable corrections and comments; at a later stage Paul
Bahn saved me from making some embarrassing errors in Chapter 5;
neither of them necessarily agree with my vievv^s.

More generally, and in addition to the various acknowledgments
implicit in the notes and bibliography at the end of the book, I wôuld
like to thank the following people: John Alexander, Sandra
Assersohn, Douglass Bailey, Lynn Bevan, Richander Birkinshaw,
Anthea Boyleston, David Brown, Aleksander Bursche, Christopher
Chippindale, Sarah CoUey, Joyce Connor, James Cox, Barry
Cunliffe, Randy Donahue, Liz Dulaney, Peter Ellis, Rhian Evans,
Ginney Ferguson, Andrew Fitzpatrick, Rob Foley, Martin Foreman,
Ken Hamilton, Richard Harrison, Gordon Hillman, Stephen
Hobson, Ian Hodder, Barbara Hoddinott, Ralph Hoddinott,
Veronika Holzer, Deborah Hughes, Chris Knight, Gicho Lazov, Yuri
Lesman, Geoffrey Lloyd, Owen Lovejoy, Patty Stuart Mac Adam,
Leonie Madden, Alexander Marshack, Keith Matthews, Elizabeth
McCann, Linda McClean, Leslie Meredith, Lynn Meskell, Peter
Miller, Theya MoUeson, Rodney Needham, Katharine Norman,
xiv Ackno w led g mentt)
Mark Pollard,
Christopher Pare, Nerys Patterson, Rachel Pilkington,
Camilla Power, Mike Rowlands, Michael Ryder, Mick Sharp,
Andrew Sherratt, Susan Sherratt, Mrs. Demitri Shimkin, Rachel
Sholl,Janet Smithies, James Steele, Chris Stringer, George Taylor,
JillThompson, Gerhard Tomedi, Bruce Trigger, Gerhard Trnka,
Paul Vasey, Jenny Wagstaff, Nick Wetton, David Wilson, Alison
Wylie, and Mrs. Rudy Zallinger.
My editors, Christopher Potter at Fourth Estate and Brian Tart

at Bantam, provided consistent input and brought many new things
to my attention. Janet Biehl's painstaking copyediting made my argu-
ments clearer and more consistent. The book Avould not have been
started without the inspired support of my agents, Katinka Matson
and John Brockman, at Brockman, Inc. I would also like to thank
my parents, Forbes and Mary Taylor, my godmother, Rosalind
Moylan, and my parents-in-law, John and Joan Wright, for all their
support.
Introduction
JDeyond INIature
'Eroticism, one may day, id

'*
consenting to live.
Pierrot-Le-Fou,
DiR. Jean- Luc Godard
In 1991 a corpse was found melting out of a glacier in the Otztal

Alps, on the mountain border between Italy and Austria. The moun-
taineer who first spotted the body, Erica Simon, thought from its del-
icate proportions that it was a \voman's, perhaps that of an

unfortunate skier from a recent season. But as the body was removed
from the ice, it became clear that it ^vas breastless, with what seemed
to be male external genitalia, and that the remains of its clothing and
equipment Avere strangely old-fashioned, not quite like anything ever
seen before. The body became known as the Iceman and was nick-
named Otzi.
Archaeologists believe that Otzi died more than 5,000 years ago,
around 3300 B.C., when the later Stone Age or Neolithic inhabitants
of central Europe were beginning to use metals for the first time. He
had been caught in a blizzard as he tried to make his way over a high
pass from one valley to the next. He carried a number of items with
The Prehidtory of Sex
^^dsJdit^M^- -l.^li.,^1: î^^^^î: - : l^îw»4.Ja^^c-£C1
(Fig. 0.1) The Iceman: emerging from a glacier on the Austro-Itahan border,
September 20, 1991. Photograph courtesy of Gerhard Tomedi.
him, including a copper ax and what might have been magical talis-
mans. His body ^vas well preserved. His general appearance and a
close study of his teeth suggest that he ^vas between twenty-five and
forty years old when he died. Tattoos were still visible along either
side of his spine and on his legs. But what really grabbed public at-
tention in the period between the initial discovery and the official
publication of the detailed and painstaking scientific investigations of

his body was the speculation about his sexuality and how it might
have been linked to his death.
Although the Iceman's scrotum was visible in the initial forensic
investigation, a mystery surrounded his penis or, more accurately, its
apparent absence. Bizarre stories began to circulate: his penis had

been eaten by a wild animal; it had snapped off as the body was being
removed from the ice; it had been removed and sold — for a six-figure
sum — to a collector of prehistoric sex organs. Someone informally ac-

cused the leader of the investigative team, Dr. Konrad Spindler, of
stealing it. A further theory, much favored in popular magazines, wâs
that the Iceman had been caught in flagrante and had been emascu-
lated by the cuckolded husband before managing to escape up the
mountain, ^vhere he froze to death. Reports that the testicles had
Introduction: Beyond Nature 3
been "scraped out of the scrotum also circulated and led

" to the out-
landish speculation that Otzi was a castrated priest who had traveled
from the Near East, a place where, it wâs thought, people sacrificed
their genitals in order to be allowed to officiate in the temples of the
"Great Mother." The fullest available autopsy report on the body,

published in 1993, however, found that the Iceman's sexual organs
were not missing after all — his uncircumcised penis and his testicles
had indeed survived but ^vere rather shrunk by cold and icy dryness.
A rumor that Otzi's scrotal sac still contained viable sperm —
quick-frozen, as in sperm banks — prompted a number of Austrian
women to ask if they could be artificially inseminated and have his
baby. Their motives — aside from the usual ones of novelty, publicity,
or insanity — rnay have included a desire to breed with a "racially

pure' individual, someone of ancient and impeccable Alpine stock.
Modern clinical techniques would theoretically grant the wômen's re-
quest, but certain ethical questions would arise. Because Otzi may well
have had children in his OAvn lifetime, there is a fair chance that some
of his direct descendants are alive in Alpine Europe today, two hun-
dred or so generations later. Thus some of the vvômen wânting insemi-
nation with Otzi's sperm might actually be his great-great-great . . .
granddaughters. Perhaps all of them are. As physical anthropologist

Torstein SJ0vold has pointed out, at a time depth of 5,000 years, the
Iceman could theoretically be a direct ancestor of everyone on earth
(although actual mating patterns among humans, along with geo-
graphical barriers, make this virtually impossible in practice).
The possibility that the Iceman could be made to "live again,"

his sperm deployed in a macabre (and potentially incestuous) fash-
ion, nevertheless reminds us that sex, in its rawest reproductive form,
is a means by which humans can aspire to immortality, transcending
material decay. Yet sex is also transcendent in itself, opening a door
to a qualitatively different experience of being alive — ecstasy.
Nonetheless, the very ideas of eroticism, immortality, transcen-
dence, and ecstasy are, on the billion-year timescale of sexual life on
earth, strikingly new. People in their present form have been around
for fewer than 150,000 years. Since higher animals usually select
their reproductive partners carefully, it is likely that many of the
4 The Prehistory of Sex
mental qualities that our species has today have been chosen to some
degree. Just as millions of years of sexual choice by peahens led,
against the grain of natural selection, to the creation of peacocks Avith

fantastic iridescent tail fans, so, I believe, the far more consciously di-
rected sexual choices of our ancestors have led to a massive increase

in brain size and to the establishment of a mental chasm between us
and the rest of the animal kingdom. Our evolving consciousness now
allows us, uniquely, to survey the remotest past and to investigate our
own prehistoric origins.
This book tells a story in ^vhich biology is intertwined mvi\\\ cul-
ture. It is based on a vast body of archaeological evidence that is virtu-
ally unknown outside specialist circles: golden penis sheaths and

graphic depictions of sex in prehistoric art, mammoth ivory phalluses,
sculptures of women in childbirth, syphilitic skeletons, and the charred
remains of aphrodisiac herbs. The story begins in the mists of evolu-
tionary time, Avhen the human form first emerged and sexual culture
was invented. It ends by surveying the practices, prejudices, and con-
fusions of the last five thousand years. It deals with sex in all its physi-
cal forms, as well as with reproduction, gender, and power ^ how
societies have ordered themselves in relation to sex and sexuality.
Four million years ago in Africa, a small group of chimplike creatures

began walking exclusively on their hind legs. The reason they did so
is debated, butmarked a profound turning point, leading to the
it
emergence of modern people. Our tree-sv/inging ancestors ^vere very

successful breeders. What they found erotic \vas probably quite var-
ied: they may even have been as extreme as the pygmy chimps of to-
day, who take their pleasure singly or in groups, often with no
particular focus on reproduction, sometimes with members of their
o^vn sex or immediate family. Howêver varied the behavior of our

prehuman ancestors was, sex involved ideas of beauty, the physical
basis of recognition and desire. Females had large clitorises and no
breasts. Males had vanishingly small penises. Both sexes were cov-
ered with thick body hair. Then, somehow, what was considered
beautiful altered dramatically. Upright walking hid the female genital
opening and encouraged the development of buttocks. The evolution

of the first female breasts follo^ved, along with the loss of most of the
thick body hair in males and females alike. The clitoris reduced in
size, ^vhile the penis grew dramatically larger.
Natural selection — "the survival of the fittest" — cannot explain

all these transformations. In the process of natural selection, a species
facing an environmental challenge either changes or dies out. In any
species change occurs because there is some variation among the in-
dividual members, and only those best fitted to the new conditions
survive to pass on their characteristics. Generation by generation,
over millions and millions of years, changes accrue that turn not only
sheeplike creatures into giraffes but fish into reptiles, and reptiles
into birds. As a species changes, it sometimes divides into two differ-
ent species. When it does, the criteria of mutual recognition between

individual members must slow^ly alter: giraffes share a common an-
cestry with okapi, but they no longer try to mate wîth them. As Dar-
win himself pointed out, however, natural selection alone cannot
account for the fantastic variety of life on earth. The peacock's tail,
for example, makes the peacock an easy target for predators. The
critical compensation for this vulnerability — and an important foun-
dation for this book — is that peahens find it sexy.
Darwin recognized that certain characteristically human fea-
tures, such as our lack of protective body hair (a stark contrast to our
nearest primate relatives), make no sense in terms of basic survival.
He proposed that "sexual selection" was the key to understanding
them, arguing that the particular mate choices that individuals in a
species make can be as crucial to evolution as pressures from the out-
side environment. In one form of sexual selection, brute force is used,
almost always by males, to compete for the chance to mate with the
opposite sex. A second, more important form of sexual selection is by
the female,who usually makes the ultimate reproductive choice.
Sometimes she may choose to conceive with a physically weaker but
more astute and, in her eyes, more beautiful male while the brawny
ones are still locked in battle.
Walking upright is another human feature that is hard to ex-

plain in survival terms, as it made getting around slow^, hard work.
6 The Prehidtory of Sex
But it also shifted the focus of sexual attraction and contact from the
back to the front of the body. Upright walking required a differently
shaped pelvis, contorting the birth canal, with the result that child-
birthbecame more painful and dangerous. Nevertheless, head size in-
creased—the braincase tripled in volume over the last four million
years. This remarkable enlargement cannot easily be explained in bi-

ological terms alone. But four million years ago our protohuman an-
cestors were not purely biological beings. Side by side with the — in
evolutionary terms, rapid — changes in basic biology, an extraordi-
nary new dimension was coming into being: culture.
Upright walking freed the hands, alloAving protohumans to use

as tools a wider range of naturally occurring objects than their
knuckle-walking and tree-swinging ancestors had used. When they
began to modify such found objects, they created the first artifacts.
The oldest solid evidence for culture is the chipped stone artifacts —
tools or weapons, made to a common pattern — that date to two-and-
a-half million years ago. Ho^vever, it is likely that many of the very
earliest things that our remote ancestors invented to extend their
po^vers over the outside ^vorld Avere made not of chipped stone but of
less durable materials — grasses, skins, bark, and wood. Their per-
ishability has meant that they have not survived for archaeologists to
find. The first stone tools are usually considered to have been made
by male hunters. They may well have been, but a large amount of evi-
dence relating to sex, brain size, and changes in the mechanics of
childbirth supports the idea that it was women who led the way in
the creation of a distinctively human culture.

In an alternative universe we could have stayed on all fours, re-
taining a wide birth canal that would have presented no problems for
a large head. But without free hands, it is unlikely that humanlike in-
telligence could have been selected for. Walking upright not only pro-
moted tool using, it increased the possibilities for communication.
The torso was given more freedom, independent of basic forward
movement. The lungs and diaphragm were suddenly able to make
more complex sounds. Around 1.6 million years ago, language
emerged, and with it the first declarations of love, both sincere and
insincere. It is probable that the first clothing was invented around
this time too. Although we lack direct evidence, it is likely that cloth-
ing was initially used to conceal or enhance the genital region and
therefore extend conscious control over bodily expressions.
Clothing, in turn, gave rise to the idea of gender — the extension
of aspects of sex beyond obvious biological attributes. Clothing \vas
from the outset "male or "female." As such, the
"
ability to interchange
clothing gave rise to a new level of sexual awareness — the awareness

of gender ambiguity. The bodies of prehistoric humans, denuded of
their apeish hair, became material objects themselves. People could
manipulate their own images through the use of cosmetics — applying
body paints to their new expanses of naked skin. Sex itself became
more tactile and prolonged. There are strong indications that prehis-
toric society utilized natural methods of birth control; I argue that for
the past four million years the human line has been able to con-
sciously separate sex from reproduction.
Culture provided sexual selection Avith massive new scope. Mate
choice Avas no longer solely a matter of sizing up the relative merits of
the basic inherited personality and appearance of a prospective part-

ner. Now learned skills — singing, hunting, dancing, and painting —
came to play an ever greater role in sexual attraction. The human
brain continued to enlarge, from 1.6 million years to sometime just af-
ter 150,000 years ago, when "anatomically modern" humans first ap-
peared. Since the period does not seem to have presented any
obvious environmental challenge that only larger brains could meet,
the enhanced cultural capacities of ever larger brains could have been
a sexual fix. Love songs and nicely arranged bouquets may have been
at least as important as aggression in the life of the species.
The implications of this ne^v picture of human evolution are far-
reaching. Much as Sigmund Freud once claimed that "anatomy is
destiny," many geneticists and sociobiologists no\v make the claim

that we are the slaves of our genes. They say that our sexual behav-
ior, along with our sexual politics, is built-in, instinctive, and best un-
derstood in terms of animal behavior patterns. They have reached the
conclusion that ^vomen have fundamentally different sexual and re-
productive aims than men and, therefore, that certain imbalances in
the modern world are biologically inevitable. For them, man is "Man
8 The Preh id to ry of Sex
the Hunter," a potentially promiscuous and inventive creature that

women attempt — and fail— to keep in check. Although this view has
been widely criticized, it is still popular. By contrast, some feminists
have argued that women have a natural biological superiority and

that the modern state of patriarchy, the oppression of women by men,
is a passing interruption in the more natural state of matriarchy.
Matriarchy as an early phase human development ^vas first
in
envisaged by Victorian ethnographers. These men were deeply im-

pressed, not to say shocked, by encounters with certain native peo-
ples of the British Empire who enjoyed what we might think of today
as a degree of sexual equality. They concluded that women must be
in control because the men were not and somebody had to be. (Freud
thought that 1930s America was a matriarchy!) These supposedly
matriarchal peoples were considered "primitive" — on a low rung of a
universal ladder of social betterment. Further, their particular social
organization was thought to have been true prehistorically of all peo-
ples in the world.
The idea of a prehistoric society ruled by women remains popu-

lar to this day. The influential theories of the late Marija Gimbutas of
UCLA suggest that, in prehistoric Europe, the supreme deity was a
mother goddess, "The Great Earth Mother," and was represented
during the last ice age, around 25,000 years ago, by little ivory and
stone "Venus" figurines depicting fleshy naked women. But given
that the widespread imagery of the Virgin Mary today does not
demonstrate that the pope is a woman, the statuettes could be telling
us something quite different. Indeed, in the light of other evidence
from the Ice Age, I believe that they indicate that dominant males
practiced polygyny — the taking of several wives.
Whatever the figurines actually represented, it is clear that "pre-
historic society" was not uniform. Once culture was invented, cul-
tural variation blossomed. Although humans may have had built-in
reproductive aims in the remote past, their extraordinarily varied
lives and experiences thereafter can be explained only by reference to
culture. Although common biological drives and potentialities clearly
play a part in every community, what humans do is not governed by

any simple "human nature." Freud was wrong: anatomy is not des-
tiny. Our behavior and achievements are at least as tied up with cul-
tural and social expectations as Avith the inherited shapes of our bod-
ies; further, our innovative technology continually alters the nature of
the \vorld we live and achieve in.
In a nutshell, humans have managed to pull ahead of the rest of
the animal world by effectively opting out of Darwinian evolution.

Instead, we now undergo — the inheri-
a sort of Lamarckian evolution
tance of learned information — not through genes but through culture.
Instead of slowly, biologically adapting to different environments as
we spread out from Africa across the globe, we used culture to adapt
those environments to ourselves.
All modern humans share the same underlying biological drives
and built-in physical potentialities, which to a degree are inescapable.
Women can give birth, while men cannot. But, while the widespread
oppression of ^vomen in the modern world may have its roots deep in
prehistory, those roots are as likely to be cultural as biological. A ma-
jor event in the development of sexual inequality occurred, I argue,
^vhen farming was invented, a system by Avhich people could produce
food ^vhen they wanted it rather than relying, like every other mam-
malian species, on natural availability. In the Near East and Europe
this process began around 10,000 years ago, when people began to
settle do^vn in permanent villages— the "Neolithic revolution." Ironi-

cally, although women \vere central to its early development, farming
quickly led to their general oppression. The domestication of animals
and the availability of animal milk in addition to breast milk meant
that women could raise children in quicker succession than before,
becoming ever more tied to hearth and home in the process.
The choices humans make about sex and reproduction can alter
or even deny biology. We have condom machines, breast implants,

and penile augmentations, artificial insemination, purdah, surrogate
pregnancies and cesarean births, drag queens and drag kings, cir-
cumcisions and clitoridectomies, telephone sex and cybersex, monas-

teries and brothels, erotic art, pornography, censorship, and a vast
range of marriage types. All are part of our sexual culture. More pre-
cisely, they are individual components of the many different and of-
ten mutually exclusive sexual cultures in the \vorld today. As

10 The Prehldtory of Sex
anthropologist Ernest Gellner has noted, "What the human species
does share genetically is an unbelievable degree of behavioural plas-

ticity or volatility. . . . But possibly the most important sociological
fact about mankind is that this plasticity is very seldom much in evi-
dence within single on-going communities." Culture, a product of con-

sciousness and free will, paradoxically involves elaborate systems of
prohibition. Different societies have different codes of sexual con-
duct, but in every society individuals transgress. The idea that there
is a sexual line that must not be crossed but in practice often is, is far
older than the story of Eve's temptation by the serpent.
Only archaeology can take us back that far. The archaeological

record — the totality of surviving material traces of the human past —
can be divided into three or four broad types of evidence. First, there
are human reinauu — skeletons or more fully preserved bodies. They

are excavated from graves or salvaged by archaeologists from sites of
ancient sacrifices, battles, or accidental deaths (as in the case of the
Iceman). The second sort of evidence comprises things that people
have made, be they small, portable, individual artifactj, or larger jitej,
the remains of houses or cemeteries, where lots of artifacts are found

together. Some sites appear as discrete monuments, like Stonehenge,
while others cover large areas and have no distinct focus, as in the
case of the Val Camonica, an Alpine valley close to Avhere the Iceman
^vas found; its rocky walls are thickly covered with mysterious pre-
historic engravings.
Prehistoric humans modified entire landscapes, producing a

wide range of environmental effects. These landscapes constitute a
third type of archaeological evidence, called ecofactd. The recently
documented rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels is an ecofact,
as is the continued felling and burning of the tropical rainforests,
^vhich contributes to it. Archaeologists can study such phenomena as
they occurred in the past by a variety of means, such as by chemically
testing lake sediments and analyzing the plant pollen found in peat
bogs from different ages. By such means they have been able to
prove that the arid, rocky landscape of much of modern Greece as
well as the distinctive heather moorlands of England are ecofacts,
both caused by prehistoric deforestation and soil degradation.
Somew^here in between artifacts and ecofacts are faunal and pa-

leobotanical evidence — the traces of human use or human impact on
animals and plants. By studying fragments of butchered and cooked
bone, carbonized grains, preserved nutshells, and so on, from care-
fully excavated and dated units of soil (contexts), archaeologists are
able to reconstruct many aspects of prehistoric diet. The jury is still
out on whether the first humans in North America, who arrived

around 13,000 years ago, ^vere responsible for the subsequent and
rapid mass extinction of the big game animals they hunted, but it
seems likely that they were. Prehistoric people were as capable of

grossly exploiting their world as we are today. How a society treats
the natural environment and ho^v it views food are both closely con-
nected to its attitudes toward sex and to the particular quality of the
relations between the sexes. The rapidly expanding agricultural pop-

ulations of Neolithic Europe s^vamped the hunting and foraging peo-
ples v^ho had lived there before by sheer force of numbers. Farming
set in motion a cycle of ecological devastation — intimately connected
with human sexual and reproductive aims — that seems set to con-
tinue until the world's last surviving forests vanish under the plo^v.
The archaeological record is a mixture of the intentional and the
unintentional. The felling of the rainforests today is deliberate, but
the connected increase in carbon dioxide levels is not. Stonehenge

was surely intentionally designed to impress, and it still impresses,
whereas sites where food was processed were not usually consciously
designed as "statements" and come to light only through careful exca-
vation by archaeologists sifting small pieces of animal bones from the
soil and painstakingly cataloging discarded oyster
shells and nut ker-
nels.The Iceman died by accident and was preserved w^here he fell,

with his everyday clothes on — clothes he almost certainly would not
have v^ânted to be seen dead in. More usually, archaeologists exca-
vate bodies from graves that contain a careful selection of objects —

grave goods — that ^vere intended to convey a particular message
about the deceased to the wider society and to its gods. The messages
that such objects communicate in death may contrast greatly wîth the
facts of the person's life.
Getting at the truth about prehistory is almost terminally diffi-

cult. Prehistoric art, much of which has explicit sexual content,

obviously depicts things that people thought about, but it may not
fairly reflect what they actually did. A Stone Age rock engraving
made in eastern Siberia around the same time that the Iceman lived
depicts a man on skis, attempting to sexually penetrate a moose

(Figure 7.Et). While the act probably coLdd have been brought to a
successful conclusion, the picture is more likely primarily symbolic.
The man has a birdlike head, and the scene may illustrate the super-
human prowess of a shaman. It could even be a visual joke. Actually,
these interpretations are not mutually exclusive. Art often idealizes.
The robust architectural curves of the Venus figurines may never
have been fully attained by human females in life, but in living Ice
Age wômen beauty was probably gauged against such models. The
"unintentional" archaeological record provides a useful foil to the
image dressing of our prehistoric ancestors: processed husks can tell
us whether a prehistoric people used aphrodisiacs; traces of disease

on a skeleton may indicate which sections of a community Avere
most affected.
On the Avhole, hoAvever, very fcAv material remains survive from

prehistory. Human sexual culture is made up of both permanent ma-
terial things (jewelry, penis sheaths, erotic imagery) and transient or
immaterial things (songs, dances, romantic ideals). Archaeologists
can directly study only the physical remains of past cultures, al-
though careful interpretation may provide insights into other realms.

Feet calloused in a particular Avay, for example, coupled with care-
fully manicured fingernails, may demonstrate that a male Egyptian
mummy was a professional dancer in life; temple friezes may show
the types of dances that he performed.
Although only firsthand accounts, w^hich are absent in the ar-
chaeological record, can express the detail and inner emotions of peo-
ple's sexual lives, archaeological methods do have a certain advantage
in that archaeological evidence relates to real activities, free from the
frequent dishonesty of words. In Tucson, Arizona, archaeologist Bill
Rathje has been conducting a long-term project at the municipal rub-

bish dump. His students spend their time sorting fresh rubbish into
categories and building up a picture of what people discard. Rathje 's
reconstruction of diet in the city is different from the picture that so-
ciologists obtained through questionnaires. The questionnaire re-
sponses from one neighborhood, for example, suggest that only 15

percent of households consume beer, with none exceeding eight cans
a week. The archaeological analysis, based on used beer containers
and packaging, shows that 54 percent of households discard more
than eight cans a week (the average being fifteen cans), while only 20
percent of households appeared "beer free."
One of the most sensitive areas of garbage work relates to sex-
ual practices. The rubbish in any large municipal dump includes dis-
carded contraceptives and their packaging, broken sex toys,

punctured inflatables and worn clothing, medicines related to sexual
diseases, and lots of pornography — some of it commercial, some pri-
vately created. Although Rathje works with Tucson's sanitation de-
partment, he needs the informal support of the people of the
municipality as well. It is therefore not surprising that he has not pro-
duced any analysis of any sexual materials he may have found, com-
paring what people actually do with what they admit to. (The
presence of Rathje s team of sorters has probably altered the way the
people of Tucson dispose of sensitive or embarrassing items anyway.)
In modern Tucson most of the material evidence the researchers
find can be quite easily identified. For prehistoric studies, hoAvever,
there is a problem: it is not always possible to tell what something

was used for. Very often what survives is a component of something
bigger and more complex. It is a standing joke that the artifacts that
archaeologists cannot easily identify get put in the wonderful, catch-
all category of "ritual objects." Nevertheless, new techniques are be-
ginning to tell us more about the use of quite common objects. Gas
chromatography, for example, makes it possible to analyze the chemi-
cal residues sometimes found inside prehistoric bowls and cups and
thus to identify minute traces of milk, opium, olive oil, pine resin, and
so on.
In modern Tucson it can be assumed that people have an idea of
"sexuality," but this assumption cannot necessarily be made for pre-
historic communities. Sex clearly has had an important place in all
human societies. "Sex," as the anthropologist Bronislaw Malino^vski

wrote in 1929, "is not a mere physiological transaction ... it implies
love and love-making; it becomes the nucleus of such venerable insti-
tutions as marriage and the family; it pervades art and it produces its
spells and magic. It dominates in fact almost every aspect of culture."

But because of this ubiquity, studying sex objectively is not easy.
Sexual culture is full of subtle and sometimes contradictory mean-
ings.The French writer Michel Foucault in his Hldtoiy of Sexuality ar-
gued that "sexuality is a modern idea. That is, the wôrd conjures up
"
a specifically Western, nineteenth- and twentieth-century idea of sex-

ual identity — of sex as the psychological center of the individual.
Nowadays it is widely believed that everyone has their own personal
sexuality. One's "true" sexuality, or sexual orientation, may either be
lived and celebrated or repressed and hidden; it can be searched for
through introspection, through encounters wîth different sexual part-
ners, and through sessions with a psychoanalyst. But people in Me-

dieval Europe did not think about sex this way. Nor did the ancient
Greeks or Babylonians. Nor do many people, both Western and non-
Western, in the world today. It is thus effectively certain that prehis-
toric peoples — in all their variety — did not have ideas of sex corresponding
to our current post- Freudian ones.
In this respect the idea of artificial insemination with 5,000-year-

old sperm brings up some difficult questions, even beyond those of
contemporary ethics, connected to what Otzi himself might have
thought about fathering children. Was he married? His belongings
and tattoos could, like a vvêdding ring today, have expressed such a
status, but it is impossible to tell at present. Indeed, it is not certain
w^hether the institution of marriage even existed in European society
v^hen he lived or, if it did, vv^hether it was monogamous, polygamous,
polyandrous, or something else. Did Otzi see any connection be-
tween sex and babies, and if so, what sort of connection? Perhaps he
took no interest in heterosexual sex.
The Iceman has been sexually "claimed" not only by Avomen as a
prospective sperm donor but by homosexual men as a prehistoric role
model. A Viennese gay magazine. Lambda Nachrichten, ran a story
claiming that sperm were preserved not only in Otzi's testicles but in
his rectum: "Otzi was the first known homosexual man. . . . Otzi was
"
the passive partner — of this there is absolutely no doubt . . . the

sperm has been carbon dated." This story spread rapidly in popular
newspapers and among gay communities on both sides of the Atlantic
and Avas taken as proof that the gay lifestyle has a respectable prehis-
toric pedigree. One idea heard in British archaeological circles was
that the odd mix of objects found with Otzi indicated that he had
been a shaman, whose alternative sexuality would have constituted
just one part of his social "specialness." But in the end, as with the
missing penis, the story turned out to be a fantasy. No semen was ac-
tually found in the Iceman's rectum.
It was not that semen was looked for and not identified, but that
semen was not looked for. Still, even if investigation were to discover
that Otzi's rectum ^vas clear of semen, that would not mean that it
had never contained it. Further, if there Avere traces, it wôuld not
prove that Otzi was a \villing participant in getting it there. Indeed, it
would have no necessary relevance to his sexual practices in life,

since he could have had voluntary homosexual encounters and he
could also have been homosexually raped. (Although it ^vould have
been unlikely in the blizzard conditions that led to his death,
necrophilia might also have to be considered.)
That semen has not been looked for in the Iceman's rectum is
partly because the rectum itself has not yet been found. As Konrad
Spindler writes, "The anal region of the corpse, through to the bony
pelvic area, was destroyed by the first [nonarchaeological] recovery
team and their pneumatic chisel. No examinations were conducted on
the soft tissue in the pelvis, nor were samples taken. The rectum has
not even been identified in the computer tomograph of the body's
internal organs, greatly shrunk as they were through dehydration."
Nevertheless, although an analysis of Otzi's rectum may turn out to be
impossible to conduct, we have independent grounds for doubting that
it is on the investigating team's agenda. As Spindler has w^ritten, he and
his colleagues felt great pressure during the first months of analysis of
the body in the face of "often absurd reports in the media.
In his book on the Iceman, Spindler gives a fairly detailed

(although unillustrated) account of the Iceman's genital region. He felt
compelled to do so, he says, in the face of press speculation. There

16 The P re h id to ry of Sex
would "normally have been no need," he writes, "to dwell at such

length on the more intimate parts of the Iceman's body — but wild
speculation must be refuted with scientifically corroborated facts ... a
Neolithic man is available as an object of research to us. . . . Nothing of
the kind could have been expected by the man himself, and it probably
wôuld not have been compatible with his religious sentiments. . . .
Thus, ^ê are all the more obliged to apply the ethical and moral stan-
dards of our society to his dead body." Spindler goes on to say that a
Jesuit theologian, Dr. Hans Rotter, has "urged us, notwithstanding
the scientific interest of the case, not to overstep the limits of piety and
to preserve the human dignity of the Iceman even beyond his death."
Spindler's point is a serious one, but it is nevertheless the prod-

uct of confused thinking. He assumes that the Iceman's sexuality was
an "intimate" matter, but no one can know if it was. And even if it
Avas, hoAv do we kno^v which areas of his body were involved in his
sexuality? Some societies consider the nape of the neck and the feet
to be sexual and intimate. We do not know for certain which parts of

Otzi's body he considered sexual and/or intimate. Yet Spindler's re-
search team has had no qualms about subjecting most of Otzi's body
and all of his belongings — perhaps sacred or even taboo belongings —
to a wide ^âriety of scans and tests.
In the light of Foucault's argument, we cannot assume that our

modern way of thinking about sex — either biologically or sociocul-
turally — is necessarily any more objective
than any other way of thinking about
sex. Even within the rather narrow
Western tradition of thinking
about sex, from Plato to Shere
Hite, it is clear that no one has
ever had a monopoly on the
(Fig. 0.2) Male homosexual anal sex; a
broken pottery vessel from the Moche culture
of Peru (A.D. 1-600). Drawing by George
Taylor after Williams 1986: plate 1.

(Fig. 0.3) Male lovers; pottery vessel from the Vicus culture
of Peru (500-1 B.C.). Drawing by George Taylor after
Williams 1986: plate 2.
truth about our bodies. Nor

is there any single -^^
overarching definition
of what constitutes
sexual behavior in hu-
mans, apes, or higher mammals (al-
though it seems to depend on a mixture of things learned, things

inherited, and things chanced).
It is easy to be judgmental about the sexual mores of other soci-
eties. The sixteenth-century Spanish were outraged by the wide-
spread homosexuality and transvestism that they found among the
indigenous peoples they conquered in the Americas. They systemati-
cally destroyed sculptures, jewelry, and monuments that depicted and
celebrated such practices. Today some museum curators still keep ar-
chaeological material that they consider "indecent" or inappropriate

for public display under lock and key; several important collections
of Roman "brothel tokens," small coinlike objects that depict the sex-
ual service that has been paid for, currently languish, unpublished, in
European museum basements. And where there is no information, in-
vention takes over, as in the Otzi case.

Because of the inaccessibility, for a variety of reasons, of data re-
lating to prehistoric sexuality worldwide, I have focused in the latter
part of the book (which deals wîth the later prehistoric period) on
Europe, western Asia, and the former Soviet Union. These are areas
that I know well and where my colleagues and contacts have been
able to help me track down hidden or little-known material. Despite
this focus, many of the themes relevant to this material are of univer-
sal significance (or have now become so through the pervasive influ-
ence of Western ideology). Starting around 5,000 years ago, it is
possible to document great variation in human sexuality in Eurasia:

bestiality, homosexuality, prostitution (emphatically not the oldest
18 The PrehlcitoryofSex
profession), transvestism (male and female), transsexuality, hormone

treatments, sadomasochism, a vigorous interest in contraception,
ideas about racially "pure" breeding, sex as an acrobatic and competi-
tive pastime, and sex as a transcendental spiritual discipline. This
variation ^vent underground when Christian values were publicly
adopted, whereupon the chivalric ideal of romantic, preferably un-
consummated love gave rise to a vicAv of physical sex as essentially
sinful and forbidden, the legacy of ^vhich lingers on.
Despite these relatively recent influences on our experience of

sex, the last few thousand years represent just a tiny part of the four-
million-year saga of its prehistory. By taking a long view of the evolu-

tion of human sexual culture — by seeing what people actually did,
rather than making claims about ^vhat they ought to have done — we
\vill be better able to consider our options for the next four million
years.
Cnapter 1
l^JLaking tne JDeast
witn JLwo JDacks:
Tne Evolution or
Human Sexual Culture
Brabantio: What profane wretch art thou?

lago: / am you
one, dir, that corned to tell
your daughter and the Moor are now
making the beadt with two backd.
Shakespeare,
Othello
I ago's words conjure up ideas of love, lust, and jealousy, of sex as an

intimate and a public act, of our fragile difference from animals, and of
the potentially explosive differences bet^veen us as humans. "The beast
with two backs" is the product of a prehistoric animal nature trans-
formed by culture. Geneticists say that we share about 98 percent of
our genetic code with chimpanzees, but between us and them is a
ya^vning chasm of mutual incomprehension. That chasm did not
aWays exist — eight million years ago ^ve sprang from a common
ancestor. But while chimps stayed relatively little changed, from four
million years ago onward the human line began to evolve rapidly.
Between then and now at least a dozen species of hominids came and
went, some following on from previous ones, others developing in tan-
dem. These intermediate creatures, known from their fragmentary fos-
silized bones and a few rudimentary stone tools, are difficult to flesh
out. Yet they hold the key to understanding our unique humanity.
We did not reach our present incarnation because men were

great hunters ^vho needed to become naked to lose heat (the man-
the-hunter theory), or because ^ve evolved in the sea Avhere large ma-
ternal breasts served as infant buoyancy aids (the aquatic theory), or
because women and children were provided with meat by men ^vho
were provided wîth sex (the monogamy theory). Instead, I believe,
our evolution was a complicated and chancy matter in which sexual

attraction and the emergence of culture played crucial roles. Many of
the most striking evolutionary changes in humans probably have to
do with jexual selection, like the favoring of features such as naked-

ness that \vere deemed attractive rather than being of any great in-
herent or natural benefit.

It is often assumed that men made all the great cultural ad-
vances while vvômen looked on, huddled with their babies at the back
of the cave. But we have good reason to believe that some of the most
crucial inventions enabling human development Avere made by
wômen. The seemingly trivial invention of the papoose or baby-sling,
around 1.8 million years ago, I argue, ^vas critical in enabling a longer
and more intense period of infant brain development, culminating in
the emergence of language. Language marked a watershed in our re-
productive and sexual lives, opening up a new world of deceptive

possibilities.
The Mletting Link*^ MUding Penid

If apes are hairy half-brained creatures that swing in trees, squeal,
and mate promiscuously, ^vhile Ave humans cover our nakedness with
clothes, walk erect, talk, marry our sweethearts, and regulate our sex
lives in a civilized manner, then what would an evolutionarily inter-
Making the Beast with Two Backs 21
mediate creature be like? The popular answer is that "he" is a semi-

hairy, stooped figure who dresses in a torn-fur loincloth, lives in a
cave, and grunts out his words in a clumsy "me Tarzan, you Jane"
manner. He takes his woman without consent and uses a club to
frighten off any competition. This Apeman is popular wîth filmmak-
ers and cartoonists, but their photo-fit portrait of him did not come
out of nowhere. It came — sexism and all — from academic textbooks.
A familiar kind of image of human evolution, reproduced in Fig-
ure 1.1 from From Ape to Adam, a textbook from 1971, shows a series
of fleshed-out individuals on the road to the present. The figure on

the far left resembles a chimpanzee, stooped and shaggy. Next comes
a simple missing-link type, who becomes progressively bigger and
less hairy, stumbling as best he can, carrying a club or a rock. The
penultimate figure on the right is Primitive Man, capable of fully
erect wâlking and noticeably bearded; as yet he is too short to hold
his head proudly, and he squints beneath dark jutting brows. Finally,
Anatomically Modern Man appears, naked, ^vith his head held high;
he sports a fine forked beard and swept-back hair, and he totes a
spear of his o^vn manufacture. Biological evolution and cultural evo-
lution are separated in these images, which suggest that uprightness,
nakedness, and brain po^ver all preceded the cultural ascent to cloth-
ing. Biological evolution is shown as a gradual affair, wherein our an-
cestors suffered hundreds of thousands of years of stiff necks and
backaches in their struggle to become upright.
More recent artists' impressions, such as the one in Figure 1.2,
are more realistic about the switch to walking upright. The chim-
panzeelike creature on the far left does it in only one step and loses
hair quickly in evolutionary terms. The disjunction between biology
and culture is less marked than in Figure 1.1: the figures in the mid-
dle carry more than one thing — a burning brand and a flint tool, or a
flint tool and a spear. Nevertheless, as in Figure 1.1, we are shown as
hairless long before we invent clothing. Perhaps this is a reflection of
the Garden of Eden myth. — not until Ave left Africa did we discover,
like Adam, our shame. Only modern man, in this case an archaeolo-
gist, is free to stride out, left leg forward this time, safe in the knoAvl-
edge that his genitals are tucked away inside his pants.
22 The Prehijtory of Se.\
(Fig. 1.1) From Ape to Adam, frontispiece by Rudy Zallinger: estate of Rudy Zallinger.
The two pictures share many misleading features. Although con-

vention bound both artists to show a sequence of lone individuals, the
reality is that as far as we know, humans have always been sexual, so-
cial, and group-living. In both pictures the figures gradually become

taller —â physical
^
and symbolic ascent to full humanity. But this im-
age is now known to be incorrect: 1.6 million years ago, around the
time fire was first controlled, our ancestors were actually taller than
the average person in most modern communities. In Figure l.I,
Anatomically Modern Man is clearly white, and in Figure 1.2 all the
figures are pale-skinned; yet we know that human evolution took
place in Africa, ^vhere people generally have dark skin.
Both pictures are male centered. Man, not Woman, is seen as
the key figure in evolution, even though it is woman's womb and
pelvis that must actually accommodate each evolutionary novelty.
The male slant is reflected in the titles of the books: From Ape to Adam
isunambiguous, while The Evolution of Early Man includes women
only by virtue of the supposition that the word man can imply both
"men and women" and "men not women" Avithout confusion. So famil-
iar is the doublethink that it is sometimes hard to see what the prob-
lem is, but phrases man typically breast-fed for five years"
like "early
and "man's clitoris became much reduced" may serve as a useful re-
minder. In fact, in these pictures it is impossible to tell w^hat the ape-
men had between their legs. The coy leg-in-front reconstructions are
symbolic of a wider unAvillingness to acknowledge the centrality of
sex to evolution.
Our sexual and reproductive lives are unlike those of any other
(Fig. 1.2) The Evolution of Early Man, frontispiece by Giovanni Caselli, with a text by Bernard Wood.
Reproduced by kind permission of Giovanni Caselli.
animal. Our sex organs are highly unusual. Compared with other pri-
mates, human males have massive penises, ^vhich are visible even
v^hen flaccid. Our naked skin is also unique among primates; com-
bined Avith distinct patches of pubic hair, it further emphasizes the
genital region in men and sharply defines it in women, who otherwise
lack the brightly colored and swollen sexual skin that marks primate
females in estrus. Buttocks, Avhich primates also lack, are a focus of
sexual attention in both women and men. Additionally, women have
distinct breasts, whose form cannot easily be explained functionally
in terms of lactation (all other primates produce milk without them)
but that are considered sexually attractive in all known human cul-
tures.
Most likely, penis size \vas also gradually increasing among

early hominids. Gorillas, orangutans, chimps, and bonobos all have
when flaccid. The most
vanishingly small penises, effectively invisible
common explanation for big penises in humans is that we evolved
them under conditions of furious "sperm competition." Sperm compe-
tition has been documented in many primates where females have nu-
merous heterosexual liaisons. The male by Avhom a female becomes

pregnant is thus not her exclusive mate; at any one time she may be
carrying the sperm of several males — sperm that compete to reach
and fertilize the ovum. A male's success in sperm competition relates

to the amount of semen that he can produce. This does not have a
simple s^vamping or displacing effect, but contains functionally dif-
ferent types of sperm, in varying proportions. Some sperm is geared
24 The Preh id tory of Sex
at fertilization, some is geared to blocking the sperm of other males,

and some is geared to attacking it.
For humans, the argument runs, the longer the penis is, the
closer the sperm can be placed to the mouth of the cervix, and the
more of a previous male's sperm will be physically displaced. But this
argument makes no sense. The vagina is highly elastic, and it expands
to accommodate virtually any size penis; the penis, for its part, ejacu-
lates with force and direction that are independent of its size. The
great apes, who have multiple partners and who evolved large testi-
cles to produce copious quantities of sperm (chimps produce about

three times more than humans, relative to body weight), do not have
large penises.
What is important about the human penis is not its mechanical
fertilizing capacity when erect but its flaccid visibility. Various meth-
ods of penis lengthening are used around the world, but none, not
even modern surgical penile augmentation, has much effect on the
modern surveys looking at the reasons men
size of the erection. In
undergo penile augmentation surgery, very few respondents cite

pressure from a heterosexual partner, such as a wife. It is not so
much sexual pleasure as prowess in the locker room that men buy
when they undergo this procedure. Having a big one is part of male-
male competition and, perhaps, bonding. Still, this is not to say that
female preferences played no part in the evolution of bigger penises
in humans.
Both upright walking and the evolution of nakedness made the
penis more visible, so that flaccid size became an issue. Moreover,
having a penis became an increasingly important visual signal of an
individual's biological sex. Among gorillas, males and females are eas-
ily distinguished by their body size. The males are far larger, and they
compete with one another through body size for control over harems;
penis size, beyond basic functionality, seems irrelevant. Human males
and females, on the other hand, are of similar body size. Although
men are bigger on average, a significant proportion of adult females
are actually bigger than some adult males. Features like genital ap-
pearance and the presence or absence of breasts or beards, conse-

quently, take on a far greater importance in visually differentiating
—
the sexes. Once the penis became a visual criterion of manhood, its
evolutionary groAvth was guaranteed. In any generation there will al-
ways be jome women who favor bigger penises, and few or none who
positively favor smaller ones, so a trend toward greater length was
established. The upper limit of penis size wâs set by considerations of
physical comfort during intromissive sex, and by the basic mechanics
of penile erection.
In a completely naked ape, however, the unruly nature of the
male penis, coupled with its obvious visibility, could have made it a li-
ability. Primate sexual and social behavior is very complex and is
based on the evolution of Machiavellian intelligence — the ability to
mask one's true emotions and feign others that may be strategically
advantageous. Jane Goodall in particular has described this among

the chimpanzees of Gombe. Having an erect penis clearly signals sex-
ual interest, whether the mind wills it or not. Although pygmy chimps
sit and lean back to deliberately display their erections when court-
ing, their fur and their gait probably alloAv them to hide an erection
better than a fully bipedal, upright vvâlking primate can. Two ques-
tions, therefore, arise in relation to the development of large penises
in humans. First, why did men become as denuded of hair women,
as
vvîth their pubic hair and genitalia framed in the same stark manner
against relatively bare skin? Second, did clothing — Adam's fig leaf
develop along with the evolution in penis size?

The ans^ver to the first question has to do Avith pleiotropy — the
process by which changes that evolutionary pressures bring about on
one sex of a species are reflected to a degree in the other sex as well.
Genetically, mammals are unlike birds in that particular features ac-

quired by one sex are typically reflected to some degree in the other.
Thus horns and antlers, developed for display and battle by billy
goats and stags, are present to a lesser degree in nanny goats and
does. It is likely that a sexual selection for nakedness in women
wôuld be reflected in men but would not become so strongly estab-
lished. That is exactly how things stand with humans today.
The question of clothing depends on the degree of cultural de-
velopment in different periods of hominid evolution. Unfortunately,
the development of clothing is very difficult to follow^, since soft, or-
ganic materials do not survive in the archaeological record from this

remote period. Nevertheless, there are other, indirect ways by which
we can hypothesize about cultural developments.
Man the Hunter?
A and ingrained prejudice holds that men were at the fore-

familiar
front of developed culture, while ^vomen somehow stayed more nat-
ural. Prehistoric men, according to the mainly male academics who
studied them, went off to the hunt, wielding their newly made stone
weapons, while women sat nursing the babies back in the cave.
Hunting was thought to have expanded men's minds, which ex-

plained their (claimed) greater intelligence.
Darwin thought that men were more intelligent than ^vomen
(partly on the basis of a lifelong preponderance of wins in backgam-
mon games against his wife).He believed that intelligence had arisen
out of competition among men to win and subsequently provide for
women. "Thus," Darwin wrote, "man has ultimately become superior
to wôman. It is indeed fortunate that the lav^^ of equal transmission of
characters to both sexes prevails with mammals. Otherwise it is prob-
able that man would have become as superior in mental endowment
to woman as the peacock is in ornamental plumage to the pea hen."
Recently, the man-the-hunter theory of human origins has been
roundly and justly criticized as sexist. It may be true that in prehis-
tory, as in every known hunter-gatherer society today, hunting was
mainly (but not necessarily exclusively) done by men and gathering
was mainly (but not necessarily exclusively) done by women. In re-
sponse to some female students who thought this assumption sexist,
archaeologist Linda Hurcombe has written:
Women breast-feeding children cannot leave offspring for

long periods, children can more easily contribute to their
own food-getting requirements if they collect static and
usually non-threatening plant resources, on a hunt children
may not be able to be kept quiet, to move quickly enough,

or may slow down an adult too much if they are carried.
The age of children can affect a woman's role in the food-
getting strategy; the children may be left in the care of el-
ders of both sexes while the younger and fitter community

members go off on longer trips. ... To say that such ideas
are sexist is to miss the point of sexual dimorphism as an
evolutionary strategy and to be biased by our own cultural
experience of the JtaUui of activities.The female students
wanted women to be seen as hunters because this was the
task they valued more.
was a mainly male activ-

Irrespective of ^vhether or not hunting
ity, the man-the-hunter theory certainly doAvngrades women's role in
biocultural evolution. The theory holds that hunting formed the

backdrop by which men developed language (in organizing the hunt)
and made technological innovations (designing weapons), the bene-
fits down to females, vv^ho were passive and bi-
of ^vhich then trickled
ologically hampered. The evolution of nakedness has also been
explained in relation to hunting, notably by zoologist Desmond Mor-
ris in his 1967 book The Naked Ape. Morris argued that nakedness was
a cooling device (although he recognized that lions and cheetahs hunt
well in their fur). Humans would have needed to lose their fur, he
concluded, since the
essential difference between the hunting ape and his carni-
vore rivals ^vas that he was not physically equipped to

make lightning dashes after his prey. . . . But this is never-
theless precisely Avhat he had to do. He succeeded because

of his better brain, leading to more intelligent manoeuvring
and more lethal weapons, but despite this such efforts must
have put a huge strain on him. . . . By losing the heavy coat
of hair and by increasing the number of sweat glands all
over the body surface, considerable cooling could be

28 The PrehldtoryofSex
achieved — not for minute-by-minute living, but for the

supreme moment of the chase— with the production of a
generous film of evaporating liquid over his air-exposed
straining limbs and trunk.
The basic flaws in Morris's hunting-and-hair-loss theory are

twofold. First, men were not compelled to make such extreme efforts.
Early humans probably scavenged as much as they hunted, and when
they did hunt, they probably used stealth, deception, ambush, and
missiles more than speed on the ground in order to catch and kill
prey. Second, as Darwin noted, despite great variations in the degree
of hairiness of particular peoples, women are universally less hairy
than their menfolk. Darwin concluded two things from this observa-
tion: that the loss of hair occurred at an early time, before people had
dispersed out of Africa; and that the selection pressure must have op-
erated primarily on women. If Morris is correct, ^vomen ^vould be
universally hairier than men — not having hunted, they wôuld have
retained more of their useful protective fur.
Buoyant Breasts:
A Strange Aquatic Utopia
Morris has changed his mind since The Naked Ape. In his 1994 book, The
Human Animal, however, he firmly adopted an even less defensible the-
ory: that humans lost their hair because of an aquatic phase in their evo-
lution. The "aquatic ape" hypothesis was developed in the 1970s by Elaine
Morgan, from an original idea of marine biologist Sir Alister Hardy. Briefly
stated, the hypothesis is that like dolphins and whales, humans have a
naked skin with a wârming layer of subcutaneous fat beneath it. The bare-
ly visible little body hairs grow in directions that follow the flow lines of
water over a swîmming mammal. And finally, unlike any other pri-
mate, Ave have partial wêbbing between our fingers and toes.
A gap in the fossil record appears between ten and five million
years ago; Morgan argued that it is because humans lived in the sea
during that period. The support of the water in the shallows helped
us develop bipedalism, while our precise hand grip developed to help
us dive for shellfish — marine protein crucial to the development of
our larger brain. Living in the sea also explained, she thought, the de-
velopment of human breasts, which the children could grab on to like
a swimming float, while they were nursing in the surf. Women's long
head hair was also available for children to grab in the water, while
her buttocks wêre to provide some comfort if a vvôman decided to
take time out and breast-feed sitting on the gravel. The hymen was to
keep grit out —a benefit worth having even if only for one's virgin
years, according to Morgan. Childbirth also could be accomplished
better under water. Morgan cited evidence of some tropical islanders

who sometimes get in the sea to give birth, and she connected her
theory to the modern idea of water birth, first carried out in Moscow
and later popularized by the great French obstetrician Michel Odent
as part of a program of "natural" birth.
There are many things Avrong Avith the aquatic theory, not least
the absence of a single shred of positive evidence for it. The only
skeletal evidence that places our early ancestors in a water environ-
ment Homo habdu and ParanthropLU bouei skulls that have
consists of
been mauled by crocodiles. And if humans really are adapted to a ma-
rine life, ^vhy do they not still live one? The simple answer is that we
are not, so we do not. It turns out that human subcutaneous fat is not
really like that of marine mammals, and hypothermia is an ever-
present danger for us in water. The Odent-style water birth, ^vhile

quite outstanding as a technique, is "natural" only in that it generally
avoids the need for drugs or surgical intervention. The pool equip-
ment itself is cultural, not "natural," and the most critical aspect of it
is control over water temperature, as tiny babies can lose or gain heat
quickly and fatally.
Much else is left unexplained by the aquatic theory. Marine

mammals of similar size to humans, such as seals, actually do have
fur; only at a much larger size does the volume-to-surface-area ratio
allow a sea mammal to shed this insulation. The slight webbing be-
tween our fingers could not really have helped us svîm. A child can-
not really grasp a naked breast in the surf (a hairy, chimpanzeelike
30 The Prehid tory of Sex
one would actually be easier). Finally, there is the streamlined hair
flow. Alister Hardy illustrated it for a human infant, making the

claim — incorrectly, as it turns out — that such hair growth patterns
are not found in nonhuman primates. Even if they were truly evi-
dence for the aquatic theory, the theory singularly fails to explain
why humans, having gone to the bother of evolving hair in a pattern
suited to swimming, should have promptly lost it.
Lacy in the Tree with Apetnen
Recent finds have confounded old notions of human evolution by

demonstrating that walking upright came long before any significant
growth in brain size. That a threefold increase in brain size follo^ved
on from bipedalism rather than preceded it is mysterious, as the

pelvic changes that are needed to support and move a body in walk-
ing upright actually make it harder for females to bear large-headed
young.
Reconstructing human evolution is like having a few thousand
badly damaged pieces of jigsaw out of an original billion or so pieces,
and the pieces may belong to an unknow^n number of different puz-
zles. For the period from four million to one million years ago, fossil
remains of about five thousand prehuman apelike and humanlike in-
dividuals are known — an average of one per six-thousand-year pe-

riod — but they are not evenly spread out in time.
^
These five thousand

individuals may come from a dozen or so different species, and only
two skeletons are anjrwhere near complete. Many individuals are rep-
resented by as little as a single tooth or small piece of jawbone.
Still, over the past twênty-five years or so, huge advances have
been made in understanding human evolution (though the field of
human-origins research is fraught ^vith controversies and bitter per-
sonal rivalries). For one thing, we now knoAv that the old view^ of a
single evolutionary line leading from apes to humans is \vrong. Hu-
man evolution has been an explosion of variants — short ones, tall
ones, clever ones, strong ones, meat eaters, and vegetarians. Some
variants died out or were pushed out of the fold; some vvênt their own
genetic engineering, Last 500 years

AIDS, internet
writing, cities,
farming, villager
cave paintings, 25,000

Veniui figurines years ago
m.iowive<f
nakedne<f^, clothing,
I®
HOMO (\Z.
language, fire ERGASTER
manufactured toot
homebaê^ RUDOLFENSIS 1/ 01
breast,), bigger peniê^, 3.5 million

ôme upright walking years ago
5 million
tfimpledt tooL
years ago
(Fig. 1.3) Human evolutionary tree (Genus abbreviations: A = Aiuitrabpitheciui, P = Paranthivpiui,
W = Homo): \. ArdipithecLU rainidiut. 2. A. aiiameiijui. 3. Laetoli footprints. A. Lucy: A. afare/uij.
5. Taung baby: A. africamui. 6. Black Skull: P. aethopitheciuu 7. Swartkrans: P. rohiutiui.
8. Zinj: PboLiei 9. KMM-ER 1805: H. habilb. 10. H. nuhlfeii.<u {esiAy). 11. KMM-ER 1470:
H. rudolfeiuui (late). 12. Nariokotome Boy: H. erpaotei: 13. Mojokerto: H. erectiui. 14. Bodo:
early archaic //. j^z/Jii'/z,/. 15. Asian H. erectiu {\a.te). 16. Petralona skull. 17. La Ferrassie:
Neanderthal. 18. Earliest Anatomically Modern /^. cW/?z>/k'. 19. Cro Magnon.
20. Pre-conquest Americans. 21. Tasmanians. 22. Contemporary humans. Source: the author.
way for a whileand then came back; some were runaway successes.
The emerging pattern is hard to grasp at once. The diagram in Figure
1.3 serves as a rough guide. (Although some of the issues I raise may
at first seem irrelevant to my theme, they are actually crucial to the

emergence of breasts, buttocks, nakedness, larger penises, and the
other quirks of the beast with two backs.)
Humans have labeled themselves primates. Primates are a group
of mammals, the earliest of which first evolved around 7i7 million
years ago and were small furry tree-living lemurs with big front-fac-
ing eyes. Eight million years ago in eastern Africa, violent tectonic
changes created the Rift Valley with a mountain chain along its west-
ern edge. These mountains isolated the ancestors of chimps and goril-
las in the moist rainforests of central and western Africa. The east
became progressively drier; along the Rift Valley itself, around A.b
million years ago, our ancestors Avalked upright for the first time.
Coming down from the trees may not have been so much choice
as necessity — the forest was shrinking. In 1978 the prehistorian
Mary Leakey made a dramatic discovery at Laetoli in northern Tan-
zania: three sets of fossil footprints, made by creatures that had
walked upright along the shore of a prehistoric lake. Shortly after the
tracks were made, they were sealed by ash from a great volcanic
eruption. The creatures may have been fleeing from the volcano (al-
though they were not running). The volcanic ash dates to 3.5 million
years ago. The size of the Laetoli footprints and the distance between
them indicates that they were made by creatures that were about five
feet tall. Fossil bones found nearby are very fragmentary, but they
are thought to belong to a species called AiuitralopithecLLJ afarend'u, or
A. afarenju. This early type oi ALUtralopithectu was named after the
Afar region of Ethiopia where, in 1974, Don Johanson discovered
one of the most famous fossils of all— the 40 percent complete skele-
ton AL 288-1, known as Lucy (number 4 in Figure 1.3).
Johanson claimed that Lucy, along vîth the less complete

remains of fifty or so other individuals from the 3-million-year-old
former lakeside site at Hadar, is ancestral to both later australo-
pithecines and early humans. But the picture becomes more complex
both with each season of fieldwork (two more species were named
—
just during the writing of this book) and as the often very fragmen-
tary bones are analyzed and reanalyzed. What is clear is that rather
than just one "missing link, "
there are many. The pattern is pulselike.
Several times in the evolution of early humanlike creatures, a burst of

new variations can be observed, each time followed by a series of ex-
tinctions.
It is difficult to date fossils this old more precisely than to the

nearest hundred thousand years, so it is also difficult to say which
different humanlike forms were real contemporaries with one another
and ^vhich represent different evolutionary stages of the same
species. In a sense, it does not matter; the basic point is that hominids
^vere evolving rapidly. By around 1.8 million years ago, around six
different species of hominid were in existence ^vithin the same broad
east African region. By one million years ago, however, the number
vâs back down to one or two.
This pulselike pattern indicates that there was an intense
amount of competition among the emergent species of hominid. They
can be grouped into three basic types, represented in Figure 1.3 by
the robust later australopithecines, also called paranthropined (on the
right), the more gracile australopithecines and habilines (in the mid-
dle), and the early human, genus Homo group (on the left). The right-
hand and middle groups retained relatively small brains, and

although they could certainly walk upright, they never completely
left the trees. But the left-hand group, Avhich includes our direct an-
cestors, became fully savannah-living and, sometime between 2.5 and
1.8 million years ago, increased their brain size quite remarkably, to
between a half and two-thirds of the modern human average. By one
million years ago, only the large-brained species remained Homo
erectud — though with marked regional variations.
To claim that Lucy (number 4 in Figure 1.3) is ancestral to all
later lines of hominids, Johanson had to make some controversial as-

sumptions. First, in naming fossil skeleton AL 288-1 "Lucy" (after a
famous line in a Beatles song), Johanson assumed that the skeleton
was The first sex determination Avas made on the basis of
female.
pelvis shape and an overall height of around three and a half feet; he
assumed that the five-footer ^vho made the Laetoli prints was a male.
"
and that there was thus a marked male-female size difference. If he is
correct, then the "sexual dimorphism" of A afarenju would have been

about as dramatic as it is in gorillas — and not at all like the relatively
small male-female size differences of modern humans.

But there is no compelling reason why the A. afarend'u bones at
Laetoli are necessarily those of the species that made the footprints
close by. Russell Tuttle of the University of Chicago flatly disbelieves
that Lucy's foot could have made the prints. He suspects that Lucy,
along with others among the australopithecines, spent more time in the
few trees that remained than on the savannah. Peter Wheeler, of John
Moores University, Liverpool, sums up the debate simply: "If . . .
Lucy- type australopithecines wêren't good bipeds, then something

else was out there, and something else made the Laetoli trackway." A
recent reanalysis of Lucy's pelvis by Hausler and Schmid of Zurich
University concludes that Lucy could not have given birth to an in-
fant with anything like an expected average neonatal brain size for
the species. It would be better to change the name to Lucifer, they
suggest, "because with such a pelvis 'Lucy' wôuld apparently have

been the last of her species.
Breeding for Beauty
Heat regulation was important in human evolution — it is perhaps the

key reason for bipedalism on the savannah, and a crucial element in
the development of greater brain size. As we have seen, heat-loss

equations show the aquatic theory to be nonsense. The equations do
not predict, however, that wê should have lost our body hair. While it
is pleasant enough to be naked under a tropical sun, it is less than fun
to shiver at night. It seems obvious that as hair was lost, clothing ^vas
developed to compensate for it. Contrary to the impression given by
the picture in Figure 1.1, humans could never have been simply
naked. As Darwin noted, "No one supposes that the nakedness of the
skin is any direct advantage to man; his body cannot have been di-
vested of hair through natural selection." Ho\v can it then be ex-

plained? Alfred Russel Wallace, w^ho had developed a theory of
evolution similar to Darwin's, specifically excluded humans from its
implications; for Wallace, human nakedness had to have been an act

of God. But Darwin, in The Dedcent of Man, and Selection in Relation to
Sex, first published in 1871, proposed another mechanism — sexual se-
lection.
According to Darwin, sexual selection depends "on the success

of certain individuals over others of the same sex, in relation to the
propagation of the species. ' By contrast, natural selection depends
"on the success of both sexes, at all ages, in relation to the general
conditions of life." Natural and sexual selection can apparently run in
opposing directions. Sexual selection may spiral out of control, mak-
ing an animal potentially more maladaptive. Darwin believed that the
Irish elk became extinct because the massive size of the male's
antlers, which had become ever bigger through competitive display
and combat during the rut, left the species vulnerable to adverse liv-
ing conditions — under pressure, the heavy unwieldy antlers became a

fatal burden.
Hair loss happened relatively early in our evolution, Darwin ar-
gued. Women lost their hair, he believed, because men found hairless-
ness attractive, not because it was burdensome; women's loss of hair

led to a concomitant but less marked loss in men. Sexual selection on
men after we spread out from Africa resulted in very different pat-
terns of beard growth worldwide. The old idea that sexual selection
human nakedness is more logical than either the
^vas responsible for
man-the-hunter theory (which would have resulted in hairier
women) or the aquatic theory (which would have ended in extinction
from hypothermia and crocodiles), but it has not attracted much sup-
port in recent scholarship.
One reason for this lack of support may be the theory of the
Specific Mate Recognition System, or SMRS, a sort of modern ex-
tension of Darwin's basic sexual selection idea. SMRS holds that
species need to be different enough from one another to make correct
mating decisions, irrespective of differences in appearance between
the sexes within any one species. Among birds, the quickest and — in
evolutionary terms — cheapest ^vay to mark a different appearance is
to change the plumage. In the sort of competitive, rapidly speciating

situation among early hominids in eastern Africa, the ability of indi-

viduals to identify their own emergent sort of hominid would have
been crucial. Hominids did not have feathers, but they did have hair,
with patches of sexual skin. Altering the distribution of these features

could, like semaphore, have been a very useful identifying tool.
One implication of our present nonhaiiy state is that the genus
Homo became the least hairy — extending the sexual skin over most of
the body. But SMRS theory does not explain why it was we, and not
the australopithecines, who played the nakedness card first. Was it
just chance? Could an alternative evolutionary path have seen naked
australopithecines go extinct and humans as hairy as gorillas survive?
I think not. To explain why, Darwin's original theory needs to be res-

urrected, but with a twist or two. Stated in brief, I believe that up-
right walking hid females' engorgable estrus skin between their legs;
^valking itself both required buttock muscles and hid the female geni-
tal opening — an important focus of sexual signaling in primates; the
ne^v buttock area became denuded of hair to compensate for the lost
sexual signal; and the bare buttocks were mimicked around the front,
in the form of bare breasts. That is, nakedness developed as a form of
sexual signaling to compensate for the disappearance of estrus skin,
w^hich Lad formerly performed that function.
The emergence of nakedness was thus not a question of losing
hair but of extending areas of sexual skin. This process culminated
through sexual selection within a cultural environment — clothes and
cosmetics enhanced and selectively covered the areas from which
hair was lost, and encouraged it to be lost over yet wider areas. In my
view^, therefore, we have never been truly naked apes. (My vieAV will
take some arguing. This preview contains many assumptions that

need to be defended now, but the argument is not completed until the
beginning of Chapter 4. Moreover, it throws new light on an issue of ^
contemporary sexual morality that I discuss in the Conclusion.)
In The Naked Ape Desmond Morris interpreted breasts as sexual
signals that mimicked the buttocks. Females in several primate
species, including gelada baboons, have paired flashes of brightly col-
ored skin around the nipples that mimic the shape and color of the
bright estrus skin on their rumps — the purpose seems to be to attract
Making the Beast with Two Backs TiV
(Fig. 1.-4) Naked breasts were
probably sexually selected
early in our evolution. But
ideas of beauty can change.
Some future culture may value

hairy breasts and select mates
accordingly: Arielle after a
haircut, Paris, 1982.
Photograph ©Helmut Newton.
sexual attention ^vhile remaining sitting doAvn. Some primate males,

such as mandrils, also have such skin patches, but in them it is the
face that mimics the genital area (just as beards may do in men). The
reason for locating this male-female distinction in front-of-body sig-
naling seems clear: female nipples are a functional part of successful

reproduction, whereas male primates often use facial appearance and
expression as part of the status displays that regulate differential ac-
cess to mates.
An upright primate could have evolved bare buttocks but stayed
hairy over the rest of its body. But if Morris's idea that breasts
evolved to mimic buttocks is correct, then breasts would have to be
hairless too. This could have set a pattern for more general hair loss,
with the round, fleshy aspects of buttocks and breasts becoming more
important as particularly sexual areas. But Morris's theory has been
criticized for failing to explain the initial evolution of naked buttocks.
Women's buttocks do not become engorged and signal estrus in the

same way as the rump flashes of certain female primates do, and if
buttocks cannot be explained as sexual signals, it is difficult to argue
that breasts developed as sexual signals that mimicked them.
Walking upright alters the shape of the gluteus maximus mus-
cles, so that hemispherical buttocks are formed. This configuration
also creates an area where a lot of energy can be stored as fat, with-
out interfering with basic movements. Neither muscular development
nor any additionally fatty development requires the buttocks to be
bare. But a sexual explanation does: once women became bipedal, the
skin of the vulva that had formerly engorged during estrus became
more hidden. Although s^vollen estrus skin could have been tactically
exposed, it ^vould have been uncomfortable to have it positioned be-

tween the legs. Instead, women's buttocks became denuded and
fleshy, while at the front, a pubic triangle of hair developed against a
bare background. Buttocks have never been engorgable, because it
would interfere with their muscular and fat-storage functions, al-
though as clothing developed, they could be "flashed. "

Nevertheless,
fat deposits have their own sexual connotations: it is the level of
stored fat in a woman's body that most usually limits her ability to
conceive. On very low fat diets ovulation becomes irregular and may
disappear altogether. But even when ovulation is regular, the success-
ful implantation of a fertilized q^^ iriay be scuppered by body fat lev-
els that are too low. (The fact that estrus is not signaled in humans
with any display of reddened sexual skin has been considered behav-
iorally significant. This idea, along ^vith the pervasive myth that
primitive humans did not connect heterosexual sex with reproduc-
tion, is criticized in Chapter A.)
Breasts evolved to mimic the no^v-sexualized buttocks by

swelling, becoming hairless, and altering their form according to re-
productive status. Judging by their pelvises, earlier austral-
opithecines such as A. afarenju and A. africaniu seem not to have had
hemispherical buttocks. Thus, even Lucy were not Lucifer, she
if
would not have had breasts. Whether the thing-that-made-the-

Laetoli-tracks had them is harder to judge, because \ve do not kno^v
quite what it was.
From Buttockd to Braind
Mary Leakey's Laetoli discovery remains crucial, however many new

fossil species turn up. Peter Wheeler believes that the footprints rep-
resent the answer to the physiological problem of overheating. Fewêr
trees mean more sunshine, and a good way to avoid overheating is to
present a smaller shape to the sun, which a primate in the tropics

achieves very well by standing up. Most savannah animals cope with-
out standing up, though, and Wheeler considers brain size important
in the light of research carried out by anthropologist Dean Falk, of
the State University of New York, Albany Falk's "radiator theory"
recognizes that special problems are involved in keeping a large ho-
minid brain cooled. Their solution lies in allowing blood to flow in or
out of the brain through valve-free veins that run through small holes
or sinuses in the skull.
The number of such sinuses increases, Falk has found, as ho-
minid brains gro^v bigger. When coupled with such a cooling mecha-
nism, standing up may pave the way for a larger brain. Moving the
head away from ground level places it in a significantly cooler air
flow^, while freeing the hands allows many more things to be done —
using a wider range of tools, for example, which may provoke changes
in brain organization and be reflected back in greater brain size. But
there is a catch: walking upright also means a modified pelvis that
makes childbirth difficult and imposes a limit on fetal head size. Be-
cause of this problem, bipedalism should not correlate with any in-
crease in brain size. That it did suggests that more than just biology
was involved.
Between three and t^vo million years ago, the climate on the
eastern side of Africa became cooler and drier. Hominids became
more and more varied. The australopithecines and paranthropines ate
a diet high in rough plant food, while habilines {Homo habdu and re-
lated species) seem to have had a much higher protein diet, empha-
sizing meat and perhaps fish. Homo rudolfenjui lived on a broad
spectrum of grains, nuts, fruits, and vegetables. Like nonhuman pri-
mates, all these hominids probably used naturally occurring objects

as tools, but from around 2.7 million years on^vard, they used deliber-
40 The PrehidtoryofSex
ately shaped stone tools or artifacts. The bones of robust paran-

thropines, such as those found at Swartkrans in South Africa from
around 1.7 miUion years ago (number 7 in Figure 1.3) have been
found alongside stone tools. Their hands seem to have been fully ca-
pable of making them, but the presence of habilines at the same site
leaves open the question of whether they actually did.
Although ^ve usually refer to early, deliberately shaped stone arti-
facts as "tools," it is quite possible that some of them were more specif-
ically weapons. Most of the early hominid species seem to have been
markedly sexually dimorphic in terms of overall stature — the males
much bigger in relation to the females than they are today. This dimor-
phism would normally imply polygyny, that males competed with each
other to be selected by females, resulting in the strongest males having
sexual and reproductive relationships with several females, and the
smallest, weakest males losing out altogether. Significantly, hoAvever,
there is no marked difference between male and female canine teeth —

in stark contrast to gorillas and chimpanzees, where the males use
their large canines competitively in displays and fights with other
males for the control of harems.
The absence of big canines has been used to support the influen-
tial monogamy theory, promoted by Owen Lovejoy of Kent State
University. Lovejoy assumes that monogamy emerged as the primary
pattern for human sexual relationships. The only way our early an-
cestors could have survived, he believes, was if each woman and her
offspring ^vere exclusively provided for by her hunter-mate. Among
the many curiosities about themonogamy theory, not least is the fact
that the current level of monogamy globally is largely the result of the
influence of Judeo- Christian values during the past five hundred
years. Although some of the largest population blocs have adopted
monogamy, a majority of individual societies world^vide still practice
some form of polygamy. There is thus no evidence for monogamy
ever having "evolved" in any species-wide sense among humans.
But the monogamj^ theory has other weaknesses too. For one
thing, competition among male hominids may typically have involved
the use of weapons instead of teeth. If large canines were neither use-
ful in fighting nor particularly attractive to females, then they would
no longer have been actively selected for, and given the nutritional
cost of growing them, they would tend to be reduced. Competition
and aggression both \vithin and between early human species would
have been well served by weapons. This is a complex debate, and I
put my view to Owen Lovejoy during a transatlantic telephone call.
He responded by pointing out that ALUtralopitheau anameruu (Figure

1.3, number 2) already shows canine reduction around four million
years ago, while the very earliest stone tools or weapons date to 2.7
million, thus the canine reduction cannot be attributed to the emer-
gence of an alternate mode of male combat. The problem for me with
this is that I am sure that natural objects such as stones could have
been used offensively for a million years or more ^vithout needing to
be worked-up into artifacts that archaeologists can easily recognize.
Indeed, supporters of the "throvîng hypothesis," such as my Brad-
ford colleague Chris Kniisel, believe that bipedalism emerged princi-
pally because of the mechanical advantages it provided in launching
projectiles. In Kniisel's view A. ananieiuLi's degree of bipedalism is a
direct index of the use of found objects as weapons in this species.
The Fir^t Word^
The ne^v sort of human that appeared around 1.8 million years ago
quickly replaced all previously existing members of the genus Homo
(late rudoifeiid'u and the habilines). The new Homo spread outward
from Africa to colonize Europe, the Caucasus, China, and Java. This
rapid dispersion and subsequent regional variation have led Bernard
Wood to divide the species into two forms, but with closely similar
features and — presumably — capabilities: the African form. Homo er-
gcuter, and the beyond- Africa form, Homo erecUu. The earliest dated
specimen of Homo erectiu is the Mojokerto skull from Java (number
13 in Figure 1.3, dated to 1.81 million years), while the best pre-
servedHomo crgcuter is the almost complete skeleton of a boy, found
by Kamoya Kimeu at Nariokotome in Kenya (number 12 in Figure
1.3). Richard Leakey and Alan Walker have dated the Nariokotome
skeleton to 1.6 million years ago.
42 The P rehid tory of Sex
(Fig. 1.5) The Nariokotome Boy. A 1.6-million-
year-old fossil. Photograph: National Museum

of Kenya.
A cast made of the inside of the Nariokotome skull shoAvs clear

signs of lateralization — or specialization of the right and left hemi-
spheres — which is associated \vith being able to make tools and to
throw. Carefully fashioned stone missiles, discovered by the late

Glynn Isaac at Olduvai Gorge, suggest that these humans may have
hunted small game. Evidence from split marrow bones certainly sug-
gests that the diet had a meat component, although it could have been
scavenged. The Nariokotome boy's molars ^vere still coming through,
indicating that he was about ten years old v^hen he died. (A dental ab-
scess indicates that he may have died of blood poisoning.) Yet he was
already 5 feet 3 inches tall and vôuld probably have reached 6 feet 1
inch had he survived into adulthood. African Homo ergcuter was more
robust and taller than modern humans, although the brain capacity
was smaller by about a third.
Despite some strongly argued doubts, the existence of Broca's

area — the brain structure responsible for language in humans — con-
vinces several scholars, including myself, that the Nariokotome boy
could talk (although the musculature of his rib cage suggests that he
may not have had as much breathing control as we have today). In
The Language Ilutinct Steven Pinker quotes Lily Tomlin's guess for the
first words: "What a hairy back!" From what I have said about the
extension of sexual skin, this is less likely than it first appears. I want
to return to the old Hollywood idea that the first words were actually
grunts . . . but off-screen, and mock-orgasmic.
Language can be elaborated only ^vhere there is a conscious
awareness of alternatives for action. Given the Machiavellian intelli-
gence of the Gombe chimps, who use the "snake call" as a decoy to
steal food, and given the sexual enthusiasm of our closest living rela-
tives, the bonobos, it is plausible that the two came together in ho-
minids to produce the mental ground conditions necessary for

language.
The sexual embrace is a physical and social contact with possi-
bilities for interpersonal closeness as well as for deception. It pro-
vided particularly good opportunities for developing what Nick
Humphrey terms introspection — the ability to understand another's
feelings by analogy wîth what one can monitor of one's own feelings
under the same circumstances. It also provides ideal conditions under

^vhich to influence or exploit the other person by consciously project-
ing misleading information about one's own inner state. The presence
of cognitive choices during sex creates a world in which effectively
linguistic statements can be made. Faking orgasm, like developed lan-
guage, is apparently unique to humans.
The overall pattern of cultural complexity around 1.8 million years
ago supports the idea that a real social world existed. Glynn Isaac
believed that the establishment of home bases, the organizing of hunting
parties, and the elaboration of food-sharing behaviors wôuld all have
required language. The first systematic sexual division of labor, with males
hunting and females gathering, might also date to this time.
Today, male-female brain differences are so slight that it requires

the most sophisticated experiments to find even the slightest trace of
AA The P re h LJ to ry of Sex
them. The current consensus seems to be that ^vhile there are some
minor brain differences, they are not of a sort by which male and
female brains can be "ranked" in terms of overall ability. Nor is it clear
whether these differences are genetically programmed or culturally

learned (or arise as some interplay of genetic and cultural factors).
Women seem marginally better at verbal skills and at hand-eye coordi-
nation, men at spatial tasks, such as orienting. On this basis, the origi-
nators of stone tool culture are more likely to have been wômen, but in
practice the differences are too slight to determine anjrthing. Still, the
tasks that men and women performed in early prehistory were certain-
ly not identical. Women must have taken the primary role in early
infant care, a task that became far more demanding Avith the advent of
bipedalism and even more so once body hair ^vas lost. A chimpanzee
baby clings to its mother's fur and hangs on around her body, leaving
her limbs relatively free to move around. Standing upright ruins this
arrangement; feet become modified for walking and can no longer
grip. It becomes harder to hang from the torso, and with little body
hair to cling to, it becomes virtually impossible.
The problem of infant carrying Avas addressed by Elaine Morgan,

Avho is unusual among evolutionary theorists in having actually
though^ hard about this practical problem, even if her aquatic solution
remains unconvincing. Ovvên Lovejoy believes that a principal reason
that monogamy must have emerged among early humans is that
females would not have been able to carry both babies and burdens.
That is, they would have had to remain sedentary in order to repro-
duce successfully. On the front cover of Don Johanson's book about
human evolution, Lucyj Child, artist David Bergen has solved this
problem by putting a child up on the adult's shoulder, but this position
seems precarious for food gathering and really leaves the adult with
only one free hand (unless the infant clings hard to the head hair).
The Cradle of Culture
The logical conclusion is that women invented the first characteristi-
cally human artifact — the baby-sling. Until the recent invention of

(Fig. 1.6) The Ovahimba sling: A Namibian woman transporting her children using both
old and ne^v methods. Photograph: The Hegenbart/Stern/SOA.
the wheeled baby carriage, the child-carrying sling was one of the
most ubiquitous artifacts on earth. At its simplest, it is a length of ani-
mal skin, tied to form a pouch and hung from one shoulder. Animal
tendons vvôuld have been useful for a range of binding and tying jobs,
including baby-slings. Excavated material from hominid sites in the
Olduvai Gorge, dating between 2 and 1.6 million B.P. (Before Pres-
ent) sho^vs that tendons were deliberately extracted from the car-
casses of large savannah animals.
The sling should have been well within the conceptual reach of
early humans who had the capacity to modify the shapes of stones. If
the "throwing hypothesis" humans who could throw
is correct, then
better would have been at an advantage in hunting and combat.

Thro^ving involves cradling a projectile in the hand or, more effi-
ciently, in a loop of material —a sling — that extends the circumfer-
ence of the arc through which the projectile can be accelerated. But
hominids could have arrived at the principle of cradling from other
activities too, notably transporting water and small objects in natural
containers — a behavior observed among primates. The date of the in-
(Fig. 1.7) Lucy's pelvis: Owen Lovejoy's reconstruction of the pelvis of "Lucy" (middle left),
compared with a modern human female (left) and a chimpanzee (right).
Photograph courtesy of Owen Lovejoy.
vention of the baby-sling is unknown, because soft organic materials
do not usually survive in the archaeological record. Nevertheless, we

have indirect evidence for it in terms of human mental development.
I believe that the invention of the baby-sling was the single most
crucial step in the evolutionary development toward larger brains.
This is because of a further condition that bipedalism imposes on evo-
lution — the paradox, referred to at the beginning of this chapter, that
changes in the pelvic girdle restrict head size rather than encourage
it. There are marked differences between the pelvises of primates and
those of bipedal or semibipedal hominids. A side-on comparison of
Lucy's pelvis to a chimpanzee's and a human's makes this point ^vell
(Figure 1.7). Looked at from above, however, they are very different
(Figure L8).
Comparing the pelvises of chimpanzees, australopithecines, and
humans, an increasing difficulty in giving birth can be observed. In
chimps, the inlet, midplane, and outlet of the pelvis have a virtually
identical cross-section, so that the head of the child does not move its
position in relation to its body as it moves down the birth canal. In

humans, however, the inlet, midplane, and outlet have markedly dif-
ferent cross-sections, so that the baby's head must actually rotate as it
passes down through the birth canal —a circumstance that makes

childbirth much more difficult. Reconstructing childbirth in australo-
pithecines is difficult, but they probably rotated their heads through
the birth canal in a manner similar to modern humans.
Making the Beast with Two Backs A7
CHIMPANZEE "LUCY" HUMAN
Inlet
Miap/ane
Outlet
(Fig. 1.8) Australopithecine birth mechanics. The mechanics of birth in chimpanzees (left) and
humans (right), showmg cross-sections through the pelvis as the fetal head emerges. The central
sequence shows how Lucy-like australopithecines may have given birth, as modeled on a recon-
struction of the Lucy pelvis (assuming it to be female). Drawing by George Taylor following Tague
and Budinolf's reconstruction in Bunney 1993.
The size limits for a baby's head are quite marked in australo-
pithecines. Everjrthing is a much tighter fit than for chimps. How did
hominids overcome this problem to evolve larger brains? The sim-
plest means was to give birth while the baby's head is still small, then
let the head and brain develop outside the womb during a period of
intensive neonatal care. This is humans devel-
in fact the solution that
oped. Whereas the newborn brain weight of a nonhuman primate is

already around 42 percent of its adult weight, a human child's is a

mere 29 percent. The human infant continues its basic cerebral devel-
opment for eighteen months after birth, during which time the
rapidly growing brain is not held in by a firm case. Fusion of the cra-
nial sutures is The downside is that the human baby
greatly delayed.
is far less physically and mentally autonomous than a chimpanzee
baby at every stage and needs far greater cranial protection. Having
an underdeveloped brain at birth retards the development of every-
thing else. Thus a human baby is not only mentally but physically un-
derdeveloped.
The australopithecines never managed to develop brains much
larger than chimpanzees'. Their young, born with some difficulty,
probably clung to mothers w\\o had retained a fair amount of body

hair. The powerful plant-processing jaw^s of australopithecines could
also have pulled the infant skull apart if the cranial plates were not
wêll fused. As the genus Homo developed, however, brain size grew
rapidly.
In practice, the development of the baby-sling removed the cru-

cial factor limiting the efficiency of postnatal care and allowed ho-
minid females to bear underdeveloped babies that, with postnatal
brain g^ôwth, could subsequently catch up and — crucially — overtake
australopithecines in brain development. Hominid mothering, far
from being a passive, essentially biological function that incapacitated

early human females and made them dependent on male "providers,"
was a challenge to which females rose with an innovative solution.
Not only would the sling have facilitated the evolution of an extended
period of physical helplessness, it would also have freed the baby's
brain to take in information about the outside world. As William
Sears has argued, "carrying humanizes a baby." The mother's ^valk-
ing movement maintains what the child was used to in the womb,
stimulating the balance organs behind the ear, "organizing" and calm-
ing the infant. In a calm state the baby is free to thrive, ^vith its en-
ergy directed into physical and behavioral development. The calm
state is the most interactive one; modern researchers have reported
enhanced visual and auditory alertness in carried babies.
Sometime between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago, among late

archaic japleiu and Neanderthals, brain size increased to such an ex-

tent that birth must certainly have involved rotation of the baby's
head, as it does today. By this time, Karen Rosenberg believes, a
woman might often have required help to give birth safely, in the
form of a midwife who could guide her through labor and manipulate
the position of the baby as it emerged through the birth canal.
Mind Gamed
It is not clear what specific advantages a larger brain gave to humans.

Its drawbacks, however, are evident. As Leslie Aiello has pointed out,
a larger brain required a much higher food energy input from the
mother, and it made childbirth more difficult. The timing of the devel-
opment was clearly significant in making it advantageous. The crucial
jump occurred between 2.5 and 1.6 million years ago, at a time when
there was considerable competition between several different species
of hominid. The ability to use a grammatical language, to forward
plan, and to organize a social division of labor, may have emerged to-
gether and within a short space of time as brain size increased above
some crucial threshold. Such abilities ^vould have given the ancestral
human line the edge over their close rivals. But the human brain con-
tinued to increase in size during later evolution too, \vhen those rivals
had already become extinct.
Why this brain-size increase should have continued in the ab-

sence of interspecies competition and after the emergence of speech is
unclear. The growth may have been driven by competition bebi'een hu-
man groups, but larger brains may also have been sexually selected.
Darwin implied they were when he compared the human brain to the
peacock's fan, and others have recently suggested that a sort of "run-
away" sexual selection could have been involved. Nor need we as-
sume—as Darwin did — that sexual selection operated on just one sex
(the male) and was more weakly reflected in the other (the female).
Both males and females may have found larger brains "sexier"; the
development of spoken language cannot be divorced from the devel-

opment of song, and both are important elements in modern
courtship. Whatever drove the increase in human mental capacity, it
effectively operated on both sexes equally. In the end, what is so fas-
cinating about human brain-sex differences is that they are virtually
nonexistent in comparison with most other animal species, which

have marked behavioral and cognitive differences between the sexes.
These differences are particularly striking in birds and insects, where
built-in genetic determinants of behavior — instincts — are of primary
importance. In mammals learning plays a greater role in cognitive de-
velopment than in birds and insects, and in humans the learned com-
ponent is massive. It has given humans the great advantage of
flexibility.
We became human not because men vvênt hunting while women

foraged for plants and carried children, but because vv^hen need arose,
the two sexes could swap roles. (Several parts of this book Avere
typed Avith my youngest daughter in a sling, across my lap, quietly
sleeping.) Humans have effectively replaced an instinctive division of
behavior along sexual lines with a learned or gendered division of la-
bor that is based on but not limited by differences in basic biological
function.
The invention of the was a turning point not just in brain
sling
development but in human sexual culture. It marked the origin of the

idea of gender — the human sexual categories into the
extension of
realm of objects and ideas. Tool use among primates is not divided
markedly along sexual lines — a mother may pass on a favorite ham-
mer stone to either her son or her daughter. The sling is an altogether
different item, representing an association with the close, continuous,
mother-baby contact necessary for early demand-led breast-feeding.

When men use it, it still carries these female connotations. The devel-
opment of gendered clothing may have followed on from a functional
yet sex-related item like the sling.
The brain-size increase that the baby-sling helped facilitate may

have pushed us over the brink to full language. The emergence of
language must be connected to the birth of fantasy — the point where
males and females could tell each other their imaginings and share
their thought Avorlds. Out of this new quality, upon which the arts of
poetry and sweet-talk are based, came a specifically human sort of

love, in which the pleasure of sex is increased greatly by the empathy

that the participants can have for each other. Sex ceased to be neces-
sarily short and sharp and became an act of potentially ecstatic mu-
tual contemplation. On the other hand, fantasy opened up the
possibility that the participants could become almost completely dis-
engaged from sex, allowing their minds to drift to other subjects, such
as where the next meal would come from. It is this mixed blessing
that we have inherited. It has led not only to widely varied individual
experiences of sex but to the establishment of marked differences in
what particular societies feel sex actually is, according to the sorts of
learning, fantasies, or myths they share.
Cnapter 2
nd JDrain O ex
'Judt how much dex id there in a dkeieton?"
Germaine Greer,
The Female Eunuch
In 1979, as a young student, I was excavating at Gars-Thunau, a

large prehistoric settlement in Lower Austria, when a request for as-
sistance came through to my group from the local police. A farmer
who was digging a septic tank in the middle of his yard had come
across the skeleton of a young woman at a depth of eight or nine feet.
Herwig Friesinger of the University of Vienna drove over vvîth a

small crew^, and it fell to me, as the most junior, to drop into the hole
and fully expose the remains so that a proper record of the position of
the body could be made.
While the police and Austrian archaeologists stood chatting in
the yard, filling out forms, their voices muffled by the damp earth
walls around my ears, I worked away on the mystery woman. Her
bones were wêll preserved, but there wêre no grave goods, no frag-
Skull Sex and Brain Sex 53
ments of a coffin or traces of clothing, nothing immediate to fix the
date of her death at five, fifty, five hundred, or two thousand years
ago.
She lay on her back in a relaxed position and had either been
buried while still \varm or much later, after rigor mortis had worn off:
not in a churchyard, not close to any known pagan or prehistoric

graveyard, but very deep. As I cleaned around her pelvis and lumbar
vertebrae, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and I felt both
sad and somehow close to her. Such isolated and unmarked burial
meant that she had most likely been murdered, or else she had died
under circumstances that someone had wanted kept secret. I was dis-
turbing that secret, as I gently brushed back the soil from her fore-
head and brought her white bones into the harsh sunlight of a day
she could not have imagined.
But / had imagined her. I had been told we ^vere going to where
a woman J skeleton had been found, and I did not question it. True,
the relatively gracile jaw and broad pelvis suggested that the bones
had once been a woman's, but it takes many measurements to be
sure, and only in some cases, as we shall see, can ^ve have complete
certainty. I have excavated many bones since, among them those of a
sixth-century Avar "princess," the burned remains of a fourth-cen-
tury-B.C. Thracian "warrior," and the eggshell-like pieces of an
unidentified infant skull. Each time I am moved, and I inevitably per-
sonify the remains in my mind.
But these skeletons may not be ^vhat they seem. What if the one
in the Austrian farmyard were a man's? Or that of an intersex indi-
vidual — someone, perhaps, with androgynous characteristics who
had passed as a wôman until his/her wedding night, when things fi-
nally came apart? Although unusual, such things do happen. The

farmyard burial ^vas not ordinary, but the police, the farmer, the Aus-
trian archaeologists, and I ^vere all in quiet agreement about the sex
of the bones from the ^vord go. An anonymous murdered woman
connected ^vell with our ideas of contemporary society. The evidence
did not challenge us; the "evidence" ^vas simply w^hat we were pre-
pared to see. If we never look any harder, then all we will find in the
past is our own reflection. As Germaine Greer put it.

When archaeologists state categorically that half a femur

comes from a twenty-year-old woman, we are impressed
with their certainty, not the less so because the statement,
being a guess, is utterly unverifiable. Such a guess is as
much based in the archaeologists' assumptions about

women as anything else. What they mean is that the bone is
typically female, that is, that it ought to belong to a woman.

Because it is impossible to escape from the stereotyped no-
tions of womanhood as they prevail in one's own society,
curious errors in ascription have been made and continue

to be made.
This statement annoys many of my colleagues. In the twenty-five

years that have passed since The Female Eunuch ^vas first published,
our ability to determine the sex of human skeletal remains has become
much more sophisticated, and analysis of ancient DNA has become an
established, though expensive, technique. (It is effective even on cre-
mated bone.) Our best practice, however, is not particularly wide-
spread, while the emotional responses of individual archaeologists are
universal. Don Johanson's AiutraioplthecLU afaretu'u was so emphati-
cally "Lucy" that it has taken us more than twenty years to be able to
see the pelvis as potentially male. The Nariokotome "boy " is so much
the young hunter that we scarcely wonder exactly what range of skele-
tal variation existed between males and females in that specific time
and place. Often we are not open-minded about what division of labor
between the sexes may (or may not) have existed in the remote past.
If the Austrian farmyard had been in modern-day Albania, the
skeleton could have been biologically female but, in most respects,
socially male. The reason is that there are two levels in human sex-
ual culture: biological sex, and gender, or the social elaboration of
observed biological differences. The Sworn Virgins of Albania are

a class of biological women who decide to be men, usually before
They take a vow of chastity, dress like men, vvôrk
the age of ten.
with men, and are accepted by men as men — except that unlike
men, they cannot be killed, Avhich is part of their advantage as
household heads in a society riven by blood feuds. Some become

village headmen.
This chapter investigates the emotional commitments we all
make when we recognize others as "male" and "female," not just by

their bones ("skull sex") but by their bodies and their behavior
("brain sex"), and how those commitments can color our interpreta-
tion of prehistoric society.
Mix- and 'Match Bone^
Possession of male or female genitalia is usually an either/or question

(although "in-between" organs sometimes do occur), depending on the
presence or absence of the shortened Y chromosome in the pair of sex
chromosomes that most people possess. (Men usually code as XY,
women as XX.) On the other hand, sexual dimorphism — the measur-
able differences in features, such as legs and arms, that both sexes pos-
sess — is a question of degree. Although men are taller than Avomen on
average in most societies, numerous individual women are taller than
numerous individual men. People cannot be divided up into short and
tall in the same way that they can be divided into male and female.
Adult female skeletons are, on average, shorter, less robust,
broader in the pelvis, thinner in the chin, and smoother over the brows
than are adult male skeletons, but these differences are only average;
individual cases demonstrate overlaps for every feature. In every com-
munity men and women share a single basic genetic blueprint for the
human skeleton, adapted to suit adult purposes by exposure to differ-
ent mixtures of hormones. At puberty the shared blueprint indicates

that the pelvis should wîden. For vvômen this makes the pelvis
mechanically less efficient for walking and running; the payoff is in its
increased efficiency as a birthing conduit. (The ultimate efficiency is
reached only moment, when the hormone relaxin allows

at the critical
the pelvic outlet to expand by an extra half-inch or so.) For men, how-
ever, there is no payoff in side-to-side growth of the pelvis, and secre-
tions of testosterone during puberty suppress it.
The skeleton is not a static frame from which the body hangs.
Rather, it grows and remodels itself continuously. Old bone gives

way to new, while shapes and volumes constantly change from birth
to death. Although the sex chromosomes control some of the hor-

mones that act on the skeletal blueprint, other factors can act on the
skeleton by altering the ratio of hormonal secretions. Both dietary
and emotional stress can stunt growth in humans, and both leave tell-
tale bands (Harris lines) in the teeth. So distinguishing male and fe-
male skeletons is not as easy as it seems. If men are systematically

more stressed than ^vomen in a particular society, then their average
height will draw closer to Avomen's. In female athletes strenuous
physical exercise during adolescence can keep androgen levels high,
so that the pelvis stays narrow and malelike. (Some female athletes
experience a late "skeletal puberty" on retirement.) In the prehistoric

past we know far less about the usual activities of males and females.
The prevalence of arthritis and injury among the Neanderthals sug-
gests that they had a very tough physical existence. Their skeletons
display little sexual dimorphism, perhaps as a result of high androgen

levels in females as much as sexual selection.
Hoii' people do things affects their skeleton as much as the sim-
ple fact of doing them. In fact, as social anthropologist Tim Ingold

has noted, there is no such thing as "simply" doing anything. New
Yorkers walk in a different style from Siberian fur trappers, and men
"walk differently from women. The male svvâgger and female teeter,
easily observable on a Saturday night in any large American or Euro-

pean city, can be seen in children long before their pelvises become
markedly different. Children copy the adults around them, and walk-
ing "like a lady" or "like a man" is encouraged from an early age and
aided by functional differences in footwear. (Finding my daughters
shoes with properly gripping soles is a perennial problem.) Gendered
Avalking styles are largely reversible (^vomen who want to pass as
men can successfully mimic a male ^valk, and vice versa), but the me-
chanical stresses on the skeleton produce measurable differences.
Despite these complexities, most physical anthropologists believe
that they can identify the sex of a particular skeleton wîth certainty in
nineteen out of twenty cases. But in view of the many dimensions of
sex, what sort of certainty can they have? What type of sex is being
measured? Beyond genetic and skeletal sex, there are other measures
of sex: the sex of the fleshy body (the sexual characteristics it displays)
and that body's reproductive potential as male (able to physically
inseminate to cause pregnancy in another) or female (able to physical-
ly bear children). The physical body is a mere potentiality until it is
coupled with sexual behavior, the roots of which are thought by some
to be in the innate physiology of the brain, and by others to be princi-
pally connected to learning and culture.
Part and Counterpart
The common genetic blueprint for the human skeleton is actually

part of a common genetic blueprint for the entire body. The plan for
the flesh, as Avell as the bones, is basically female; maleness is created

hormonally. Men have nipples because nipples are part of the original
plan. Male human nipples very rarely produce milk (although males
of some species, such as the goat, often produce it), but they are quite
susceptible to erotic stimulation. Men also have an organ analogous
to the womb situated at the base of the prostate gland, the utricle (or
utenu mcucuUniS) . Its opening into the urethra is guarded by the deli-
cate membranous circular fold of the male hymen, close to w^hich the
ejaculatory ducts open; it may be connected to the experience of anal

orgasm in men.
famous essay called "The Spandrels of San Marco,"
In a
Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin suggest that particular
features of living things need not have been deliberately evolved but
could have come into existence by virtue of something else that wâs
constructively necessary. They drew an analogy with the small, flat,
triangular areas of wâll — spandrels — that occur high up inside some

churches, such as San Marco in Venice. These spandrels, ideal spaces
for paintings, simply come about by virtue of the angles at which the
vaulted ceiling panels support the roof. For Gould and Lewontin,
male nipples are somewhat like spandrels. Their erogenous qualities,
like a frieze of paintings, represent a fringe benefit that was neither
planned nor evolutionarily selected.
When it comes to the penis, many biologists have argued against

the original-female-body-plan idea. Instead, they see the clitoris as
like a spandrel, a spin-off from the body plan, ^vhich reserves a bud
of embryonic cells for potential development into a penis. Gould be-
lieves that the female orgasm is functionless in the strict evolutionary
sense, since conception can occur in its absence. This explains, for
Gould, why female orgasm seems less reliable (more prone to dys-
function) than male orgasm.
The clitoris, however, is not a small bud of underdeveloped cells.
It is actually no smaller than the penis, although in humans much of
it is hidden. When flaccid, the glans is partly or wholly covered by a
fold formed by the inner lips of the vagina. After the first inch or two,
the clitoris divides, and the remainder of its erectile tissue (the "bulbs
of the vestibule ") run down for six or seven inches to either side of
the vaginal opening. In female lemurs — primates with whom, going

back twenty million years, ^ve share a common ancestor — the urethra
runs down through the clitoris, so that urination occurs in the same
^vay as in males. In hyenas the clitoris in the female is long, like the
male's penis, and the birth canal runs do^vn through it. Such func-
tions flatly contradict the idea that the clitoris is an evolutionarily
functionless spin-off.
The Widdont of the Ancientd
The physiology of the female orgasm has been hotly debated over the
past hundred years. Sigmund Freud maintained that in psychological-
ly healthy women, the center of orgasm should shift from the clitoris to
the vagina in adulthood. By contrast, Alfred Kinsey argued that vagi-
nal orgasms ^vere a "biological impossibility." Yet w'\t\i appropriate
training and focus, all sorts of different parts of the body can be stimu-
lated to result in orgasm, so it seems strange to rule out the vagina. In
fact, the whole female pubic area can be actively involved in sexual
pleasure; it can also play a decisive part in conception.
One of the most detailed ancient descriptions of female sexual

and reproductive physiology wâs Avritten by the ancient Greek medic
Hippocrates of Cos and his followers. Hippocrates was born around

460 B.C., at a time Avhen many oral traditions were being committed
to writing for the first time. The Hippocratic medics were not a
legally recognized profession, and they competed for business with
many other healers and trainers. Hippocrates' knowledge was proba-

bly based not only on his own firsthand experiences in his practice
but on the un^vritten knoAvledge of midwîves and wise women —
women who, because of the evolutionary pattern of the human pelvis
described in Chapter 1, vsêre custodians of techniques and knowl-

edge that had been continuously developed over the last 100,000
years or even longer. (If Hippocrates did rely on them, then his unac-
knoAvledged incorporation of their knowledge marks the earliest
identifiable stage in the ongoing male takeover of the management of
pregnancy and childbirth, the most extreme form of which — the out-
lav^îng of autonomous (female) mid^vives by (male) gynecologists —
has so far been reached only in a (ew places, such as S^veden and
some American states.)
Hippocrates saw female sexual physiology as active — so active

that he envisioned the ^vomb as able to move around the body in
search of moisture, sometimes getting stuck and sometimes drying

out and traveling to the liver. Such apparently bizarre beliefs have
caused most modern scholars to reject Hippocratic gynecology as
pure fantasy. Yet his basic facts were correct, even if his explanation
was not. In the condition known as endometriosis, part of the uterine

lining can detach itself and migrate to other parts of the abdomen
and, more rarely, beyond, to the arms, lungs, head, and so on; there is
no reason why it should not attach itself to the liver. Endometriosis is
a painful condition (often causing monthly inflammation of the af-
fected area) that ancient Greek healers could have attempted to treat
surgically or herbally, and Hippocrates may well have examined the
affected tissues postmortem.
Hippocrates described female orgasm in some detail:
It is my contention that when during intercourse the vagina

is rubbed and the womb is disturbed, an irritation is set up
in the womb which produces pleasure and heat in the rest
of the body. A woman also releases something from her

body, sometimes into the womb— which then becomes
moist — and sometimes externally as well, if the womb is
open wider than normal. Once intercourse has begun,

she experiences pleasure throughout the ^vhole time, un-
til the man ejaculates. If her desire for intercourse is ex-
cited, she emits before the man, and for the remainder of
the time does not feel pleasure to the same extent.
This last is a clear reference to female ejaculation, the existence of

which has often been questioned in modern medicine (mostly by
men), though it has alwâys been real enough for those w\io experi-
ence it.
Hippocrates believed that a Avoman could work her cervix to

regulate the uptake of sperm:
When a woman has intercourse, if she is not going to con-

ceit ê, then it is her practice to expel the sperm produced by
both partners Avhenever she wishes to do so. If hoAvever she
is going to conceive, the sperm is not expelled, but remains
in the womb. For when the womb has received the sperm it
closes up and retains it. . . . If the woman is experienced in

matters of childbirth, and takes note of when the sperm is
retained, she will know the precise day on which she has
conceived.
This process can be attested by modern experience. During orgasm

the top of the vagina balloons out to form a kind of pool for the se-
men, into ^vhich the cervix dips, drawing it up into the uterus. This
action is aided by the semen itself, which contains the fatty acid
prostaglandin that causes vaginal spasming.
Hippocrates s description of women with active reproductive
anatomy fits with the findings of the Liverpool-based researchers

Robin Baker and Mark Bellis, who have studied the way in which
women can manipulate sperm within their bodies, rejecting it ("flow-
back") \vhen they do not want to conceive and sucking it up ("up-
suck") w^hen they do. Baker and Bellis are convinced that female
masturbation plays an important part in the process, generating uter-
ine contractions that help a woman to keep a particular man's sperm
in play for several days after intercourse. The control of orgasm and
up-suck also allows a woman ^vith more than one partner to have a
surprising measure of control over ^vhom she conceives by.
The Hippocratic view, based as it was on a long tradition of

female body knowledge, and Baker and Bellis 's research both sug-
gest that the clitoris has a functional dimension. Its situation,
toward the top of the pubic area and a little away from the vaginal
opening, allo^vs comfortable masturbation without the risk of
infection from the insertion of fingers or objects. Gould's idea of
the clitoris and the female orgasm as functionless can in fact be
reversed, so that male orgasm becomes the spandrel. While a penis
seems necessary for normal insemination, it does not need to spasm
to ejaculate; it could just produce a directed flow, as with urine.
The characteristic spasming of male orgasm may therefore be a
pale neuromuscular reflection of vaginal "up-suck." Nevertheless,
the comparability of women's and men's sexual organs probably
indicates a fair degree of overlap between their inner experiences
of sex. Sex, after all, is mostly in the head. But are women's and
men's minds the same?
Proper GirU and Boyd
Many people believe that boys and girls are psychologically different
from birth onward, but the evidence is controversial. Researchers
claim to have found structural differences in the brains of adult men
and women, but whether these differences are innate or come about
in some complex interplay between genes, hormones, and socializa-
tion is not clear.

It is something of a modern Western habit to discount the im-

pact of cuhure during the earhest moments of a child's Ufe. Babies are
thought of as completely natural beings from whose behavior general
principles of sexual difference can be inferred. Matt Ridley, in The
Red Oiieen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, quotes from a letter
written by a mother to a new^spaper: "I would be interested to know

if any of your more learned readers could tell me ^vhy, from the time
my twins could reach for toys and were put on a rug together with a
mixed selection of 'boys' and 'girls' toys, he would inevitably select
the car/train items and she the doll/teddy ones." Ridley's answer is
that, although there are no genes for liking guns or dolls, there are
"genes for channeling male instincts" into imitating males and for
channeling female instincts into imitating females.
But this notion is nonsensical. Male and female babies are often
dealt with as male and female from birth on, and they can easily learn
to imitate one or the other parent or activity sphere. In the case in
point, we do not know whether the twins were placed among the toys
completely at random, or whether their particular choices throughout
the day were differently approved or recorded. What is certain is that
many cultural factors ^vere at work. By virtue of writing to a newspa-
per to challenge its "more learned readers, "
in fact, the mother sho^vs
a prejudice in favor of a particular ans^ver. In a society that generally
mocks boys who play ^vith dolls and girls who tote guns, mothers of
twins with the "^vrong" preferences are much less likely to publish
the fact.
Measures of sex differences in the brain do go beyond the anec-
dotal. They are thought to show up most clearly under laboratory test
conditions, ^vhere particular forms of intelligence can be tested in iso-

lation. Women appear to have (marginally) better verbal capacities,
and men (marginally) better spatial ones. The way men and women
mentally "map" the ^vorld seems systematically different. A surge of
testosterone in the male fetus at around six weeks is crucial to the de-
velopment of brain sex, some researchers think. Boys who do not get
this surge, though testosterone may physically masculinize them at
puberty in the usual way, apparently retain a femalelike brain pat-

tern. On the other hand, Edelman has recently presented evidence
suggesting that much of the nervous "wiring" of the human brain is
actually fixed into place during the early years of hfe, under the influ-
ence of learning.
Degrees of Sex
Many of the hormones that guide the development of the human

body are also found in animals and plants and have synthetic coun-
terparts. Hormone levels can thus be artificially boosted, a fact that
has led sports regulators to run genetic and hormonal checks on ath-
letes. Biologically, female athletes can take androgen supplements to
develop their skeletons in order to gain what is termed "unfair mas-
culine advantage." (Most sports favor the male physique; activities
where \vomen naturally excel, such as long-distance ocean swim-

ming, do not attract Olympic recognition.) But marked variation is a
fact of life, both in individual hormone production and in the degree
to which an athlete genetically conforms to typical maleness or fe-
maleness.
Since 1968, the International Olympic Committee has required
all Avomen athletes to show an "XX" sex chromosome configuration
as part of their "gender verification" procedure. In the 1985 World
Student Games, Maria Martinez Patino, a Spanish athlete, ^vas dis-
qualified as a bona fide female competitor because, although she
showed no physical signs of masculinization, she was genetically XY.
In a landmark appeal case, she \vas reinstated. It is possible for some-
one to look female and be reproductively female but still have an XY
coding — a fact that sports regulators will have to face. Conversely,
genetically female (XX) fetuses vvîth adreno-genital syndrome (AGS)

react to androgens while they are in the womb, causing them to de-
velop as men. They may often have competed in sport as men, al-
though their position since genetic testing became widespread is

unclear. By the strict genetic criterion, they should compete as
vômen, despite being male in all other respects.
Many other body-sex variations are known. Where AGS is less
marked, females may develop in a partially masculine fashion, with

64 The Frehidtory of Sex
enlarged testiclelike labia, a penislike clitoris, and a generally robust

skeleton. Many XY boys are born with their testes undescended; if
they do not descend from their internal position before the onset of
puberty, an adrenal failure results, causing femalelike bodily charac-
teristics to develop. Differences may occur in the uniformity or num-
ber of sex chromosomes: some people's bodies have a mixture (or
"mosaic") of XX and XY cells. In Turner's syndrome the presence of
a single X chromosome leads to the development of a female body
type, but without ovaries.
Sometimes three or more sex chromosomes are present, the
most common variation being XXY — Kleinfelter's syndrome — which
is usually manifested in the body as male external genitalia with a fe-
malelike pelvis and hormonal pattern, and possible infertility. A rare

inherited disorder called 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, known from
thirty-eight cases reported in the Dominican Republic, causes XY fe-
tuses to develop outwardly as girls, which is what they appear to be
at birth. At puberty, however, they suddenly develop into men, with

the labia developing into testicles and the clitoris into a penis. Still,
the opening of the urethra remains below it, so that ejaculation is not
^vell directed.
Some people are fully hermaphroditic, having the internal and

external reproductive organs of both sexes. The overall birthrate of
recognizably "intersex" individuals is surprisingly high, running at
between one and two in every thousand. In industrialized societies,
when intersex babies are born, doctors usually do a genetic test to de-
termine the "real" sex, surgically conform the genitalia accordingly,

and administer additional hormones as necessary. But in many non-
Western societies a child is accepted as it is, and outside medical in-
terference aimed at changing its basic identity may be viewed with

extreme hostility.
The birthrates for intersex individuals probably vary from soci-

ety to society. Odd genetic effects may often be quite local, and their
retention in a fetus from conception to birth may depend on the de-
gree of environmental stress that a population faces. In harsher con-
ditions, evidence suggests, birth abnormalities of any sort are much
rarer. Intersex animals are more common among domestic popula-
.
tions than in the wild, an effect that seems to be an accidental genetic

side-effect of strongly selective breeding.
Most likely, intersex individuals were born at roughly the same

rate in prehistory as they are today, although archaeologists have so
far failed to definitely recognize a single example. In a prehistoric
community, an intersex person vvôuld usually have been fairly obvi-
ous, as little could have been done surgically to "normalize" them,

even if that were considered desirable. Community reactions proba-
bly varied ^videly. Positive reactions could have included normal inte-
gration into the community as either male or female (through tolerant
"muting"); normal integration as a third catch-all ambiguous gender
group (such as the dag-ur-jag — a recognized social group in
Mesopotamia around 2000 B.C. that may have included castrated
males, homosexual transvestites, and intersex individuals); or some
special social treatment (hermaphrodites, for example, were thought
of as semidivine in the ancient Greek world). Negative responses
may have included infanticide (if the ambiguity was recognized at
birth) or ostracism (if it developed later)
Mothers in the Men*^ Hat
One clear measure of sexual difference is between those people who

can and do give birth (and those who look like them), and those who
do not. Such people can often be identified by their skeletons. Pelvic
scarring, especially of the preauricular groove, seems to indicate child-
birth (although most experts now agree that its extent cannot accu-
rately reveal the number of births). Sometimes archaeologists excavate
burial sites where a fetal skeleton is preserved within the body cavit)^
of an adult skeleton. A burial recently discovered at Beit Shamesh in
Israel, dated to the fourth century A.D., contained the skeleton ot an
individual of around fourteen years of age, identified as female not
because of her bone structure but because a full-term fetal skeleton
was present in her pelvic area. They probably died because the baby's
head could not fit through the girl's narrow pelvic girdle. Traces of
burned cannabis found within the girl's skeletal void indicate that it
(Fig. 2.1) Coffin birth. The fetus
still has its legs within the birth
canal. Anglo-Saxon cemetery at
Worthy Park, Kingsworthy,

Hampshire, England. Photograph:
Calvin Wells Laboratory, University
of Bradford.
^vas inhaled during the final fatal stages of the uncompleted labor.
CannabiL is a pain-killer that is also known to increase the force of

uterine contractions. (Its use in childbirth goes back at least to 1550
B.C., ^vhen it ^vas mentioned in an Egyptian medical papyrus.)
Certain skeletal sexings are also possible in rare cases of "coffm
birth." In the Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Worthy Park, Hampshire,
England, one grave contained the skeleton of a woman who died with
her unborn baby lodged in her birth canal. After burial, the relaxation
of the traumatized tissues and buildup of putrefaction gases in the vis-
cera caused the fetus to be pushed out, so that when the grave Avas
excavated, it looked at first as if the child had been buried indecorous-
ly hanging from its mother's body, With only its feet still inside.
While motherhood is usually one of the characteristics used to

define the social gender "female," it does not necessarily establish
mothers as women in perpetuity. Among the Hua people of New
Guinea, bearing children actually has a masculinizing effect. The
Hua separate physical sex from social gender by reference to a sub-
Skull Sex and Brain Sex ^7
stance called nu. Nu is thought of as a moist, life-giving essence,

mainly produced by women but transmittable to men through sexual
intercourse and food. Figapa people contain lots of nu, and kakora
people have very little nu. The figapa include women in their child-
bearing years, children of both sexes (because of their close contact

-with the former), postmenopausal wômen who have had fewer than
three children, and old men v^ho have had so much sex and nu-rvoSx
food that they are irrevocably permeated with nu. The kakora include
males who have been initiated through a period of heterosexual absti-
nence and avoidance of female foods, and postmenopausal wômen

w^ho have borne three or more children, a process that has so purged
them of nu that they can be given male initiation and go to live in the
men's house.
Because the basic anatomy of men and women is so similar,
many societies culturally exaggerate physical sexual differences
through tattooing, penis enlargement, or clitoridectomy Among the
Hazda of Ethiopia, older wômen conduct ritualized surgery on girls
to make them into wômen, removing the visible part of the clitoris
along wîth the outer (and sometimes inner) labia. These features are
viewêd as being uncomfortably like the m.ale testicles and penis. As
such practices show, gender is not a biological given but a cultural
performance. It is based on real physical differences but, as the an-
thropologists Penelope Brown and L. J. Jordanova say, w^hat cul-
tures make of these differences "is almost infinitely variable."
The skeleton in the Austrian farmyard was unusual in that it
expressed no gender. In most funeral rites, the deceased is accompa-
nied by artifacts, "grave goods," which express things about them.
Archaeologists generally assume that these artifacts are gendered —
swôrds being male and spindles being female, for instance, symboliz-
ing a division of labor and activity in daily routine. In reality, things

are not so simple. The perceived gender of artifacts typically alters
according to context, as social anthropologists have observed. Since

death may be seen as the opposite of life, it is possible that some pre-
historic societies wholly inverted the genders of objects used in funer-
ary rites, so that men were buried with "female" grave goods and
vômen wîth "male."
^
68 The Prehicitory of Sex
Archaeologists' own biases often come to the fore in identifying
the functions of things buried as grave goods. My research assistant,

Alison Deegan, wrote to me from an excavation that "a classic exam-
ple occurred a couple of weeks ago — a short sword was uncovered in
the course of excavating a skeleton; however, as soon as it was dis-
covered that the skeleton ^vas female, the object became a weaving
baton and has remained so ever since."
The Iceman and the Gay Gene
Otzi, the Iceman, was found with a number of artifacts that archaeol-
ogists usually consider to be male: an ax and hunting equipment. But
when Konrad Spindler concludes his discussion of the Iceman's sexu-
ality with the words, "The anthropological sex diagnosis agrees with
the archaeological one. There cannot be the slightest doubt that the
Hauslabjoch corpse is that of a man," he is using the word man in two
significantly different senses, only one of \vhich is actually warranted
by the evidence. Otzi's bones and body tissues are clearly male, but
we do not know whether the idea of "being a man" in modern society
had any recognizable counterpart in Otzi's society. (It is possible that
Otzi's idea of "being a man" has, via a chain of historical influence,
contributed in some way to Western ideas of "maleness" today —
5,000 years later.)
At a superficial level, dress conventions were clearly different in

Neolithic Europe. Otzi's underclothes, made up of a leather crotch-
piece, probably pulled tightly up between the buttocks and hooked
over the equivalent of a leather garter belt (used to keep his leather
leg coverings up), inspired the headline "Stone Age Leatherman
Found in Alps" in the British magazine Capital Gay. More pro-
foundly, vvê may legitimately ask whether Otzi was a full man in the
sense of belonging to something like a men's house. He might, like

older genital males among the Hua, have become so saturated with
some /2/^-like substance that he was no longer an initiated member.
The speculation about Otzi's sexuality, ^vhile not based on any
positive evidence, may prompt the thought that certain features of his
brain might provide some indication of his sexual behavior in hfe. Re-
cent work by Dick Swaab at the Netherlands Institute for Brain Re-
search seems to demonstrate that a part of the brain directly involved
in sexual behavior, known as BSTc, is smaller in women than in men,
and is also smaller in male-to-female transsexuals — people born with
a male external anatomy ^vho have an aAvareness, from an early age,
of being "a woman trapped in a man's body."
Some researchers in the United States have claimed to show
that there is a "gay gene" that affects a particular area of brain devel-
opment and hence sexual Simon LeVay has conducted
orientation.
autopsies on a small sample of men (some of whom had died of
AIDS). Those thought to have been homosexual in life were claimed
to have a smaller INAH3 cell area in their brains than those thought
to have been exclusively heterosexual. But even assuming that mea-
surements of relative cell-group sizes are reliable (which they may
not be, since the length of time a brain spends in preservative on the
^vay to a research lab affects the degree of shrinkage of its internal
features), and assuming that the lifestyles of these men were well-
enough known (they were not), and assuming that the correlation be-
tween the cell-group size and behavior is statistically valid (which it
may not be), it is still not clear if the relative size of INAH3 depends
on possession of the gene or is a result of having AIDS. Or w^hether,
rather than causing certain behavior, INAH3 actually changes size

under its influence. LeVay's findings have not yet been independently
replicated.
Whatever its statistical and procedural integrity, the gay gene

debate is, at another level, total nonsense. The Goodies — a British
comedy team — once imagined a regime that segregated short

satirical
people ("Apart- Height"). Under this social system, a gene coding for
tallness could statistically correlate with a feeling of superiority. But
that would not mean that there was a "superiority-complex gene." Re-
verse the Apart- Height legislation to discriminate against tall people,
and the tallness gene would become statistically correlated with a

feeling of inferiority. That would no more make it an "inferiority-
complex gene" than it was previously a "superiority-complex gene."
The same logic can be appHed to the debate over the so-called
gay gene. No statistical correlation between a particular genetic en-

dowment and homosexual behavior in modern America, even if
proven, Avould prove the existence, biologically speaking, of a gay

gene. It would simply mean that a particular gene appears to corre-
late, imperfectly of course, with behavior construed as homosexual
\vithin a particularNot everyone who identifies themselves as
culture.
homosexual in modern American culture would have the gene, and

not everyone who had the gene would identify themselves as homo-
sexual. The simple truth about at least some identical tvvîns (who
have identical genetic endowments) is that they can differ markedly
in their adult sexual orientation. If the hypothetical gay gene had ex-
isted in ancient Athens, where male-male sexual relations wêre de
rigueur, both in philosophical circles and in the army, its occurrence
might not have been connected to any particular behavior at all.
The controversy over the gay gene is part of a central problem

in the prehistory of sex: w^hether behavior is principally determined
by biology or by culture. In discussing sex today, many people are
concerned to distinguish the natural from the unnatural. Several
^vorld religions stigmatize sexual activities that are not potentially re-
productive, especially homosexual ones. It is against such a back-
ground that lesbian and male homosexual interest in the gay gene
debate must be viewed: "The gay gene made me like this" carries
more immediate po^ver as a moral statement defending the right to

exist than 'T choose to do this because I like it."
The interaction between biology and culture is unimaginably

complex in all aspects of life. Genetics, the intra-uterine hormonal en-
vironment, profound early learning experiences, and later, personal
and political factors can all play significant parts in the individual ex-
perience of sexual identity and the development of sexual prefer-
ences. Even at an apparently basic level, biology does not exist
independently of culture: biological sex as a distinct idea is actually
part of the modern Western system of gender, a system that includes
scientifically derived and evolving knowledge alongside many in-
grained prejudices and unconscious assumptions.
I never found out if the skeleton in the Austrian farmyard vvâs
that of a woman or a man. But even if evidence of pelvic pitting and

an XX DNA test had indicated that it was a woman and that she had
once had a child, what would I really have known about the woman's
gender, about her experience in her own society? Seen this way, the
problem of gender in prehistoric archaeology seems daunting. Yet
progress can be made. Once the extent of human variation and flexi-
bility in the present is at least partly grasped, significant patterns can

be more easily and securely recognized in the past — although recog-
nition typically requires far more evidence than a single skeleton pro-
vides.
Cnapter 3
lîysteries or
tne V^rganism
**Wef alone on earth . . . are separate and

independent enough front our gene^ to
rebel againdt them , . , we do *fo in a

dntall way every time we uê contraception.
Richard Dawkins,
The Selfish Gene
I n William Gerhardie s novel The Poiygbtd, the hero-narrator lies in
bed, having consummated his love for his cousin on the night of her
wedding to someone else. He is deflated because he feels that for all
its buildup, love ultimately reveals only that "concavities are concave,
and convexities convex." Some societies find these concavities and
convexities dangerous, disturbing, and obscene. Britain (along with
Ireland, China, and Albania) currently censors nearly all visual rep-
resentations of human sexual activity — erect penises, sexual penetra-
tion, ejaculation, erect clitorises, and so on. (The film from which this
chapter takes its title, made by the Yugoslav director Dusan Makave-
Mysteries of the Organism 73
jev, has not been shown in its entirety in Britain because of its erotic
expHcitness.)
The definition of sexual behavior varies from one society to an-
other. Touching someone's arm in one cuhure may serve simply to at-
tract their attention; the same action in another culture might be
taken as an aggressive act or, alternatively, as a sexual advance. Some
paraplegics have learned how to achieve orgasm through physical
contact at the elbows — for them, a touch of outwardly similar type,
following on others, could be the culmination of sexual activity.
This variation makes it extremely difficult to give a universal
definition of what sex is. Advanced proponents of oriental tantric

yoga, a sexually oriented physical and spiritual philosophy, claim to
be able to achieve a whole-body orgasmic state and maintain it for
several hours. But many people in modern industrial society view sex
in mechanical terms, as a discrete and separable function of human
bodies. This vie^v was expressed in its most extreme form in the So-
viet idea that performing the sexual act (and there was only one) was
like drinking a glass of water — straightforward, hygienic, necessary,
and brief (suggested optimum time two minutes).
Pleasurable self- stimulation of the genitals (not necessarily lead-
ing to orgasmic experience) begins early: recent ultrasound images
shovv^ a baby boy masturbating in the womb. In the modern West the
average age that children are observed to start masturbating is eigh-
teen months. In Victorian England the idea that masturbation was an

inappropriate and unhealthy activity, especially in children, led to the
development of a range of restraining devices and methods, including
female "circumcision" — the amputation of the external parts of the
clitoris — an operation that was performed on girls in the United
States as late as the 1950s and that continues in several parts of the
world.
The end result of such repressive measures was that human sex-
ual activity, hitherto private and unrecorded, came under medical, le-
gal, and psychiatric scrutiny. Pioneers such as Richard Krafft-Ebing,

Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud, and Wilhelm Reich recorded and
theorized tirelessly, producing great lists of sexual activities that read
like diseases — urolagnia, undinism, scotophilia, eonism, stuff-
fetishism — and processes that ^vere so obscure, they were often plau-
sible — sublimation, transference, and the production of orgone en-
ergy. But activities that ^vere originally thought to be "perversions"
turned out to be so widespread that they were renamed "deviations"
and, perhaps becoming still more popular as a result of the candid de-
scriptions in sexological books, finally became "diversity." Some ideas

have hung on way past their shelf life. One is the idea that ^vomen
are less sexually motivated than men. Another is that, despite all the
talk of diversity, monogamous heterosexuality is the natural norm.

Neither idea holds for higher mammals, and patently not for our clos-
est relatives among them.
After briefly summarizing what is known and what is conjec-
tured about the emergence of sexual activity, I will show how, in
higher animals, sex began to move beyond its primary, and evolution-
arily significant, reproductive function to become a source both of
pleasure and po^ver as ends in themselves. The widespread bisexual-
ity of the animal world culminates in the extraordinarily ^vide-rang-
ing sexual behavior of our closest living relative, the pygmy
chimpanzee, or bonobo. Sexual pleasure has been taken yet further
by humans — and so has sex as an aspect of powder. Effective plant-
based contraception was available to our prehistoric ancestors, free-
ing sex from any necessary reproductive shackles. This must have
speeded up the process of sex-selected evolution, as people, especially
women, gained more control not only over whom they had sex with
but whom they bred with.
Women and the Sex War
In his 1992 book Sex and Recuon the eminent American jurist Richard
Posner attempted to provide a thoroughly argued basis for laws that
regulate sexuality in all its forms: marriage and adultery, birth con-
trol, homosexuality in civil and military society, rape, erotic art,
pornography, nudity, coercive sex among adults and with children,
and the complicated issues surrounding adoption, surrogacy, artificial
insemination, and eugenics (selectivist or racially motivated breeding,
discussed further in Chapter 9). For the bases of his arguments he

turned to the history of sexuaUty and the various current theories of
it. He presented the following description of women's sexuality as bi-
ologically correct:
A \voman w^ho wants to maximize her reproductive success

must be charier of her sexual favors than a man. She must
try tomake every pregnancy count. ... in the evolutionary
period, when life ^vas precarious, a woman had to be in-
tensely concerned about the quality of her mate as a poten-
tial father. . . . Since a powerful sex drive would probably
stimulate a taste for sexual variety, or at least make it more
difficult to adhere to a strategy of being choosy about one s
sexual partners, it is plausible to expect natural selection

against a powerful sex drive in women.
This argument is completely speculative and runs against virtually all
^ve know of sexuality among primates. In practice, female primates

do not have unlimited choice, and they have substantial sex drives.
But Posner continues, claiming that:
There is much evidence that women do in fact have (on av-

erage, of course, not in every case) a weaker sex drive than
men. For example, lesbian couples have intercourse less
frequently, on average, than heterosexual couples do, while

male homosexual couples have intercourse more frequently
than heterosexual couples do.
Posner supports this conclusion with statistics, but they are statistics
relating to intercourse rather than to sexual behavior in its broader

sense. His focus on quantity, how many times a person does "it,"
is
rather than quality. Women's greater ability to have multiple or-

a
7^ The P re h it) to ry of Sex
gasms, and their more whole-body approach to sexuahty (in Western

culture at least), could actually lead one to the conclusion that
Avomen have a higher sexual potential.
Statistical data generally do support the idea of lower sex driiêd
among wômen in the Western Avorld, agreeing with evidence pre-

sented by Nancy Friday (among others) for the childhood suppres-
sion of female sexuality. Friday adopts the term "cloaca concept" to
describe the current of repression, passing from mother to daughter,
that ensures that girls are not familiar with their sexual anatomy in
the same way that little boys are. They may remain ignorant of the
fact that they possess a clitoris, and even if they are not they have no
vvôrd for it. They are subjected, in Friday's terms, to a "mental cli-
toridectomy. " You cannot easily value Avhat you have no words for, as
it is quite literally "nothing."
Outward anatomical differences between men and wômen are
thought to reflect yet greater existential ones. In humans, Avhere the
fertilized e^^ develops inside the female body, the female's principal
reproductive concern after conception is to make sure that the em-
bryo develops properly and survives to reproduce in its turn. The
male's reproductive concern ought, on the face of it, to be the same as
the female's — that is, it is as much in the male's interest as in the fe-
male's that offspring are ^vell nurtured. But there is — supposedly —

crucial difference. Whereas a ^voman is thought to instinctively know
that the baby developing within her carries half of her orwn genes, a
man — unless he guards his mate day and night — cannot be quite as
certain that his genes are being passed on. He may therefore attempt
to make a number of females pregnant, and he may be encouraged to
do so if other males around him are follo^ving the same strategy — if
they have sex with lots of different partners, then they ^vill increase
the likelihood that at least some of the next generation will carry their
genes, but if they are faithfully monogamous they may be cuckolded

and never reproduce.
Such strategic differences are claimed to lie at the heart of the
so-called war between the sexes, indicating Avhy competition within

species — between males or females — is as important a force in evolu-
tion as competition between species. Marx and Engels considered
that "the first division of labour is that between man and woman for
child breeding," and Engels went on to state that "the first class an-
tagonism which appears in history coincides with the development of

the antagonism between man and vvôman in monogamous marriage,
and the first class oppression with that of the female sex by the male."
When it comes to a conscious strategy for passing on genes, peo-
ple have — for the vast majority of their time on earth — been entirely
ignorant. The very concept of a gene has been around only for about
the last hundred years, so it can hardly have explicitly informed hu-
man mating patterns before then. Practicalities seem far more impor-
tant: a \voman is reproductively committed by pregnancy and
childbirth for nine months at the very least, man is not. It is ac-
but a
tually possible for him to go and get other women pregnant in this
period, irrespective of whether he knows an3rthing of genetics.
Sperm Competitions
Marriage and mating patterns in humans differ widely, and to a de-
gree independently of each other. In a marriage of whatever sort —

monogamous (two people, generally of different biological sex),
polygynous (a man with several wives), or polyandrous (a woman
^vith several husbands) — the prescription and proscription of various
sexual and reproductive relationships and practices are not necessar-
ily adhered to in practice. In tests of genetic paternity recently con-
ducted by Robin Baker and Mark Bellis, they found that around 10
percent of children had been sired by someone other than their osten-
sible fathers — although the fathers consciously believed these chil-
dren to be their own.
Baker and Bellis believe that male biological mechanisms are
geared to the expectation of cuckoldiy. Human males have relatively
large testicles and produce far more sperm than they seem to need. In
normal conception a single ^^^ is fertilized by a single sperm. So
what are the other 2,249,999 sperm from an average 2.25-million-
sperm ejaculation up to? Humans (along with other species such as
chimpanzees and lions), Baker and Bellis argue, have evolved a sys-
tern of sperm competition in which the majority of sperm actually

make no attempt to find the egg. Rather, these sperm are on anti-
cuckolding duty. Some wait around ready to attack alien sperm,

while others — ^vhose seem deliberately deformed — knot to-
tails
gether to form a passive tangled barrier against any intruders. If a

man spends an entire day -with his female partner, then has sexual in-
tercourse with her, he ejaculates far fe^ver sperm than he would have
had he spent the day apart from her — a period ^vith opportunities for
her to be unfaithful. Nevertheless, although the man's sperm may

battle it out, it may ultimately be the woman's internal manipulation
of sperm via orgasm during intercourse and subsequent masturbation

that most influences v^^hose baby she will have (see Chapter 2).
What motivation could the women in Baker and Bellis's study

have for cuckolding their husbands at a rate of one in ten? Matt Rid-
ley interprets their case in stark sociobiological terms, citing the work
of Anders M0ller. M0ller, a zoologist, has found that the more physi-
cally attractive a male swallow is, the less parental investment he
makes in his offspring; female swallows are thus encouraged to Find a
mediocre-looking but caring partner and to cuckold him. Humans
may do this too, Ridley suggests — a woman
may marry a rich but
ugly man but take a handsome lover. But what he does not explain is
why a ^voman would wish to conceive by her handsome lover. Surely
her children would be better off, in a society that ultimately values
wealth, having the genes of the rich man. It may be that people and
society are unclear about what they value most; nevertheless, it seems
unlikely that Baker and Bellis's one-in-ten cuckoo-in-the-nest chil-
dren can be explained in purely sociobiological terms.
Liverpool, where Baker and Bellis conducted their survey, is an
international seaport that, since the industrial revolution, has seen
hordes of seamen and laborers come and go. Whether Liverpudlian
traditions of marital fidelity and uncertain paternity closely mirror
those of say. Salt Lake City or Stockholm or even many other parts
of Britain, is debatable. But even accepting the statistics at face value,
the researchers' conclusions are not foolproof. A woman's chances of
conceiving ^vith a lover whom she has actually chosen purely for sex-
ual pleasure are rather high for a set of rather mundane and practical
reasons: cheating lovers do not want to be caught carrying condoms

or diaphragms, or the sex might be opportunistic or a chance,
drunken encounter.
Embarradding Relatives
The possibihty of pure sexual pleasure brings us to a major problem

with sociobiological explanations of human sexual and reproductive
behavior, as well as that of many animals. In many higher animals the
evolutionary development of sensuous and sexual pleasure has led to
the partial separation of sex and reproduction. Although reproduc-
tion requires sex, sex need not always be aimed at reproduction. This
is clear from observing the sexual behavior of animals, both ^vild and
domestic. Among cattle, pigs, and rabbits, for example, sexually re-
ceptive females regularly respond to other females in heat by mount-

ing them in a masculine fashion and making pelvic movements like
the male's copulatory thrusts, although most ^vill choose to mate with
a male when that option presents itself. Similarly, males may mount
one another, and some mounted males may respond Avith a display of
female mating reflexes, although at other times they may mount re-
ceptive females. Observation suggests that female mammals experi-
ence orgasm much as males do. Female rhesus monkeys Avho were
clitorally stimulated with specially adapted electric toothbrushes un-
der laboratory conditions shovvêd similar brain activity to that of
males.
On the basis of such observations, zoologists long ago concluded
that "the behavior of male and female animals . . . reveals that the in-
herited neuro-muscular constitution of both sexes includes mecha-
nisms capable of mediating many of the responses which make up the
mating pattern of the opposite sex." Given that animals cannot repro-
duce all the time, there is no natural disadvantage in such mediation.
Recent research shows that both male and female homosexual activ-
ity is commonplace in more than two hundred species of mammals,

birds, reptiles, amphibians, fishes, and insects, although exclusive ho-
mosexual subgroups do not occur.
The sexual behavior of the great apes has often been examined
to provide clues about the sexual behavior of our earliest direct an-
cestors — to define the essential sexual nature of humans. Unfortu-
nately, these other hominoids have very different sexual patterns
from one another as species, and they themselves vary from commu-
nity to community. It is possible to believe \vhatever one likes about
human sexuality 's "true" nature, depending on which of these apes
one chooses to describe and ^vhich studies one refers to. But some
generalizations are warranted. In most species early learning appears
to be crucial. A male chimpanzee who before the age of six is denied
all sexual knowledge, whether through ^vatching sexual acts or
through a degree of participation and experimentation, will never be
able to have intercourse ^vith a female, irrespective of how receptive
and helpful she is or how^ physically excited he himself may become.
He simply has no idea vv^hat to do, as his responses were not devel-
oped during a crucial phase of his life.
In captivity, primates such as rhesus macaques show a wide va-

riety of sexual behaviors that are apparently nonfunctional in the ge-
— masturbation, same-sex behavior, even heterosexual
netic sense
—
avoidance and that have not been seen at all or to the same degree
in the wild. These behaviors may be due to the animals' boredom in
captivity; thus it has been said that they cannot be used as any guide
to the true nature of sex. In reality, however, such behavior in captiv-
ity only confirms that apparently "set" biological predispositions can
be socially modified in species of primate similar to those that already
existed twenty million years ago.
Observations of sexual behavior in the wild confirm the idea
that animal sexuality is flexible. Perhaps the most interesting of the
great apes are the bonobos of central Zaire. Little was said about
them until recently, apparently because their behavior challenges the
fondly held view that male dominance is natural and universal in
both primate and human society. Observers have often sought to
compare humans with chimpanzees and gorillas. We are clearly evo-
lutionarily related to these two apes, but genetically they are more
similar to each other than either of them is to us. There is more than
one type of chimp, however. The bonobos, which are also called
pygmy chlmpd (though they are no smaller than others), actually form
a separate species, characterized by a more upright gait and a less
"specialized " skeleton. In fact, they are the closest living analogue to
the early australopithecines of four million years ago.
A more significant reason evolutionary science has ignored the
bonobos for so long — according to Alison Jolly and other re-

searchers — is our sexual puritanism. "The sexual promiscuity of
pygmy chimpanzees makes Sodom and Gomorrah look like a Vicar's
tea party." Bonobos have sex most of the time. Aside from adult het-
erosexual activities, females indulge in a lot of genital rubbing with
each other (GG, ^vhich is called tribadism in humans). Males indulge
in "penis fencing" and rub their swollen rumps together, back to
back. Most shockingly to human eyes, adults and children have a lot
of sex. In fact, infants are often initiated by their mothers — the only
observed taboo is on sex between mothers and any sons over six
years of age. Sex is a natural part of childhood for bonobos, re-

searchers believe, and it mingles imperceptibly with care, play, all the
other elements of growing up. Sex for bonobos appears to be a fairly
quick, perfunctory, and relaxed activity that functions as a social ce-
ment.
I am not saying that bonobos provide a model for ^vhat human
sexuality ought to be like — that, but for cultural constraints, we would
all behave more like bonobos. They challenge us to think more
openly about the range of sexual behaviors that were potentially open
to our remote ancestors. In physical terms, there is actually nothing
that bonobos do that some humans do not sometimes do.
But how human observers interpret bonobo behavior is tricky.
What one sees depends very much on ^vhat glasses one is \vearing. A
classic example is the "food for sex" scenario. In wild bonobos a male
will approach a female carrying a food item to share. The two will
share the food, then have sex. Most observers interpret this sequence
and some draAv conclusions about human evolution
as a transaction,
and even modern human behavior based on it. Robert Jay Russell
has termed it the "lemur's legacy," as it is a behavior apparently
shared by lemurs, one of our most remote direct mammalian ances-
tors. Yet such interpretations have as much to do with the observer as
the observed. This is Uke sajang of human society (and some people
do say it) that any ^voman w^ho has dinner bought for her at a fancy
restaurant by a prospective male partner and has sex W\\\\ him after-
ward is a prostitute. It is a sexist interpretation in that it denies the

possibility that the female may enjoy sex as well. The assumption is
that she "gives" sex to the male but he does not "give" sex back (hav-
ing already given food). But looking again at the bonobo pair, we
could equally well conclude that the male suggests sharing some
food, which is nice, and then sharing some sex, Avhich is nice.
Invisible Sex
One of the most striking differences betwêen the sexual behavior of

contemporary humans and that of the great apes is privacy. Although
primates do seek privacy for sex on occasion, much of their sexual
activity goes on within eye- and earshot of the rest of the group. But
human sexuality is often hidden — so hidden, in fact, that privacy be-
comes an obstacle for those who study it. In an article entitled "Sex
the Invisible," Ernestine Friedl surveyed the worldwîde ethnographic
literature and concluded that "hidden coitus may safely be declared a
near universal." She ^vent on to discuss various sociobiological expla-

nations for its hiddenness. But her initial premise remains unproven,
since the potential problem is actually the ethnographic literature it-
self. From A.D. 1400 onward, when Catholic merchants set out to ex-
plore the seaways of the world, the very earliest accounts of "natives"
that they wrote often contain descriptions of or oblique references to
open sexuality.
Many peoples of the Avorld, prior to European colonization and

its attendant Christian missions, seem to have openly celebrated their
sexuality, at least on occasion. Days of sexual license, where adults
had sex with many partners as they wished quite publicly, seem to
as
have occurred among North American Indian groups like the Huron.
Jesuit missionaries were eager to crack down on such activity, so that
by the time trained anthropologists arrived to study these communi-
ties in detail, from the nineteenth century onward, they found a very
different culture from Avhat the Jesuits had encountered. Sexual be-
havior had changed, and where it had not, we can surmise that it was
vvêll hidden from the Europeans. But Friedl is wrong to think that
coitus is entirely hidden even in modern Western society. Although it
is not an everyday public act, it is regularly performed in small pri-

vate groups as well as for larger paying audiences at live shows and
for the video market.
In many societies children observe adult sexual activity. Jean

Liedloff, in The Continuum Concept, writes that the Yequana Indians of
Amazonia consider the presence of infants during lovemaking a mat-
ter of course, and she claims that children who do not witness it miss
out on an "important psycho-biological link" with their parents.
These same Amazonian parents also teach their children head hunt-
ing, however. Clearly practices that are acceptable in one culture may
be quite unacceptable in another and may have very different effects.
In Viennese apartments, Sigmund Freud assumed, it was effectively
inevitable that children would at times be able to observe their par-
ents' sexual activities, but this did not tend to make them into well-
balanced people.
Power Play
Despite the evidence that sex is a largely learned behavior among

primates, and despite the documentation of homosexual activities
and instances of obvious "sex-as-pleasure" among many higher ani-
mals, sociobiologists still contend that reproductive success ultimate-

ly determines sexual behavior. They would explain male homosexuality
in chimps, for example, primarily in terms of male-male bonding or
the subordination of one male by another — that is, as part of a
process of forming alliances and pecking orders whose ultimate goal
is to gain access to females for reproduction, and to protect the
genetic legacy embodied in one's offspring. But beyond sex-as-plea-

sure, the idea of sex-as-power raises further problems for sociobiolo-
gists. A cherished notion among sociobiologists is that men are
naturally promiscuous, while women are naturally monogamous.
Robin Baker says in Sperm Ward that most male readers of his book
will have sex with around a dozen Avomen in their lifetime, while
female readers will average eight male sex partners. But this is illogi-
cal; statistically, for heterosexual pairings, the numbers simply have

to even out. The discrepancy in Baker's survey data arises from
men's tendency to exaggerate and women's fear of derogatory label-
ing. Still, these very tendencies betray real imbalances in modern
Western society — not in the relative amounts of sex but in the
power relations associated wîth it.
When men rape women, according to sociobiology, they could
be pursuing a strategy — albeit a violent, criminal one — of genetic
maximization. The ethologist Robin Dunbar has recently argued that
rape is an evolutionarily sensible policy for unattractive men who
Avould not otherwise get a partner; by contrast, Robin Baker argues
that women, followîng the genetic imperative, should seek out men
with above-average reproductive success. His argument is so incredi-
ble, it is ^vorth presenting in some detail.
Since rapists "do indeed have an above-average [reproductive]

potential," argues Baker, "it should be no surprise to find that when
a woman's body has a one-off opportunity to collect a rapist's genes,
it often does so." But Baker does not want one of Dunbar's losers.
"On the contrary, it is reproductively important to the wôman that

her body collect genes from only the most successful of rapists. If
she conceives to an inept rapist, doomed quickly to be caught . . . her
male descendants would inherit unsuccessful characteristics." Thus a
^voman should "do everything possible to avoid being raped"; that
way, she "is unlikely to fall victim to any but the most cunning, de-
termined and competent of rapists. The result is that only a minority
of Avomen are ever raped, but those ^vho are may then respond by
conceiving."
The absurdity, not to say bad taste (though that never bothers
sociobiologists), of this argument is patent. Only by a long stretch of
the imagination could a tendency to rape — Avere it inheritable — ever
be seen in cultural terms as a more "successful" characteristic than,
say, courage (and culture is ultimately where success gets judged).
Moreover, the "minority of raped " women to w^hom Baker refers are
known because their attackers were subsequently completed (at a rate,
estimated by the London-based Rape Crisis Centre, of around one in

every thousand actual rapes committed). Some of the victims may
conceive, but many of them will abort the fetus. Studies of the con-
nection between rape and reproductive success leave out the very ob-
vious point that rape is used to express power and to give the rapist
pleasure. It is rarely used to pass on genes.
One social situation where rape is definitely directed at generat-
ing pregnancy is in some types of war. In the recent war in Bosnia,
the systematic rape of Muslim women has been geared to breaking

up communities, as the rape victim is traditionally ostracized. But it
cannot be said that the Serbian rapists have any great reproductive
interest in the offspring so created, as they are prepared to shell the
areas v^here mother and child might wêll be staying. In war, and per-
haps outside it, rape, by whatever mechanism, involves forced sex
under circumstances that seem unconducive to the subsequent birth
survival and success of offspring.

Despite the fact that it is possible to support theories of sex-as-
pleasure and sex-as-power, sociobiologists may still turn around and
say that underlying reproductive strategies, however circuitous, ulti-
mately determine observed human behavior.
Bucking Biology
The bandwagon is
factor that completely derails the sociobiological
contraception. The human ability to learn presupposes a mind that can
be changed, a mind that can make certain choices. The development of
such a mind, to be sure, may have been enabled by the development of
particular genes. (One could, if one ^vere naive enough, postulate a
"free will" gene to set alongside the "gay gene.") But the emergence of
that mind put an end most of the determinism of the other genes.
to
That is, although one may have "an instinct" to do one thing, one may
choose to do the opposite. People may choose to "rebel" against their
genes by using contraception; they may choose to be celibate; or they
may choose to be sexual but never have children. Contraception is not
86 The Prehii^toryofSex
some recent invention involving vulcanized rubber and packages of

pills. The body has its o^vn contraceptive mechanisms
tinfoil-Avrapped
that can be culturally enhanced, while further means of contraception
are commonly available in nature.
Breast-feeding suppresses menstruation in wômen. The reason is
nov^ thought to be that suckling increases the activity of opiates in the

hypothalamus, which in turn suppresses production of the hormones
involved in ovulation. Menstruation may recommence as early as six
months after birth, but if breast-feeding is kept up, then both ovulation
and the successful implantation of any new^ fertilized e^^ may be
delayed for much longer. One of the benefits of not menstruating is
that the iron that a ^voman ^vould otherwise lose is channeled into the
breast milk; another obviously good reason for a wôman not to get
pregnant again right away is the intensiveness of early infant care. On
a global scale, lactational fertility control is the most efficient contra-
ceptive known. (Women do not forget to breast-feed, and it is free.)
The ancients were aware of it, and exploited it more Avidely Thus,
Hippocratic Aphorism V. 50 says: "To restrain a woman's menstrua-
tion, apply the largest possible cupping glass to the nipples," while
Aphorism V. 39 notes, "If a woman who is neither pregnant nor has
given birth produces milk, her menstruation has stopped. "
A woman's
sex-work as a prostitute might in this Avay be neatly combined with
employment as a ^vet nurse, a dual occupation referred to in Flaubert's
novel Madame Boiâiy.
Knowledge of the role of the cervix in mediating sperm, of fetal
development and the circumstances and techniques of mechanical

abortion, and of the control of menstruation through lactation could
all have been employed in prehistoric fertility control. Caustic or
blocking vaginal pessaries ^vere known and used. The ancient Egyp-
tian Kahun gynecological papyrus of around 1900 B.C. prescribes
natron (hydrated sodium carbonate) mixed ^vith crocodile drop-
pings —a recipe, one imagines, that could have been an aphrodisiac
as well as spermicidal! Other pessaries contained acacia gum, men-
tioned in the Ebers papyrus of 1550—1500 B.C. Modern tests on aca-
cia gum show it to have spermicidal properties. Inserting half a
lemon into the vagina was a popular contraceptive device in ancient

Rome. (The fruit was first widely available in Greece from the fifth
century B.C.)
Forgotten Fruitt^
Many plants can have a direct hormonal effect on human reproductive

function and can be used as oral contraceptives and short-term aborti-
facients ("morning-after" drugs that prevent the fertilized e^^ from
implanting). So widespread and effective are these plants that I believe
that they must have been used in prehistory and possibly throughout
our evolutionary emergence. This controversial belief can, as yet, be
substantiated only from indirect kinds of evidence. There are four such
sources: the hormone chemistry of the plants themselves; the extent of
their use among present-day societies; their ^veil-established and wide-
spread use in ancient Greece and Rome; and finally, their possible use
by animals, including primates, in the Avild.
At first glance the fact that plants produce sex hormones that
can affect animals and humans is surprising. It did not begin to be
scientifically accepted until 1933, when Boleslaw Skarzynski found a
substance in willow, trihydroxyoestrin, that resembled estrogen. In
the same year, Adolf Butenandt and H. Jacobi isolated female hor-
mones from date palm and pomegranate. It is clear that plants con-
tain many complex chemicals that can affect humans. They can bring
menstruation to a halt (menses prohibitors) or, conversely bring it on
(emmenagogues); they can act hormonally to alleviate premenstrual
syndrome (PMS) and function as contraceptives or abortifacients;
and they can be aphrodisiac.
Ethical considerations, prejudices, and moral scruples on the
part of Western scholars have meant that they have grossly underes-
timated the true extent of knowledge about and use of natural repro-
ductive controls among traditional societies worldwide past and
present. Modern Western herbals and pharmacopeias do not gener-
ally list effects of plants on sexual function beyond the formulaic
standard warning "should not be used in pregnancy." One of the

most effective early-term abortifacients, Queen Anne's lace, has not
appeared in any official medical record since the sixteenth century,
although it has been recently reported to be in regular, everyday use
in parts of western North Carolina, western Virginia, Tennessee, and
Indiana.
Only rarely have botanists, social anthropologists, and ethnog-
raphers thought to ask local peoples about the day-to-day realities of
their sex lives. Most of these travelers have been male, whereas most
of the relevant kno^vledge concerns women's bodies and lives; herbal-
ism is part of the magical tradition of midwives and medicine women
and is often kept secret. The ethnobotanist Edward Anderson, w\\o
has worked for many years among the hill tribes of northern Thai-
land, writes in relation to the "immense arsenal of medicines related
to fertility, pregnancy, parturition, and the critical few weeks immedi-
ately following birth" that:
Most vvômen were unwilling to discuss this subject wîth me

and my male interpreters. Although men know some of the
plants used by women during this period, the subject seems
to be almost totally in the domain of ^vomen. My Thai col-
Duangduen Poocharoen, a
league from Payap University,
woman who speaks excellent northern Thai, and my
daughter. Erica, who also speaks Thai and who served as
my assistant for a period of time, vêre able to gain consid-
erable knowledge of this subject which I could not.
The most clearly systematized bodies of herbal knoAvledge are

found on the Indian subcontinent. The Ayurvedic system of medi-
cine uses around seventy-five plants, twenty-eight of which are said
to be effective for aborting pregnancy. Listing their names gives a
feel for the extent of the known natural pharmacopeia of a single
region: prickly chaff flo^ver, custard apple, celery, betel-nut palm,
^vorm-killer, Indian birth^vort, common bamboo, giant milk\veed
and swallow wart, papaya, ringworm shrub, purging croton, lesser

cardamom, cotton plant, common cress, horseradish tree, oleander,
black cumin, Syrian rue, black pepper, rosy leadwort, Ceylon lead-
wort, bushy gardenia, Indian madder, sandalwood, marking-nut
tree, sesame, and bala. Ten of the herbs on this list are also used as
emmenagogues — serving to bring on menstruation; along with a fur-
ther forty-eight species listed as commonly used to stimulate men-
struation, they are likely to Avork as early-term abortifacients, either
of a "morning-after" type or at the point Avhen the period is first
missed.
The preparation of these plants for consumption is complex, in-
volving variously the seed, fruit, oil, root, bark, flower, or — in the
case of bamboo — the stem joint. They are sometimes applied in the
form of a vaginal suppository or douche, sometimes decocted in order
to be drunk, and sometimes the two methods are combined. In all
cases both the dosage of the plant and the reproductive state of the
individual are critical. Many of the same plants, in differing

strengths, are used by women to stimulate milk production (galacto-
gogues), to clamp dow^n the uterus after childbirth, to alleviate morn-

ing sickness, and so on, as well as by men as cures for impotence and
other sexual disorders, and by both sexes as aphrodisiacs. Saffron
(CrocLid dativLu), for example, contains the substance picrocrocin,
which promotes menstruation and soothes menstrual pain in small
doses, ^vhile in large doses it is said to be both an aphrodisiac and an

abortifacient. But in general, few^ of these plants have been clinically
tested in the West, and their possible active ingredients remain

unidentified.
Similar numbers of plant species are used by peoples living in
the world's other tropical belts— the rainforests of South America,

Africa, and the Malay Peninsula — as well as in colder climes. A type
of fennel, Ferula modchata, is used as an abortifacient by folk practi-
tioners on the Central Asian steppe— a region where artemisia
(which has similar properties) also grows. In Hispanic New Mexico,
rue is used as a traditional abortifacient. Among the Saami people of
the European Arctic, a tree bark Kchen is reputedly used as a female
contraceptive. But the most comprehensive evidence for plant-based
contraceptives in a temperate region is contained in classical Euro-

pean writings, especially those of Hippocrates and Soranus.
Hippocrates was aware that the seed of Queen Anne's lace or
wild carrot, when taken orally, both prevented and terminated preg-
nancy, as did an infusion of pennyroyal (also mentioned by Aristo-
phanes in 421 B.C.). Tests in 1986 showed Queen Anne's lace to
contain compounds that block the production of progesterone, the
hormone that prepares the uterus for the fertilized egg) it can thus be
used as a powêrful "morning-after" remedy Perhaps the most potent
herb was a variety of silphium or giant fennel, genus Ferula, discov-
ered by Greeks on the coast of northern Africa in the seventh century
B.C. So sought was it as a contraceptive and such a high price
after
did it command that, by the third or fourth century A.D., it was

driven to extinction. The active ingredient in silphium was probably
the substance ferujol, which has been shoAvn in clinical tests to pre-
vent pregnancy in rats up to three days after coitus. Myrrh,
artemisia, known and used as abortifacients.
and rue were also
These plants commanded high prices when they reached the

city, but they ^vere much cheaper than having more children. Poly-
bius, writing in the second century B.C., said that Greek families were
limiting themselves to one or two children. They could have achieved
this by widespread infanticide, but ^ve have no evidence in the med-
ical literature that they did. Nor is there demographic evidence, in
the form of a ske^ved sex-ratio — in all kno"wn societies where infanti-
cide is practiced, more girls than boys are killed, leading to an obvi-
ous imbalance between the sexes in adult life. Archaeologically,
infanticide sometimes shows up in the form of separate neonatal
cemeteries, but these are not common. It seems ancient Greeks em-
ployed a variety of other methods of contraception. Soranus s early-
second-century-A.D. treatise Gynecology distinguished between

contraception and abortion and listed several methods for each; eight
out of the ten plants that he listed have been show^n in modern tests
to have distinct effects.
While we know that vômen both in antiquity and in traditional
societies world^vide used an extensive range of reproductive controls,

far less is known about precautions taken by men. Male contracep-
tives are not mentioned in the Hippocratic corpus, although we may

surmise that materials and technology for condoms were available. In
visualizing a scientific experiment, Hippocrates says, "Suppose you
were to tie a bladder onto the end of a pipe"; the bladder is then filled
via the pipe —a simple process from which the principle of the con-
dom may easily be deduced. That male contraception was desired at
times is indicated by the first-century medical ^vriter Dioscorides,

who says that men could make themselves barren if they drank a
preparation of the plant called perlklymenon for thirty-seven days. We
do not know for certain what the plant is, but it could be honey-
suckle, ^vhich Linnaeus later named after it (Lonicera periclytnenum).
Modern ethnography records male oral contraception among the

Deni Indians of Amazonia. A single dose of a plant closely related to
curare is taken by both men and women as a contraceptive. It seems,

however, to actually Avork only on the men, in ^vhom it can produce
temporary infertility for around six months.
Pro-Choice Prehistory
A veritable chestnut in the prehistory of sex is the claim that early

humans did not know that sex and babies ^vere in any way con-
nected. Reay Tannahill, on the first page of her book Sex In H'utory,
states that in prehistory, before the relatively recent development of

farming, "there is nothing to suggest that man was even remotely
aware of his own physical role in the production of children." The
eminent British scientist Sir James Biment has recently claimed that
"Stone Age man probably didn't associate sex vvîth something that
came along nine months later," adding "I doubt he could count up to
nine." Many people think that prehistoric life was a struggle for exis-
tence that neither required deliberate population control nor was

conducive to providing any rational understanding of its possibility.
"The struggle for existence" is a phrase coined by Thomas

Malthus, who in 1798 published the first edition of his influential KKHiy
on Poputatlon. Human populations increase naturally, Malthus argued,

and are checked only by war, famine, and pestilence, as well as misery
and vice. The second edition stressed an additional factor in popula-

tion control: "moral restraint," or the postponement of the age of mar-
riage and strict sexual continence. Malthus lived some three hundred
years after the first systematic ^vitch-hunts, at a time when women
were formally excluded from the medical academy and their long-
established plant-based contraceptive knowledge had been destroyed,
forgotten, or gone underground. At a loss to explain v^^hy the size of
simple hunting groups did not rise in the way that his theory predicted,
Malthus supposed that such people felt less "passion" for one another.
But passion was clearly not absent from hunter-gatherer soci-
eties. The indigenous peoples that Western colonialists met in the
South Seas seemed in fact to celebrate sex —a fact that made their
relatively stable population levels all the more puzzling, even though
the explanation lay clearly in view. For example, the British anthro-
pologist George Pitt- Rivers noted in 1927,
European observers, such as missionaries and government

officials, have often supposed that some mysterious contra-
ceptive drug was used by the unmarried girls. Native herbs
and roots, mixed together with all manner of magical sub-
stances, such as spider's eggs, skins of snakes, etc., are as a
matter of fact made into concoctions and drunk by girls
with this idea. I have myself collected such recipes from

Melanesian and Papuan sorcerers and old women, but
there is no reason to suppose they have any physical effect.
The most influential anthropological view was that of Bronislaw Ma-

lino\vski, who argued in his 1929 book The Sexual Life of Savages In
North-Wed tern Melanesia that infertile premarital promiscuity among
the Trobriand Islanders could not be explained by reference to delib-
erate birth-control measures: "any suggestion of neo-Malthusian ap-
pliances makes them shudder or laugh. . . . They never practise coltod
InterruptLUy and still less have any notion about chemical or mechani-
cal preventives."
Malinowski's views were disputed by other Europeans resident

in Melanesia, w^ho believed that the natives used herbal remedies.
One magistrate wrote that he had "been informed by many indepen-
dent and intelligent natives that the female of the species is specially
endowed or gifted with ejaculatory powers, which may be called
upon after an act of coition to expel the male deed. It is understandable
that such powers might be increased by use and practice, and I am
satisfied that such a method does exist." This description is almost
identical to the description of volitional control described by Hip-
pocrates.
Malinowski maintained that Trobriand and Andaman Islanders
^vere ignorant of the physiology of conception because of their belief
that children were the result of a divine spirit entering the womb, and
that semen was merely a nutrient for the growing fetus. Yet this belief
does not reflect a denial of any connection between semen and the
successful birth of babies, and it must have been a matter of general
knowledge in this community — as it was, I believe, in every other hu-
man community that has ever existed — that women Avho remain vir-
gin do not become pregnant. Male orgasm is everywhere implicated

in the process of human reproduction, but it is everywhere seen as in-
sufficient in itself. Pregnancy and subsequent childbirth do not result
from male homosexual acts, or from lesbian ones, or from sex using
inanimate objects, or from any sort of sex by any type of person vvîth
animals. Many people in the modern vvôrld, in both Eastern and

Western philosophies, continue to hold the compatible belief that di-
vine intervention is required for the initial implantation of a soul.

Speaking for myself, I find the proposition that no spirit is involved
in conception unpleasantly atheistic, although I do not deny the phys-
ical part that bodies play.
Proceeding from the assumption that male sexual activity and
the production of offspring from it are connected acts, sociobiological
reasoning assumes that male animals can recognize something of
themselves (in modern parlance, their "genes") in their offspring
through smell and other senses. Human fathers too can recognize
their own by sense of smell, as well as by facial characteristics. Fe-
male animals are thought to make the connection, in behavioral if not
conscious terms, between heterosexual intromissive sex during estrus

and pregnancy. Human females who are in touch ^vith their bodies
are often able to consciously pinpoint the moment of conception —
knowing both when they ovulated, when they have retained sperm
from their partner, and w^hen the hormonal effects of fertilization are
beginning. Only by consciously obscuring this straightforward bodily
knoAvledge (by placing an almost religious reliance on the compara-

tively clumsy machinations of modern medicine, for example) is it re-
ally possible to imagine that prehistoric women and men thought the
creation of progeny was unrelated to sexual activity.
In reproductive terms, human beings are termed K-strategists:

that is, they have few children, but they invest hugely in them. Con-
traception is not just a ^vay to get sexual pleasure vvîthout having
children; it can also be part and parcel of good K-strategy planning.
To give children the greatest chance in life, everything from the tim-
ing of their birth to the number of competing siblings they have can
be brought under conscious control. Such control is a hallmark of our
species and is directly related, I believe, to our evolutionary success
(thus far).
That people all over the world have recognized certain plants as
having the potential to affect human reproduction is not surprising
since, until the recent rise of urbanism, most people lived among
plants. People in hunter-gatherer societies are exposed to tens of
thousands of complex plant-based compounds; such societies typi-
cally utilize two hundred species of edible plant, each of ^vhich in turn
contains around two hundred complex organic "secondary product"

chemicals, many of them unique to that particular species. Plants
from closely related species can therefore have very different effects.
"The plant killing the \\ê," AneiUma Uneolatum, for example, is closely
related to Aneilema nudiflorum, w^hich is a staple vegetable. In some
parts of the world 40 percent of plant species contain estrogenic com-
pounds that have the potential to modify sexual functioning.
Just touching certain plants can produce marked effects on hu-
man sexual chemistry. Since Roman times, for example, hops (the
flo^vers o£ HumuUu^ Lupuiud) have been used in bre^ving; picking them
was traditionally known to reduce men's sex drive, ^vhile ^vomen
commonly suffered a disruption or cessation of menstruation. Both of

these effects are now known to be caused by skin absorption of an oil
containing a female sex hormone. One way humans could have

that
learned about the properties of plants was by observing their effects
on animals. Farmers were often aware that the reproductive cycles of
their livestock could be disrupted if they fed on particular plants,
such as ivy — now known to contain estrogenic compounds.
Animals may at times seek such plants out deliberately. In some
species of rodent, changes in diet trigger reproduction, \vhile howler
monkeys and other primates seem to use them more deliberately for
this purpose. Chimpanzees use various plant species for self-medica-
tion, although not, apparently, to control fertility. But orangutans
have been observed to deliberately eat the leaves, bark, and fruits of
particular trees {McLanochyla, Melanorrhoea, and Dupyroj) that have

clear toxic effects, causing blackening of the lips and peeling skin.
The primatologist Paul Vasey tentatively hypothesizes that the toxic

effects may also extend internally to the lining of the uterus; in view^
of the fact that forced copulation (rape) occurs among wild orang-
utans, Vasey believes it at least possible that females are using these
plants to produce abortion (although this currently remains a specu-

lation only).
On the basis of the available evidence, I think it is highly likely

that most prehistoric communities were in control of their fertility
and fully able to separate sex from reproduction. Egyptian and an-
cient Greek knowledge dates back several thousand years. Tech-
niques recorded in the Bronze Age period in Europe and the Near
East are presented as tried and tested — and there are a great number
of them. The inevitable conclusion is that these techniques were al-
ready under development in yet earlier periods. But for this period it-
self, direct evidence is currently lacking. The processing of medicinal

plants is known from as early as 40,000 years ago (discussed in
Chapter 4), but so far we have no positive evidence for plants with
contraceptive or abortifacient qualities.

Reproductive control was a crucial part of our evolution, caus-
ing sexual selection to proceed at a fast pace and facilitating greater
cultural investment in children. Prehistoric communities must have
been vêll aware of the facts of life. Most likely, awâreness of the con-
nection between certain forms of heterosexual sex and subsequent
pregnancy was part and parcel of the evolution of consciousness it-
self. But prehistoric communities wêre not identical: it is aWays pos-

sible to "unlearn" or culturally obscure the facts, something that
humans are rather good at. Societies that feel a need to censor the
"mysteries of the organism" can erode the natural body know^ledge of
their constituent members and banish the age-old Avisdom of medi-
cine women to the realm of satanic superstition. Control over sexual
know^ledge and erotic imagery for social ends is nothing new^. It be-
gan more than 30,000 years ago, during the last ice age.
Cnapter 4
iVLeet tke
JKêal Jnlintston es
'If you believe in nothing elde^ believe that

sexual repreddion never ^leepd. "
Nancy Friday,
Women on Top
m hen our prehistoric ancestors started to communicate with each

other, they did so in a number
Spoken language allowed
of ways.
subjective expression and the development of communally shared
ideas, ^vhile the symmetry and standardization in objects such as
stone tools expressed shared aesthetic ideas. The point at which sub-
ject and object met was the human body. At once personal and pub-
lic, natural and cultural, a person could express inner states through
the body, using gesture and appearance. As it became progressively
more naked, the body became a potential canvas for art. Plant-based
cosmetics, such as henna, could be applied directly to areas of skin
and hair. Belladonna could be used to dilate the pupils. Mineral pig-
ments, such as red ocher, were used to create dramatic temporary ef-
(Fig. 4.1) A 230.000-year-old sculpture from
Berekhat Ram, Israel. Drawing by George

Taylor after Goren-Inbar 1986.
fects on the skin. Clothing and mask or enhance partic-

je^velry could
ular body parts and express changing moods and intentions. More
permanent changes could be achieved through decorative scarifica-
tion and tattooing.
I believe that the evolution of nakedness and the development of

body decoration and clothing ^vere interconnected processes. In this
chapter I argue that body art constituted a ceremonial language, one
used as a form of self-representation. It also marked the first rites of
passage and helped formulate ideas of status-appropriate behavior
and punishment for transgression.
The Dawn of Art
The very first time that we know of for certain that our ancestors
made representations of themselves is sometime between 800,000
and 233,000 years ago. The evidence is a tiny hand-v\ôrked figurine
sculpture that was discovered in 1981 in a deposit sealed between
two datable basalt floes, on a site called Berekhat Ram in the Golan
Heights, Israel. The excavator, Naama Goren-Inbar, believes that
the archaic human occupants of the site selected a pebble that bore
some resemblance to the female form, and enhanced it by cutting
grooves to delineate the head and arms. Depending how^ one looks
Meet the Real Flintstones 99
at it, the Berekhat Ram figurine seems to have some type of project-
ing breast, but it is hard to say more than that. Our capabihty for
appreciating artistic images dates back some three milUon years, to
an australopithecine-inhabited cave Makapansgat in southern
at
Africa, where a pebble in an occupation deposit was found to look

like a human face.
The Makapansgat pebble is a small quirk of nature. Looking at

it, one cannot fail to see two eyes, a hairline, and a mouth, \vhich is
presumably what the australopithecine who brought it back to the
cave also saw. Neither the Makapansgat pebble nor the Berekhat
Ram figurine tells us what early people looked like — the one because
it is a natural object possessing only the simplest features, the second
because it is so crudely made that it looks less like a person than the
natural pebble. But their importance should not be underestimated.
The first seems to suggest some gleam of self-awareness, while the
second tells us that people Avere actively sculpting each other. If the
Berekhat Ram sculpture represents v^hat people could do with an in-
tractable bit of stone, tough enough to survive for more than a quar-
ter-million years, then what were they able to do in more forgiving
media, such as clay? Or on their own bodies?
That naked skin presented itself as a decorative field is a sup-
position that cannot be tested unless we can find the potential color-
ing materials in the archaeological record. At Middle Stone Age
sites in southern Africa dating from sometime after 300,000 B.P., red
ocher begins to be found. Archaeologist Ian Watts has documented
six certain and five possible instances of the deliberate use of ocher
in the following period, down to around 130,000-110,000 B.C., after
which its use suddenly becomes very widespread. The standard
archaeological interpretation of red ocher is that it was used for cur-

ing hides, since iron oxide (the coloring component of the ocher)
can stop the action of the enzyme coUagenase, which starts the
decay process But among hunter-gatherer groups in the
in leather.
savannah region, as Watts notes, the use-life of most hide items is

shorter than the time it takes for coUagenase to render them unus-
able. He proposes instead that the ocher was used in the artful cre-
ation of "sham menstruation." This part of his work is closely
connected to a research group, led by Chris Knight of the University

of East London, that have developed the "sex strike theory" of
human cuhural evolution.
The Sex Strike Theory
The sex strike theory, developed ^vithin a revolutionary Marxist

framework and inspired by a rather idiosyncratic reading of Richard
Dawkins's "selfish gene" theory, holds that reproductive conflict lies
at the heart of human social relations. Marx and Engels believed

that prehistoric communities lived in a state of primitive commu-
nism, but that it did not last very long. Classes emerged with cities
and writing and set up a dialectical process of conflict and social
contradiction ^vhose ultimate resolution Avas envisaged as the com-

munist ideal. Today, now that the immense timescale of human pre-
history has been recognized, orthodox Marxists are left without any
real theory for social change during some of the most significant
periods of human development. The sex strike theory is an elaborate
attempt to see men's and Avomen's genes as the conflicting class-
agents that powered the "human symbolic revolution" — the period
in w^hich art first emerged.
The sex strike theory has been wêll number of
received by a
sociobiologists and social anthropologists, although less so by
archaeologists. The central belief is that among archaic japlenj^
women, incapacitated by babies, needed the men to go off and hunt
and bring back game animals that they could all eat. In such circum-
stances the women, according to the sex strike theorists, had two
options. The first was to live in subservient polygyny of a type in
w^hich a dominant man had several ^vives and divided his time
among them. The sex strike theorists feel that this option ^vould
have given women too little male support and have been bad for the
group as a Avhole, as subservient males ^vould have hung around on
the margins of the community, contributing little. Therefore, they
believe that the ^vomen organized things so that each of them could
be provisioned by a single, faithful male — as in the Lovejoy see-
nario — in order to maximize the amount of nutrition and child care

they got. According to the theory, they first had to synchronize their
menstrual cycles, so that they all became fertile at the same time,
thus apparently thAvarting any incipient polygynists (although ^vhy
this should actually work is not clear). Second, in order to obtain
food, they periodically persuaded the men that sex was off.The
obvious time they did this — according to sex strike theorists— was
when they were all menstruating.
In order not to misrepresent the complexities and nuances of
this theory, I present it here in the words of a sympathetic reviewer,
Robin Dunbar of the University of Liverpool. As Dunbar puts it:
As meat came to provide an increasingly important element

in the diet of the ancestral hominids, the females, with their
increasingly large brained offspring, came to be progres-
sively more dependent on the hunting activities of the
males. However, like the males of most primates, the ho-

minid males were not especially interested in the females'
problems in rearing offspring: their primary interest was

simply in sex, and if meat offerings provided them with
greater access to sex (the so-called "prostitution theory" of
human social evolution), then they were prepared to trade
meat for sex, but that was that.
But because "the females' heavy reproductive burden" required more

meat, they came up with the "organized policy of sex strikes."
Red ocher has a place in this strange scenario, albeit slightly
inconsistently. According to Camilla Power — a member of the East
London group — menstruation, which signals a "sex strike," also
signals impending fertility. Thus, men would wish to hang around
menstruating women in order to get them pregnant (although they
would also be prepared to disappear again, once their genetic seeds
were sown). In Chris Knight and Charles Maisels's words, men-
struation
102
'
The Prehidtory of Sex
signals a female's imminent fertility — and hence by contrast

the infertliity of neighbouring females not displaying such
blood. Logically in selfish gene terms, fitness-maximizing
males ought to have been attracted by any such fertile fe-
male within the local area, competing to bond with her

rather than with pregnant or breast-feeding females. Moth-
ers with heavy childcare burdens, lacking the menstrual
signal, would then have lost out at the very moment they
needed help most.
To get around this,
When not really fertile, females signalled cu If they were,

acting within kin-coalitions of both fertile and non-fertile
individuals even to the point of borrowîng one another's
blood or similar coloured pigments. Such strategies were
designed to th^vart male philanderers, not collude Avith
dominant males.
Thus, conclude Knight and Maisels, "selfish genes in the case of our
species have clearly led to the emergence of human solidarity."
One of the most obvious problems with the sex strike theory is
that menstruation does not actually signal fertility; ovulation gener-

ally occurs in midcycle. The sham menstruation in the sex strike the-
ory is the corollary of concealed ovulation —a feature that
sociobiologists think emerged in humans naturally rather than cultur-
ally but for the same purpose — to keep men guessing. The idea of
concealed ovulation is popular among animal behaviorists and socio-
biologists. According to Richard Alexander and Katherine Noonan,
concealed ovulation meant that females \vere able "to force "
desirable
males to stick around and not be promiscuous, as the males wôuld
not know when ovulation occurred; "thus concealment of ovulation
could only evolve in a group-living situation in which the importance
of parental care in offspring reproductive success was increasing . . .
these two circumstances together describe a large part of the unique-

ness of the social environment of humans during their divergence
"
from other primates.

A second theory, developed by Nancy Burley, is that because
human females had the intellectual capacity to practice contraception,
they avoided the pains of childbirth as far as they could and stopped
well short of having the maximum number of children that they were
physically capable of producing. Because these ^vomen left feAver de-
scendants, natural selection somehow, according to Burley, evolved a
mechanism to th^vart them by giving them a reproductive cycle recal-
citrant to birth control — one in which the time of ovulation was not
known.
Body Knowledge
Both the sex strike theory and Burley s theory have their problems.
As Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has pointed out, what is termed concealed

ovulation is not unique to humans, and plenty of nonreproductive,
outside-estrus sexual activity goes on among many primates. Burley
assumes that the only method of contraception available to early hu-
man females Avas the rhjrthm method, yet hunter-gatherer women to-
day use a variety of methods to space births judiciously at a rate of

around one every five years to an average of four or five live births
per woman. This birthrate does not translate into a demographic ex-
plosion because of the high early mortality among hunter- gatherers.
In short, it is simply not true that concealed ovulation causes more
babies to be born. Human evolutionary success did not — in early pre-
history, at least — depend on producing massive numbers of offspring
but focused on intensive, high-quality infant care.
The main point against Burley 's theory, however, has escaped
most behavioral scientists: ovulation is not really concealed in
humans at all. Many women know when they are ovulating. Some
experience a specific pain that can be detected to the left or right,
according to which ovary is releasing the e^g; and some develop
skin coloration — on the cheeks, for example ^
— that is associated with

ovulation. Ovulation is also signaled by fertile mucus; the changes in
vaginal discharge may be noticeable both to a woman and to her

partner. Further, a number of studies have shov^n that Avomen are
more sexually active at the time of ovulation. In small group-living
communities, women menstruate and ovulate pretty much in syn-
chrony (for reasons discussed in the next section). The mechanism

by Avhich they achieve this synchrony is pheromonal — Avomen are
able to smell each other's menstrual status and bring their bodies
into line Avith one another accordingly. All of this suggests that
reproductive cycles within early human groups would have been
fairly well knoAvn by both females and males, consciously or uncon-
sciously.
1 proposed in Chapter 1 that the mechanical practicalities of up-

right walking undermined the signaling function of estrus skin. So-
called concealed ovulation is nothing more than a result of that

evolution. In the last chapter I argued that reproductive body knoAvl-
edge and fertility control Avere part and parcel of human conscious-
ness as it developed. There is thus no reason to suppose that men
Avould not have known when women were reproductively receptive.
Both the sex strike theory and Burley's theory also seem to assume
that most women had a "heavy reproductive burden" to bear, yet this
is not true of most primate females or human females in hunter-gath-
erer societies. Most crucially, the sex strike theory rests on the idea
that a menstrual sex strike would be effective — that men Avould not
Avish to have sex with menstruating women, or with each other, or
with postmenopausal women. If it really was sex alone that the men
were after, why did they have to be forced to go hunting in order to
get meat to trade for it? The theory assumes, of course, that it is not
just sex that the men wanted, but reproductive sex Avith no follow-up
commitment to child care.
The sex strike theory also assumes that a man would actually
be fooled by red ocher into thinking that a woman had a period
when she had not. Given menstrual synchrony, the women not hav-
ing periods Avould either be premenarchic or postmenopausal, or
they Avould be pregnant; only the pregnant wômen^— according to
the theory — critically

needed the extra meat that could come only
from a dedicated hunter who believed that he had yet to get her
pregnant. Yet during the most crucial time span — late pregnancy
and the first few months — she would be in big trou-
after childbirth
ble if she did persuade her man that she was potentially fertile —
still
because if he believed her, he vvôuld be demonstrating intelligence

somewhat lower than that of a lemur! If men really were not inter-
ested in helping during this crucial time, then why could not the
"female kin-coalitions" that Po\ver postulates (and that exist among
other primates) help supply her and so obviate the need for the
whole ocher palaver?
Marginal Fertility and

Menstrual Synchrony
Another vvêakness of the sex strike theory is that it does not deal with
the perfectly well-established reason for menstrual synchrony. Men-
strual synchrony keeps some wômen fertile w^ho \vould not otherwise
be. Female fertility is a delicate thing; it depends on the slow accumu-
lation of sufficient fat reserves to see a pregnancy through. In hunter-
gatherer communities this delicacy would be highly apparent. But in
agricultural societies, as in the modern ^vorld, this delicacy is often ig-
nored, and a more sedentary lifestyle and more constant food supply
coupled Avith other factors (detailed in Chapter 3) mean that the in-
tervals between births are much shorter. Menstrual and ovulatory

synchrony is achieved quickly Avhen women live together, using scent
clues as a conscious or unconscious trigger. Women Avho live more
isolated lives are less likely to have regular ovulations, and under
conditions of nutritional stress they may
them altogether lor a
lose
while. Staying close to a group containing one or two strong men-

struators keeps the more borderline women in the game. Menstrual
synchrony indicates the existence of a "female kin-coalition," with its
implied good outlook for child care.

That men should go off hunting at the time of women's men-
struation—as they do in many traditional societies — is not actually
at all odd. Most societies have a taboo on sex during menstruation,

based on a variety of aversions, such as the symbohc association of
blood and death and the idea that women's blood is ritually conta-
gious. These taboos may be rationalizations for the facts that men-
struation is a rather messy time, that the ^voman is unlikely to get
pregnant (if that happens to be the aim), and that ^vomen them-
selves often do not feel sexy during their periods (although there are
exceptions).
Alexander Marshack has conducted a series of analyses that
seem to shoAv that the regular incisions found on many small pieces of
portable bone and antler found on Upper Paleolithic sites have a
time-tracking significance. If this is true (and the marks are so varied
that it is hard to know), then it would make sense in terms of people
keeping track of the annual migrations, gestation periods, and so
forth, of the big game animals that they hunted. Boris Frolov has sug-
gested that one particularly complex plaque from Mal'ta in Siberia
records a calendar year in Avhich the gestation period of the reindeer
is picked out. Women might also have wanted to keep track of
moons. In many societies living in marginal conditions, there is a par-
ticular best time of year to have a baby. Indeed, the human gestation
period of three-quarters of a year is adapted to such a system: a
^voman can fall pregnant at the end of the season of plenty, when her
fat reserves are highest, and give birth the following year at the be-
ginning of the next season of plenty.
A Codmetic Advantage
The sex strike theory involves the same sexist assumption as \
the "sex-for-food" theory, namely that women did not want sex as
much as men did. Nevertheless, if one focuses more narrov^ly on
reproduction, the "sex-for-food" theory becomes rather more plausi-
ble, and may indicate a more logical role for red ocher body color in
early human As brain size grew and infants became harder
societies.
to rear, ^vomen would have reduced their number of pregnancies

and competition among men to be chosen as a father could well have
heated up. In many societies worldvîde men paint and adorn them-
selves for days and wêeks in order to attract a mate — someone v/ho
wîll agree to do the hardest part of passing their genes on. Red
ocher is far more likely to be a male cosmetic than female menstrua-
tion decoy.
Makeup men a crucial advantage. To
could have given some
put it in very stark terms, imagine two men competing with each
other to be chosen by a mate. One has a naturally healthy complex-
ion. The other is actually terminally ill but has recourse to bright
ochers. He uses some belladonna to dilate his pupils and dabs oil of
muskrat behind his ear. Through this clever sexual culture, it is pos-
sible that the ill man can outdo the healthy one in the display-and-
attraction stakes and be chosen as the woman's mate. Of course, this
may turn out to be bad new^s for the wôman, as she may have to
raise the child alone, but her consolation is that the child will have
clever, culture-using genes on board. This rather caricatured exam-
ple show^s how culture complicates the business of sexual and natur-
al selection, giving rise to all sorts of complex and sometimes
unexpected results. The development of near-total hairlessness in
many human communities may reflect the evolutionary victory of
svelte body-decorators over hairy types.
Although humans probably had the capability for making art
from at least 233,000 years ago, it is not until around 30,000 B.P. that
they made much art that was solid enough to survive in the archaeo-
logical record. That w^hich has survived is spectacular — a fully

formed and mature sculptural style of miniature depictions of
women, the Venus figurines of Ice Age Europe. Before considering
these sculptures in detail, it is necessary to say something about the
cultural development o^ Homo and Neanderthals from 100,000
âpieiu
B.P. onward. Especially in the Near East, anatomically modern hu-

mans seem to have lived side by side with Neanderthals. Whether
they actually had anything to do with each other is disputed. It may
be that their population densities were so low that they never came
into contact. But skulls with both Neanderthal-like and modern-t>ê
features, such as those from Cro-Magnon (number 19 in Figure 1.3)
suggest that some intermixing of the two populations may have oc-
curred in Europe.
The last distinct Neanderthals lived in Spain around 28,000 years
ago. Because the Ice Age Venus figurines date to the period during and
follovvîng the final Neanderthal disappearance, some scientists have
argued that only anatomically modern humans had the capacity for
art. This thesis is obviously undermined by the Berekhat Ram figure,
even as rough as it is. Moreover, the formality and elaboration of

Neanderthal burials leave us in no doubt that Neanderthals had devel-
oped aesthetic sensibilities. The most famous site is the Shanidar cave
in the Zagros foothills of northeastern Iraq, where a series of
Neanderthal skeletons were excavated in the 1950s by Ralph Solecki.
The remains of seven adults and two children are dated to somewhere
between 60,000 and 44,000 B.P.; four of them were deliberately buried,
one apparently ^vith a garland of flo^vers as an offering.
There is some indirect evidence in Shanidar for a network of so-
cial support and for some sort of medical knowledge. The skeleton
knov^n as Shanidar I, a 30-to-45-year-old male with a brain capacity
of 1,600 cc (compare the modern European male average of 1,415 cc)
and around five feet seven inches tall, had suffered crippling injuries,
yet he lived on for many years after sustaining them. His left eye
socket had been crushed and his right arm had atrophied, along with
his right shoulder and collarbone. The forearm and hand were miss-
ing, perhaps because they had dropped off, or perhaps because they
were surgically amputated. Both his legs were damaged. Such a suite
of injuries could easily cause death today and must have left him ef-
fectively unable to fend for himself.
That knowledge of medicinal plants definitely existed by this
time is sho^vn by nevv^ discoveries at the Doura cave site in Syria,
dated to 100,000-40,000 B.P. Many hearths have been found that

have charred plum stones in them (presumably roasted to get rid of
harmful glucosides). Close by the hearths is a vast two-meter-thick
deposit of husks from Boraginacea — borage or star flower — widely
used today as a dietary supplement to alleviate premenstrual syn-
drome (PMS). The processing of borage seed is very labor intensive,
so the reasons for this large deposit are not explicable in terms of
calorific returns. It seems likely that the inhabitants of the Doura

cave were processing borage for its active ingredients.
The two main active ingredients of borage are gamma linolenic
acid (GLA) and alpha linolenic acid (ALA). The first is the one effec-
tive in treating PMS; the second, in treating Alzheimer's. It is hard to
know to what extent PMS is a modern Western phenomenon; the
compensating factor GLA is naturally found in breast milk, and it
may be that the intensive and long-term breast-feeding characteristic

of premodern and traditional societies provided girl babies with
enough GLA in childhood to ameliorate the syndrome in adult life. It
seems unlikely that the Doura cave people would process such a
large amount of borage unless they had a special need for it. Interest-
ingly, borage has another quality that they may have valued — it is an
aphrodisiac.
The evidence from the Doura cave indicates that people were
definitely aware of the specific effective properties, rather than
simply the basic nutritional values, of the plants around them. It
accords with the suggestion (made in Chapter 3) that people could

well have been using plants for birth control from an extremely
early period. Determining the extent of herbal use is an archaeo-
logical problem, since it is rare that the remains of \vild-plant gath-
ering survive. Only when there is a major deposit of processing
residue, as at Doura, is there any hope of recognizing the traces for
what they are.
Rited of P add age
The earliest firm evidence for formal burial of the dead comes from
Skhul Cave in Israel, where nearly 100,000 years ago an archaic
Homo dapieru was laid out next to a boar's jaw. But no systematic asso-
ciations between what was buried with a body and its inferred bio-
logical sex are known before the relatively recent period, from 10,000
B.P. onward. (The reasons are discussed in Chapters 7 and 8.)
Still, the simple fact of formal burial may tell us something. For-
mal burial is a "rite of passage " — a term coined by the anthropologist
Arnold van Gennep to describe the Avay that communities in the
modern world mark transitions between different stages of life. As

defined by van Gennep, a rite of passage has three phases: the prior
state (in this case, the basic state of being alive), the end state (being
dead), and the liminal or transitional state. The existence of the limi-
nal state does not mean that death is not sudden, in straightforward
biological terms. Rather, it means that ^vhat follows after physical
death is social death. The interval between the two is marked by rit-
ual. Immediately after physical death the body becomes "liminal" —

dangerously in-between; the person no longer breathes, but their
physical form exists. For their body and belongings to move on, fu-
neral rites must be held, at the conclusion of ^vhich the person be-
comes socially dead and, to a greater or lesser degree, no longer
perceived as active in the community.
Other main rites of passage that van Gennep identified wêre
for birth and for the transitions between childhood and adulthood
(notably first menstruation), adulthood and parenthood, and unmar-
ried and married states. Birth, like death, had not only a physical
aspect but a social one, usually marked by a naming ceremony. This
ceremony was conducted some wêeks after the birth, once the
infant's life had become established. Children who died before nam-
ing had not become social individuals and experienced no social

death, hence no funeral. (Archaeologically speaking, neonatal buri-
als rarely occur ^vithin formal cemeteries, unless they are accompa-
nying a mother who died in childbirth.) The other, perhaps less
fundamental transitions include loss of virginity, a change in resi-
dence (moving out to live with a partner), and the act of giving
birth. In many societies vvôrldwide, a man's transition to fatherhood
ismarked by the couvade^ —a rite of passage in w^hich the man is
secluded and acts out labor pains. Among some North American
Indian groups, the husband went up into the roof space, from where
strings tied to his testicles hung doAvn, to be periodically pulled on
as the baby ^vas born.
The archaeological evidence for the beginnings of formal burial
implies, van Gennep s insights suggest, a social Avorld in w^hich rites
of passage occurred. If death was marked, then so, one imagines, was
birth. If birth and death were marked, so might other life-cycle tran-
sitions have been. Tantalizing evidence for some of these rites of pas-
sage comes from the Upper Paleolithic period in Eurasia, from
40,000 to around 10,000 years ago — a period that witnessed an extra-
ordinary explosion of creativity. Although from around 40,000 B.R
onward the human population of Europe was physically very similar
to modern humans, the change from preceding periods was not that
sharp. "Modern" humans were in existence before 100,000 and per-

haps as early as 150,000 years ago; the Berekhat Ram sculpture sug-
gests an even earlier origin for art. However, the Upper Paleolithic
art of Europe starting 30,000 years ago marks the first surviving art
on a grand scale and ^vas accompanied by a number of other dra-
matic changes in culture.
Upper Paleolithic societies inhabited northern Eurasia during
the last ice age. The glaciers reached their maximum extent around
20,000 years ago, covering most of the Alps, northern Britain, Scan-
dinavia, and northern Poland. Because the sea level was low^, what is
now Britain and Ireland was part of a continuous continental tundra,

over which herds of mammoths, woolly rhinos, reindeer, shaggy wild
horses, and steppe bison roamed. These animals are beautifully
shoAvn in cave paintings in southern France and the Pyrenees. Con-
trary to popular beliefs about "cave men," Paleolithic people did not
live in caves. Usually they made tents or huts, although cave mouth
areas sometimes show traces of brief occupation. They depended on
largegame animals not just for meat but for building materials. The
remains of many mammoth-bone houses, constructed from piled ver-
tebrae with upward-arching tusks, presumably to keep a covering of

cured skin in place, have been excavated in southern Russia. At
Dolni Vestonice in theCzech Republic, people kept warm in tents
that had coal-fired hearths in the middle. Tallow was burned for light,
and bones and ivory vêre worked into a variety of striking artistic
objects of a portable nature.

Evidence for rites of death — as well, perhaps, as representations
of complex relationships between living individuals — comes from a
small number of Upper Paleolithic burials. Burial was the exception
rather than the rule during the ice age. Like many of today's societies,
ice age people might have exposed bodies to the elements, scattered
ashes, or floated funerary biers off down the river. The normal form
of funeral, whatever it was, may have been elaborate, but it does not
show up in the archaeological record.
The Red Threesome
One of the most interesting of those few burials that are known was
recently excavated by Bohuslav Klima at the important open-air set-
tlement site of Dolni Vestonice in the Pavlov Hills, near Brno in the
Czech Republic. It is a triple burial; the three bodies were found ly-
ing in a shallow pit, two probable males flanking an individual of in-

definite sex, either a light-boned male or — marginally more likely —a
female. All were around twênty years old ^vhen they died, but the
cause of death is unknown. They were carefully positioned in the

grave, their relaxed forms indicating that rigor mortis had worn off,
and then were covered with branches that ^vere set afire (shown in
black in Figure 4.2) before the whole burial was covered with a thin
layer of earth. Elements of clothing or body decoration survive in the
form of pierced seashells, wolf and Arctic fox teeth. The male to the
left had a string of drilled human teeth next to him, possibly part of a
necklace. The most striking aspects of the grave are the presence of
red ocher (a form of iron oxide) and the positioning of the bodies. All
three heads seem to have been sprinkled with red ocher. The central
figure has a large patch of red ocher between her/his thighs; the left-
hand figure not only gazes at the patch region but extends his hands
into it as ^vell. This left-hand figure has had a stake driven through
his pubic region, into the coccyx. The middle figure is turned away
from him, looking toward the right-hand figure. The latter is turned
away, although he has been buried in an unusual facedovv^n position,
partially overlying the central figure.
The precise significance of the Dolni Vestonice triple burial may

never be known for certain. In the future, DNA testing may be used
to determine the genetic sexes of the individuals, ^vhich would be im-
portant for interpreting the obvious sexual elements in the burial.
(Fig. 4.2) Ice Age triple burial:
Dolni Vestonice in Slovakia.
Drawing by George Taylor after
Klima 1988.
(The technique is not yet ^videly applied in archaeology, partly due to

expense, partly because of problems of shipping human remains to
labs that are often in other countries.) The youth of the three and the
absence of any obvious cause of death suggests that they died to-
gether, perhaps from an acute disease, poisoning, or droAvning. The
possibility that they ^vere put to death in one of these ways, either as
sacrificial victims or as a punishment for some indiscretion, should
not be ruled out. The positioning of the bodies itself seems to tell a
story. If the central figure is female, then we could see her and the
right-hand male as a young heterosexual couple. His partially over-
lapping position and unmet gaze symbolizes some disruption in their
relationship. The figure to the left could be the third player in the
drama. Was he her illicit lover? What behavior wârranted staking his
penis in death? Why are his hands between her legs, in an area
marked Avith symbolic blood? Here I undoubtedly overstep the mark
in terms of firmly based interpretation, yet it can be said with some
certainty that the remains reflect quite complex social and sexual re-
lationships. These relationships may, too, have been projected onto

them as unwilling or unwitting victims.
A Venus figurine carved from a solid piece of ocher —
hematite — also comes from the site of Dolni Vestonice. The red ocher
that covers the heads of the three buried figures could have symbol-
ized the power of blood in life — a charged material necessary for the
transition into death, and some rebirth beyond. The red ocher be-
tween the central figure's legs suggests the association of this re-
gion — in ^vomen, at least — vvîth blood, and it may strengthen the idea
that the skeleton is female. Was ocher simply sprinkled onto this re-
gion? Or is it the scattered remains, after burning, of some sculpture

or object that was carved in ocher and held by the left-hand figure
against, or partially inserted into, the central figure's vagina?
Klima himself has suggested that the grave may represent some
tragedy surrounding a childbirth gone w^rong. He sees the male fig-
ures, rather implausibly, as midwives. But he may be right in some
respects. The central figure has been examined by physical anthro-
pologist David Frayer, who found it to have suffered from a congeni-
tal hip condition, coxa iâra. (This condition is just discernible in
Figure 4.2, where the central figure's left thigh — to the reader's
right — is linked to the pelvis by a ball joint that juts from the head of
the femur at right angles, as opposed to the normal, slightly less acute
angle, as seen in the right-hand male.) Such a deformity ^vould have
caused the individual to have a slightly odd walk in life and might
have caused problems in childbirth. It remains possible that the cen-
tral figurewas male or some type of intersex individual w\\o war-
ranted a special kind of burial. The aggression displayed in driving a
stake through the left-hand male's genital region does not immedi-
ately suggest a peaceful "Age of the Goddess," although it could be
taken to support a particularly aggressive form of matriarchy.
Whatever the precise meaning of the Dolni Vestonice triple bur-
ial, it displays a complex symbolism. Its "narrative" aspect is dis-
cernible in the careful posing of the three bodies. The story has clear
sexual connotations, and the suggestion is strong that some kind of
social judgment has been passed. The burial seems to indicate a soci-
ety in which sexual transgression could occur and thus a society gov-
erned by rules for normal and appropriate sexual conduct. To see
how such behavior could have been encouraged and regulated, it is
necessary to look in greater detail at Ice Age art.

Cnapter 5
Venus in JTu rs
"The myth of matriarchy id but a tool

uded to keep wom.an bound to her place.
To free her, we need to destroy the myth.
Joan Bamberger,
'The Myth of Matriarchy"
A great deal of art from Ice

ings, sculptures, etchings,
Age Europe is known: cave paint-
statuettes, and engraved artifacts. Al-
though this art is high in potential sexual content, let alone
functioning, surprisingly little has been made of it, beyond some ab-
stract and rarefied suggestions about the symbolic division of male
and female principles. In this chapter I interpret the art objects as
part of a complicated sexual culture that, through sexual objectifica-
tion and censorship, created and maintained poAver imbalances be-
tween men and women.
The Veniiif Figurined
Perhaps the best-known piece of Paleolithic art, and one of the most
pervasive of all prehistoric art images, is the Venus of Willendorf
(Fig. 5.1) The Venus of Willendorf,

Austria. Limestone, with traces of red ocher
pigment. Photograph: Naturhistorisches
Museum, Vienna.
(Figure 5.1). In 1908 this five-inch-high sculpture of a large-buttocked,

large-breasted woman vvâs found beside the Danube in Lovvêr Austria.
The discovery occurred at an archaeological site known as Willendorf
II. A place where traces of human occupation dating to the Upper

Paleolithic or final ice age period (vv^hich lasted from around 40,000 to
12,000 years ago) had been found. The form of the figure is "plastic,"
being carved fully in the round from limestone. Traces of red coloring,
probably/ red ocher, are discernible, surviving in the deeper folds of the
body. It is thought to have been red all over at one time.
Around 200 Ice Age statuettes of women have been discovered
so far. Despite a fair degree of variation in their appearance, they
have been collectively — and perhaps misleadingly — termed "Venus"
figurines, after the Roman goddess of love. The purpose and func-
tion of Venus figurines have been the focus of intense debate. Were
they made by men as the prehistoric equivalent of Playboy center-
folds, an ice age "plastic pornography?" Or did they depict priest-
esses, or ancestral leaders, or images of a "Great Mother Goddess?"
Were they part of a communicative code that linked individuals in
widely dispersed communities? Were they used for sorcery, as a link
between everyday and supernatural powers? Or were they the
product of wômen's self-affirmation, small-scale self-portraits to
treasure?
Venus in Furs 117
At the very least, the Venus figurines are durable imaged. They
are the first positive evidence we have for human nakedness, despite
the fact (discussed in Chapter 1) that nakedness likely developed far
earlier. By carving them, ice age societies were making an important
statement about ^vhat it took to be human or a particular type of hu-
man. Whether or not the figurines reflect the way real Upper Pale-
olithic 'women looked, they must have constrained the way that real
women were looked at — both by women themselves and by men.

They must also have changed the way women, and perhaps men,
thought about their physicality. Whereas real Upper Paleolithic
women were mortal, \vith bodies that changed throughout life — and
month by month, season by season, pregnancy by pregnancy, accord-
ing to natural rhythms and the rigors of a demanding ice age environ-
ment — the figurines' bodies are fixed in stone, or bone, or ivory so
durably that they have survived intact for tens of thousands of years.
The Venus figurines are various in appearance. Some are very
fleshy and naked, or almost naked, while others are thinner and have
more substantial clothing, such as a parka-clad figure from Bouret in
Siberia. The earliest, which comes from the Galgenberg in Lower

Austria, is a flat, apparently dancing figure made in greenstone, dat-
ing to just before 30,000 B.P. But the majority of the figurines date to
around 26,000 B.P. The spatial distribution of the figures runs

from the steppes of southern Russia, w^here they are found within
mammoth-bone houses at Kostienki and Molodova, to the Pyrenees
in the ^vest, ^vhere they are found on cave shelter sites. Many inter-
pretations of the Venuses have been made, which have helped to cre-
Upper Paleolithic society

ate ideas about the overall organization of
and the relations between the sexes therein. At present it is not

known ^vho made the figurines — women, men, or both — or why they
made them.
The best-know^n theory is that they are images of a "Great
Goddess" and that they relate to a period of matriarchy, when
women called the shots. This view has been popularized by Jean
Auel in her racy best-sellers set in Ice Age Europe, The Clan of the
Cave Bear and The Mammoth Huntetv. Among archaeologists this theo-
ry has very little support, but nor is there any consensus among
^r?7?ft^v^5sapî5iPfS7imw
(Fig. 5.2) Four Venus figurines from the Ice Age site of Avdeevo, near Kursk in European Russia.
Photograph: Paul Bahn.
them about what the figurines do signify. Over the years many
researchers have come up with a whole range of fairly sexist inter-
pretations, Avhich to some extent explains the popularity of the
matriarchy theory as an alternative. The prime impetus for the
matriarchy theory came from the late Marija Gimbutas of UCLA
who, in the last years of her life, produced some splendid volumes —
The Language of the GoddedJ and The Civdlzation of the Goddedd. These
books ostensibly document the religious and political dominion of
women both in the ice age and in the succeeding early farming soci-
eties of Europe. Her theory was mainly developed in respect to
farming cultures (and is discussed in detail in Chapter 6), but she

considered that the "Goddess Creatrix" had many aspects, one of
which ^vas expressed by the Ice Age figurines.
While Gimbutas s own research \vas scholarly, that of many of

her followers and of those inspired by her work has been less care-
fully argued. Works such as The Ancient Religion of the Great Codmic
Mother of Alt and The Great Codmic Mother, both by Monica Sjoo and
Venus in Furs 119
Barbara Mor, make very broad generalizations about prehistory that

have been taken as gospel by the large number of people who are,
understandably, unfamiliar with the difficulties of archaeological in-
terpretation. Thus, for example, Nickie Roberts, at the beginning of
her otherwise excellent book on the history of prostitution (which I
use as an authority for parts of Chapter 6), tells us that
Sjoo and Mor show that the power of the Stone Age god-
dess Avent far beyond the simplistic notion of fertility . . .
she Avas all-encompassing, and thus expressed the original

power Avhich animated the universe and the Avhole of na-
ture . . . the Great Goddess wâs creator, preserver and de-
stroyer of all life . . . culture, religion and sexuality were
intertwined, springing as they did from the same source in
the goddess. Sex was sacred by definition, and the

shamanic priestesses led group sex rituals in which the
w^hole community participated, sharing in ecstatic union
with the life force.
Roberts captions a picture of the Venus of Willendorf Avith the state-
ment, "In the beginning wâs matriarchy."

If this were true, we should expect the Goddess to be doing
something, as the vigorous goddesses of India do — slaying, giving
birth, making love, and so on. Ho^vever, the Ice Age Venuses are al-
most completely passive. The only active figures in Ice Age art are
men — usually depicted in semi-animal form on the walls of caves and
rarely objectified in small-scale sculpture. Some of the figurines may
be intended to depict pregnancy, but in none of them is the Goddess
giving birth or nursing an infant. Some are shown wearing string
aprons, but they are not shoAvn making them; they are not shown
hunting or killing or doing anything much at all. Even if they were
active, the figurines would not be able to see what they were doing
as, although their sexual attributes are shown in considerable detail,
the vast majority of them have no faces.

Today's revamping of the Victorian matriarchy theory is broadly

related to the feminist movement. Gimbutas's Avork can be seen as a
necessary move to promote new social interpretations of prehistory,
ahernatives to the deep male sexism of orthodox views. Prior to her

work, for example, it was simply assumed that all the Venus figurines
were made by men. Of course, they could have been, but any state-
ment in this regard needs to be based on evidence rather than bias.
Pladtic Pornography
Karel Absolon, who excavated a number of figurines at Dolni Ves-

tonice, wrote that "sex and hunger Avere the two motives Avhich influ-
enced the entire mental life of the mammoth hunters and their
productive art." A rodlike figurine from the site (Figure 6. "5) has two
lobes that are considered to be breasts; Absolon (using the quaint
chronological term dlLuviai, meaning in this case coming from strata
old enough to have been scrambled by the biblical flood) wrote, "This
statuette shows us that the artist has neglected all that did not interest
him, stressing his sexual libido only where the breasts are con-
cerned—a diluvial plastic pornography." However, the "breasts"
could just as easily be seen as testicles, making the piece as poten-
tially phallic as female. Absolon believed that the piece was made by
a man, but he did not investigate the idea of gay pornography. It
could, of course, have just as well been made by a woman. What is
clear is that like a number of similar objects, this figurine is visually

ambiguous. We should not rule out the possibility that it had a func-
tional use, "ritual" or otherwise. Modern dildoes display a similar
kind of ambiguity, being necessarily phallic, but some have a tip
shaped in the image of a woman's face with tressed hair, ^vhile others
are shaped like dolphins. (Although the Dolni Vestonice phallus is
only finger-sized, others measure six or eight inches: Figures b.b, 5.6,
5.7, and 5.8.)
The idea that the Venus figurines represent ideal sexually attrac-
tive women has always run into a certain amount of difficulty. Some
Venus in Furs 121
researchers feel that it is a sexist interpre-

tation. Others feel that the Venus figurines
are neither attractive nor erotic. One of

the principal French ice age art re-
searchers, Andre Leroi-Gourhan, has said,
"Taken at face value, the palaeolithic
^voman was an uncomplicated creature,

naked and with curly hair, who kept her
hands folded over her chest, holding her
minute head serenely above the dreadfully

sagging shape of her breast and hips." The
doyen of early ice age art research, the
(Fig. 5.3) Phallic baton from
Abbe Breuil, thought that the figures
Dolni Vestonice, Slovakia.
showed steatopygia — a pronounced devel-
Drawing by George Taylor
opment of fatty deposits on the buttocks — after Marshack 1972.
and wondered whether the Avomen were

from Africa, racially akin to Bushman
women, whose steatopygia \vas renowned.
More recently a French gynecologist, Duhard, has proposed that
the Venuses represent various states of clinical obesity. Both Gobert
and Jude argue that they are too stocky to be fertility symbols and
thus represent postmenopausal women. Piette, taking into account the
wide range of variability in size and shape, proposes that they repre-
sent two basic types of ice age woman, "adipose" and "svelte," but that
both are equally fertility images. Patricia Rice has argued that they
represent Avomen across the entire age range. She breaks them down
by percentages into what she judges to be young women up to 15 years
old (23 percent), mature pregnantwomen between 15 and 35 (17 per-
cent), mature nonpregnant women (38 percent), and women older
than 35 (22 percent). It is not clear, however, what value can be placed
on her analysis, since the figures do not represent the population of
one site but are spread over a wide region and display st)4istic varia-
tions that make any attempt at comparison difficult.

Some researchers believe that the statuettes could not have been
involved with enhancing fertility because of the problem of finding
food in Ice Age Europe. Communities ^vould have had to keep tight
control over their populations if they ^vere to survive. Henri Del-
porte, in the fullest survey of female imagery in the Upper Pale-
olithic, castigates this view, saying, "Having attributed the hunter
with bourgeois motivations and having equipped him ^vith Palae-
olithic tools,we then declare his situation desperate." Indeed, food on
the hoof may have been relatively plentiful, and many of the figurines
themselves appear well-nourished. As Delporte's statement intimates,
however, the main food supplies wêre probably procured by men. In
the tundra environment the calorific contribution of women from
gathering activities may have been reduced, which suggests that the
Venus figurines appeared at a time of growing economic inequality
between men and women.
Absolon's "pornography" theory has been followed by others
who see the figurines as potentially erotic. It is perhaps a truism that
old erotica no longer has the power to arouse and may therefore be
difficult to recognize. For most of us today, Greek orgy scenes, for all
their sexual explicitness, are no more than quaint curiosities, yet in

the Victorian period — when even piano legs were considered danger-
ously erotic and had to be put in skirts — such images wêre far more
sexually charged. Live physical nudity was not a common sight in
Victorian Britain, making nudity in art all the more piquant. Nudity
during the ice age may have been equally uncommon, packing a simi-
lar erotic punch. People had to stay well wrapped in the glacial envi-
ronment, which for a time was an average of 10 degrees Celsius

colder than modern Europe — comparable to southern Alaska today.
But the Venus figurines are images without their furs. They may re-
flect the nakedness of women as they huddled around glowing coals
within a well-insulated hut, but such nudity may equally have been a
great rarity. Guthrie has suggested that the Venus figurines are the
world's first erotica, and he draws direct comparisons ^vith Playboy.
Their typical form, with small heads and feet, and large breasts and
buttocks, stresses — he feels — the most attractive parts, and the legs-
apart position of one figure from the cave of La Madeleine, he thinks,

suggests "submission and timidity" (though he does not explain why
these qualities should be erotic).
VenusinFurs 123
According to Devendra Singh, a psychologist at the University
of Texas at Austin, the results of a recent survey of the erotic prefer-

ences of 195 men support the idea that there is a universally recog-
nized canon of female beauty, wîth a marked preference for average
weight and a low waist-to-hip size ratio — exactly the same ratio,
around 0.70, that Playboy centerfold pinups have maintained over the
last thirty years. But all this conclusion shov^^s is that Playboy — ^vith
its almost globally pervasive imagery — influences some modern men's
idea of the erotic. (It tells us nothing about what sort of women mod-
ern women may find erotic.) The average wêight of Rubens s volup-
tuous wômen, wîth their rippling cellulite and rolls of vâist fat, looks
much higher. The Venus figurines in their day may have similarly in-
fluenced taste; their average weight looks higher than Singh's norm,
and their waist-to-hip ratios do not all conform to 0.70.
Tke Bodied Beyond
It is difficult to know which aspects of the Venus figurines represent

real women and which — like the striking lack of faces — reflect stylis-
tic conventions. Fatness, far from being a clinical condition, may have
rendered a woman physiologically and reproductively fit to live
within a glacial environment. Perhaps a greater survival rate for
larger women affected the gene pool. In the Donner Party disaster of
1846—47, where a group of settlers were caught out in the mountain
wînter on their way to California, the \vell-nourished women sur-
vived best. When it comes to feats requiring great stamina and en-
ergy reserves, such as swimming across Lake Ontario, large women
do best ^ and they may be the only people who can do it at all. In Ice
Age Europe women of proportions like the larger Venus figurines
would have had great endurance potential, which would have been
critical for bringing a child to full term when food was uncertain.
These figurines are, therefore, not established mothers but potential
mothers — those with the reserves and stamina to be successful. It is
possible that women did indeed look quite like these representations,
for part of the year at least. But who made the sculptures and why?
124 The Prehititory of Sex
Leroy McDermott has argued that the figurines' features are
best explained if they are understood as Avomen's "self- representa-
tions." The fact that v/omen had to look down their bodies, over their
breasts, would have emphasized the breasts, McDermott argues,

while letting the legs taper aAvay to nothing. This vie^v could also ex-
plain why virtually all the figurines are faceless, as you cannot see
your o^vn face. But I do not think the Venus figurines are \vomen's
self-representations. First, the theory is internally inconsistent: areas
like the back of the buttocks and the hair at the back of the head are
represented, though ^vomen could not see them. Second, if the theory
is true, then the women must have deliberately chosen to represent
themselves naked; having done so they then wênt into some gyneco-
logical detail (Figure 5.1) yet studiously omitted at any point to
sculpt a clitoris. So these would be self-representations in ^vhich the
focus of personality, the face, and one of the most important physio-
logical foci of sexuality, the clitoris, are absent. In view of these con-
siderations, McDermott s case does not seem strong. But some
aspects of the figures lead in another direction.
Sarah Nelson believes that the Venus figurines are too varied to
be considered as just one thing, claiming that they 'only have gender
in common" (by which she means the outward attributes of female
sex). Yet while figurines that span several centuries and occur over a
Avide area could undoubtedly have had different local or contextual
meanings, they do in fact share other attributes beyond sex. The es-
sential feature of the Venus figurines is that they are durable. The
smooth-wôrn surfaces of many of them suggest that they were han-
dled often and were perhaps passed around or given. They were
portable and exchangeable. The significance of this exchangeability
gro^vs ^vhen one considers that — with one possible exception — no
male figurines are known. Ice Age European society either censored
the sculpting of men (although not of phalluses) or made images of
men out of perishable materials of which we currently know nothing.
The underlying implication is that Avomen, at least symbolically, could
be given, while men could not. The type of woman ^vho could be
given ^vas typically faceless (her identity did not count) and repro-
ductively fit.
Venus in Furs 125
The social implications of "giving women" fit well with other

features of Upper Paleolithic society, which was made up of small
scattered communities among which communication would have
been very important. That the figurines are found over such a wide
area suggests that they were a commonly understood symbol. We
have no way of being absolutely sure what these figures were used
for, and their meaning may not have been constant. Perhaps they
were something like marriage tokens, given to a bride's mother as a
keepsake when her daughter transferred to a far-off group to bear
children for a strange man. They may have been carved by the bride-
groom, w^ho had not seen his bride prior to the exchange and so left
the face blank, to be given to the bereft parents, who would be better
able to envisage the features of their loved one on the smooth surface.
This fanciful suggestion assumes that Upper Paleolithic society
practiced marriage — an institution that, however imprecisely defined,

is present in all known communities. The idea that marriage began in
the ice age is plausible, since burial evidence from the Upper Pale-
olithic demonstrates the existence of at least one elaborate rite of pas-
sage. If one, why not another? Economic and reproductive
conditions might have been such that the assertion of individual
property rights in another person — which is what marriage, in part,
boils dov\^n to — became an important issue.

The transferability of wômen but not men in Ice Age society is
supported by evidence from other artistic endeavors during the pe-

riod, notably cave art. The sexual content of cave art has long been
recognized and discussed. Leroi-Gourhan tried to discern a precise
gendered "key "
to the multitude of representations in the larger
caves, dividing all of them into "male" and "female." As with the
Venus figurines, we do not know who executed the cave representa-
tions. There has been a general feeling, often poorly presented, that
men created the art. I believe that men did make most of it, not be-
cause women were not involved in "art," but because the cave art that
wê know about depicts passive "objectified" females and active males.
British prehistoric art specialist Paul Bahn believes that Leroi-
Gourhan is mistaken to consider such a great range of abstract sym-
bols to be vulvas, believing that in his case a modern sexual obsession
I: -f
( Fig. SA ) Three rock-cut vulvas;
Angles. Drawing by George Taylo
has run riot over the actual evidence. "There is Uttle sense in our
lumping together signs Avith different shapes when Palaeolithic artists
took pains to differentiate them, "

he notes. Nevertheless, different
artists render the same things in different ways, and there are good
ethnographic parallels in Polynesian societies for covering rock sur-
faces and portable pebbles with vulva motifs. On Easter Island, for
example, t^vo-lobed vulva forms with abstractly rendered clitorises
(on the whole looking like cartoon cockroaches to the untrained eye)
are engraved on a rock at the site of Orongo. The engraved stone Avas
used in the girls' clitoris-stretching ceremony; during the te tnanu mo

ta poki or "bird child" ceremony (still part of living memory in 1919),
girls stood on a rock where their enlarged clitorises ^vere examined

by five priests, who then carved the images on the rocks. As with the
Venus figurines, we do not know who made the vulva representations
in Upper Paleolithic art. The incised and partly sculpted vulvas
found on the walls of Upper Paleolithic caves (Figure b.A) could
have been intended as either erotic or ritual; they could have been de-
signed by men or by women. (Anyone in doubt as to ^vhether women
might draw^ vulvas for erotic purposes is referred to the Cunt Coloring
Book, a modern lesbian publication.)
In Polynesia, men also had vulva designs tattooed as a sign of
virility. Tattooing may very likely have been part and parcel of Pale-
Venus in Furs 127
(Fig. 5.5) Rod from La Madeleine, France. Drawing by George Taylor after Marshack 1972.
olithic art as Avell. The coloring materials, such as soot, were readily
available, as was a technology that could make suitable points; bone
awls, probably used for leather sewing, are commonplace. It seems to
me almost essential that artists vvôrking in the recesses of caves,
painting animals on rough protuberances and angles of rock walls by
guttering torchlight, had a great deal of prior practice. Tattooing,
with its requirement to get it right the first time on a rounded and
sometimes moving three-dimensional surface, would seem to provide
an excellent training ground.
Although many of the abstract forms in cave art could be vulvas,
Bahn is right to counsel caution. What one sees in these more ab-
stract forms is indeed an open question. An engraved bone rod from
the cave of La Madeleine is one of several that bear w^hat appear to
be phallic representations — in this case, what seems to me to be a li-
oness is licking the opening of a gigantic human penis, which is hang-

ingdown from between the legs of a rather confusingly engraved
man (Figure 5.5). Others have seen a vulva somewhere in this pic-
ture; Denis Peyrony claims that it is half open, with the hair depicted,
while Luquet thought it was an anus and buttocks instead of a vulva.
Whatever the truth may be, neither the explicit sexual imagery nor
the connection of male human and animal sexuality is in doubt.
Symbols in Action
Many phallic batons carved in the round are found in Upper Pale-
olithic art. An interesting double "baton" from the Gorge d'Enfer has
two explicitly rendered penises set at an angle to each other (exactly
as in a modern "double" dildo; Figure 5.9). Unfortunately, many of

these batons have not been published with their dimensions given in
full, so it is difficult to gauge their potential utility, as opposed to in-
terpreting their symbolism. Generally speaking, the batons do fall
within the size range of modern dildoes.

Looking at the size, shape, and — in many cases — explicit sym-
bolism of the ice age batons, it seems disingenuous to avoid the
most obvious and straightforward interpretation. But it has been

avoided. These phallic objects are variously considered ritual
objects, batonj de conimandeinent, arrow- or spear-straighteners
(those Avith a hole at the base or, in the case of the Gorge d'Enfer
double "baton," at the junction of the two penises). Undoubtedly
the majority of these phallic objects could have been used for vagi-
The "baton" from Dolni Vestonice,
nal, anal, or oral insertion.
woman, could clearly serve as

^vhich Absolon saw^ as an abstracted
a dildo with a handle; the Gorge d'Enfer double "baton" could
easily have been used for vaginal insertion by two women,
although other permutations are conceivable; the hole could have
been used for some sort of strap. A selection of other phallic batons
are sho^vn in Figures 5.6—5.8.
I aTi not suggesting that these artifacts were necessarily sex toys
in the modern recreational sense (although I do not see why that
should be ruled out). If the ^vord ritual restores credibility, then ritual
defloration is one possibility; it is known in a number of societies
worldwide. Even if the various batons had other primary or ostensi-
ble uses, their dimensions and symbolism do not preclude their sexual
use. The presence or absence of dildoes in various human cultures
has not, to my knowledge, been systematically documented, but they
have probably been a widespread phenomenon for much of human
history. The vaginal insertion of objects for sexual pleasure has been
observed among primates in the wild. It is something that is likely to
have been a part of our own evolutionary and early cultural back-
ground, despite the fact that the earliest graphic depictions of the use
of dildoes are generally thought to be those found on ancient Greek
pottery of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. However, there may be
an ice age example of one in use.
Venus in Furs 129
(Fig. 5.6) Phallic baton; Bruniquel. (Fig. 5.7) Phallic baton; Le Placard.
Drawing by George Taylor after Drawing by George Taylor after
Marshack 1972. Marshack 1972.
(Fig. 5.8) Phallic baton; Predmost. (Fig. 5.9) Double phallic baton; Gorge
Drawing by George Taylor after d'Enfer. Drawing by George Taj'lor after
Marshack 1972. Marshack 1972.

The Grltnaldi Figure:

Madturbator or Hermaphrodite?
A phallic artifact may actually be depicted in use in the case of one of

the most enigmatic of the Venus figurines, the Grimaldi "hermaphro-
dite." made of translucent green steatite, is
This strange sculpture,
one of several that are thought to come from the Grimaldi cave but
that were not excavated properly by archaeologists. The figure is rel-
atively conventional in the upper half, with breasts and a bulging
belly. The arms, however, are puzzling. Ice Age sculptors never
found a neat solution for rendering arms on Venus figurines. The es-
sentially objectified and passive subject matter and the sculptor's
striving for a rounded form meant that they ^vere often left off alto-
gether or look curiously sticklike, as in the case of the Venus of Wil-

lendorf. The Grimaldi figure appears to have arms that fall straight
from the shoulder, disappear (or are broken off), and reappear at the
top of the thighs, then come around so that the hands can cup what
appears to be a scrotal sac. Leading up from this lo\v-slung lump, a
ridge runs up between the arms and ends beneath the belly. This con-
figuration of forms has been interpreted by Henri Delporte and oth-
ers to depict hermaphroditism — a figure with breasts and erect penis.
In the light of what has been said in Chapter 2 about the incidence of
intersex individuals in human communities, it ^vould not be particu-
larly surprising to find one represented.
But there are problems with the interpretation of the Grimaldi
figure as a hermaphrodite. The arms do not seem to belong to the up-
per torso at all. Further, the head of the penis is extremely unclear. In
short, it is equally possible to see the sculpture as showîng someone
else's hands coming around from behind, to insert a dildo into the
vagina of the main body. Both interpretations have problems, but the
latter interpretation may be more plausible in the light of the fact that
suitable objects existed. Moreover, in the Dolni Vestonice triple bur-
ial, we have direct evidence for a male placing both hands into the
pubic area of a probable female, where he may have held some arti-
fact made of red ocher.

There are other possible explanations for the Grimaldi "her-
Venus in Furs 131
(Fig. 5.10) TheGrimaldi

"hermaphrodite." Drawing by George
Taylor after Delporte 1993: fig. 93.
maphrodite." It could, for example, represent a rather contorted

copulation scene. Such a scene, differently managed, is known from
a cave wall at Laussel. The Laussel scene seems to represent two fig-
ures in genital union; they are depicted in mirror image, joined at

the groin, lending the picture an emblematic, almost hieroglyphic
feeling. Heinz Hunger notes that researchers have been reluctant to
interpret the scene as a copulation. Leroi-Gourhan, in his own trac-
ing of it, "felt tempted to tamper with the glyph and 'redraw' the
outlines of the copulating pair until he succeeded in converting the
composition into an apparently less obnoxious breech delivery,"
Hunger observes. He argues that the depiction of human copulation
presents particular artistic problems, and that the Laussel solution is
fairly much identical to that arrived at in many other art styles.
Tranced with Build
Cave art is concentrated in the Dordogne region of France and the

French and Spanish Pyrenees. It has two basic features: caves, and
paintings. The paintings were done with red and yellow ochers and
charcoal. Traces of wooden scaffolding exist inside some of the caves,
erected to position the painters close to the cave roof. Sooty marks
show that burning brands or tallow candles were used to light areas
•
t '.
(Fig. 5. 1 1) The Lascaux shaft scene. Photograph: SPADEM.
that ^vere being wôrked on. If the key quahty of the Venuses is their
durabihty and portabiHty, then an important feature of cave art may

well be that much of it wâs created in caves that were deep and some-
times pecuharly difficuk to access. So remote and inaccessible ^vere
some of the pictures that they could remain secret as millennia
passed; indeed, after around 10,000 years ago, it seems they wêre
completely forgotten and passed out of all knowledge until people
with scientific interests began to go caving in the nineteenth century.
The best-knoAvn images are of large game animals: woolly rhi-

nos, mammoths, horses, bison, and deer. But the greatest number of
images are "abstract" motifs (which Leroi-Gourhan divided into two
basic types: "full" or female signs and "thin" or male signs). Many
people have tried to interpret the art in mythological terms. The
revered mythographer Joseph Campbell has described the "crypt"
area of the cave at Lascaux in the follo^ving terms:
DoAvn there a large bison bull, eviscerated by a spear that

has transfixed its anus and emerged through its sexual or-
gan, stands before a prostrate man. The latter ... is rapt in
Venus in Furs 133
a shamanistic trance. He wears a bird mask; his phallus,

erect, is pointing at the pierced bull; a throwing stick lies
on the ground at his feet and beside him stands a wand or

staff, bearing on its tip the image of a bird. And then, be-
hind this prostrate shaman, is a large rhinoceros, appar-
ently defecating as it walks Siway.
Campbell connects this scenario, rather unclearly, to the Australian
phallic rite of "pointing the bone." In this lethal magical rite a shaman
holds a pointed bone out of sight beneath his perineum, while strew-
ing his own semen or excrement, in an attempt to put the victim to
sleep. He then points the bone from under his penis directly at the
victim. In the Lascaux depiction, Campbell thinks that the rhino
"may well be the shaman's animal familiar. The position of the
lance . . . spills the bowels from the area between [the bison's anus
and penis] — which is precisely the region affected by the 'pointing
bone' of the Australians." It is difficult to know what to make of this
interpretation. The detail and the oddity ring true and convince us
that the Paleolithic painting did indeed concern something complex
and strange. But it is difficult to know hoAv precise our interpreta-
tions can be, given the lack of more tangible evidence.
A different sort of approach is to look at gross generalities, like
my observation about the remoteness and inaccessibility of the caves.

In contrast to the Venus figurines, the cave paintings were hidden
from the community most of the time. It is logical to suppose that
only certain people were allowed to see them or to know of their exis-
tence. It may well be that the caves themselves bore a vulvar/vagi-
nal/womb symbolism. In the cave of Niaux, in the Ariege region of
France, is a long, slightly curving vertical fissure in the rock wall. Its
latent sexual symbolism was drawn out by the addition of large

smudges of red to either side of its lower end, where the rock wall
curves under. The smudges conjure an image of open labia, an image
enhanced by a liberal dotting of marks suggestive of pubic hair. Pop-
ulated as they are with (painted) animals, the caves might have repre-
sented some symbolic womb out of which the herds would suddenly
flow, as they appeared to do in reality
when they suddenly came in sight
around the head of the valley, on the

annual migration that the hunters re-
lied on intercepting.
Several male human figures are
depicted in the caves; they are often

described as shaman figures. Several of
them have animal characteristics. Apart
from the "bird mask" figure described
by Campbell, others are half bison and
half stag (Figures 5.12-5.14). Both
(Fig. 5.12) The "sorcerer" of the Trois
bison and deer are animals whose sex-
Freres cave, Ariege, France. Painted
ual organization is of a polygynous,
and engraved figure. Dravîng from
Marshack 1972. harem-holding nature. Is it too much to

imagine that Upper Paleolithic soci-
eties took some of their sociosexual
cues from the patently successful ani-
mals around them? A famous engraved
fragment of reindeer bone from
Laugerie-Basse in the Dordogne
(Figure 5.15) sho^vs traces of a scene in
which a stag v^îth erect penis stands
over a supine doe-a/m-woman. Her
necklaces and braceleted arm are just
discernible to the right, while her
rounded, apparently pregnant belly is
shown covered with fur, and her legs
are those of a deer. A polygynous mar-

riage system \vould fit well wîth the
interpretation of the Venus figurines
given above, although it implies a very
(Fig. 5.13) Semi-human bison figure,

different position for women from the
the Trois Freres cave, Ariege, France. Great Goddess theory.
Engraved figure. Drawing from
Marshack 1972.
Venus in Furs 135
The Secret Art of Initiation
As with the Venus dangerous to attempt an all-

figurines, it is
embracing interpretation of cave began before 25,000 B.R and

art. It
ceased around 10,000 years ago, a period during which there were
marked changes in other aspects of life. Various schemes have
attempted to fit particular artistic styles to particular periods, but as
Paul Bahn says in the best recent survey of Ice Age art as a whole,
"One must never forget that art is produced by individual artists,
and the sporadic appearance of genius during this time span cannot
be really fitted into any general scheme. "
On the other hand, it is
certainly inappropriate to project a modern Western pace of change

to the Upper Paleolithic. As
Gamble has pointed out, the Ice
Clive
Age environment was tough: "There would have been no room for
individual iconoclasts then. Lack of cooperation meant death."
Contrary to popular belief, nonliterate societies are much more like-
ly to do things in the same ^vay, generation after generation, than lit-
erate societies. The reason is that the nonliterate must commit

detailed cultural knowledge to memory rather than relying on a
written record. It is entirely possible that some basic elements of
meaning stayed fairly constant for over
15,000 years — because there was no rea-
son to change them.

A source of light was crucial for
viewing the cave art in the deeper caves.
But instead of seeing these animals in the
light of day, it was the animals' own

deaths that allowed them to be seen, by
providing tallo^v for lamps. In this inter-
active symbolism of life and rebirth, the
pasty white tallow may have stood for se-

men (as it was to do in the form of phallic
candles, dripped into the font in early (Fig. 5.1H) Bison hgure with
Christian baptism, thousands of years humanoid hindquarters and
later).The tallow/semen would have been long erect penis. Drawing From
carried down into the cave/womb where Marshack 1972.

(Fig. 5.15) Deer- woman, Laugerie-Basse. An engraved fragment of reindeer antler or, more
probably, bison shoulder blade. Drawing courtesy of Alexander Marshack.
it would bring a norw generation of animals to life. Such a symbolism

could have extended beyond the caves to the idea of light itself, and
therefore the sun as a male principle or deity and the earth as a fe-
male oixe. (This possibility is discussed in Chapter 6 in relation to

farming societies.)
Although such general symbolism seems possible, the precise

niythological and social details of the trips Ice Age people made to
paint and see such images is probably beyond our ability to decipher.
My guess is that the paintings were made by men (as I said, due to
the absence of active female depictions in the caves) and were meant
to be seen by boys during their rite of passage to manhood. This in-
terpretation is not new, but it has a lot to commend it. It explains the
pains taken to create the art, in that to serve as a men's initiation, it
had to be concealed from wômen. This point has been vvêll made by
Joan Bamberger, whose fascinating observations on the "myth of ma-
triarchy" helped bring many of the strands of thought in this chapter
together.
Bamberger claims that myths of matriarchy — stories of prior

rule by women — are relatively ^videspread in patriarchal societies.
Venus in Furs 137
and that they function as social charters justifying male power. She
cites two myths from Amazonia, both recorded in the early part of
this century. The
a myth of the Yamana-Yaghan people
first,
recorded by the Austrian anthropologist Father Martin Gusinde,

concerns initiation in the kina or men's hut and holds that women
were the first to perform kina rituals:
At that time women had sole power; they gave orders to

the men who ^vere obedient, just as today the women obey
the men. . . . All the work
was performed by the
of the hut
men, with the women giving orders. They took care of
the children, tended the fire, and cleaned the skins. That is
the way it was a Ways to be.
The women then invented the kina hut "and everything that goes on
in it." While inside, they dressed themselves up as spirits, then came
out to terrify the men, thereby keeping them in 'Tear and submis-
sion. "
This intimidation continued until Sun-man, who provided
game for the kina hut spirits, saw two of the young girls bathing with
makeup off. He realized that they were not spirits after all;
their spirit
Sun-man forced them to confess their deception and then exposed

them to the men as frauds. The men stormed the kina hut, killing the
Avomen or transforming them into animals. "From that time on
the men perform in the Kina hut; they do this in the same manner
as the vvômen before them."
The second vciyt\v that Bamberger relates comes from Gusinde s
contemporary in Amazonia, E. Lucas Bridges, the son of an English

missionary, who worked among the Selk'nam people. Selk'nam men
had a hut, the hain, from which women were excluded. According to
their myth of matriarchy, the women were knowledgeable in witch-
craft:
They kept their own particular Lodge, which no man dared

approach. The girls, as they neared womanhood, were in-
structed in the magic arts, learning how to bring sickness
and even death on those who displeased them.

The men lived in abject fear and subjection. Certainly
they had bows and arrows with which to supply the camp
Avith meat, yet, they asked, what use were such weapons
against vvîtchcraft and sickness?
Eventually the "tyranny of the ^vomen" became unbearable, and the

men massacred the adult initiated women. They had a respite while
the younger generation of girl children Avere growing up; but the
men's great worry was that the girls might get together as adults and
things might repeat themselves:
To men inaugurated a secret society of

forestall this, the
theirown and banished forever the women's Lodge in

which so many wicked plots had been hatched against
them. No wôman \vas allowed to come near the Hain on
penalty of death.
The common thread in these myths, Bamberger notes, is that

a claim of past misdemeanors is used against women as a justifica-
tion for denying them initiation: "The utility of amyth that
accounts for the origin of the men's lodge, separating men from
women in action and in space, is easily demonstrated. As part of a
cultural code distinguishing men from women in moral terms, the \
myth incorporated values that permit males a higher authority in

social and political life." At puberty boys are physically separated
from their mothers, so as to be taught esoteric lore. At the end of

their liminal initiation period, they are introduced ceremonially
into the society of adult men. The girls, on the other hand, are
inculcated with lifelong prohibitions and restrictions on their
Venus in Furs 139
behavior. They are threatened with punishments for transgressing,

punishments that are actually translated into action among the
Kayapo of central Brazil, where the men's house is the scene of the
ritualized gang rape of young girls.
On the face of it, these Amazonian myths of matriarchy are very

different from the Victorian ones that still have currency in the West
today. But Bamberger concludes:
The elevation of woman to deity on the one hand, and the

downgrading of her to child or chattel on the other, pro-
duce the same result. Such visions will not bring her any
closer to attaining male socioeconomic and political status
. . myth of matriarchy is but a tool used to keep

. the
vôman bound to her place. To free her, we need to destroy
the myth.
The myths she discusses may have relevance for our understanding
of both Venus figurines and cave art. The Venus figurines seem un-
convincing as male erotica, yet the society that produced them does
not look particularly matriarchal. Perhaps, like the Yamana-Yaghan
and Selk'nam, Upper Paleolithic communities had their own "myth of
matriarchy, " symbolized by the ancestral forms of previously initiated
women. The caves would have provided the perfect setting for the
initiation of young boys into adult male society — their remoteness al-
lowing them the potential of completely excluding a major section of

the community.
Se^M on the Steppe
We still have no firm idea how gender ^vas constituted (or "per-
formed," to use Judith Butler's term) in Ice Age Europe. Burials are
rare exceptions, and it is impossible to deduce gendered clothing
codes from them, beyond the fact that both sexes seem to have been
140 The Prehicftory of Sex
(Fig. 5.16) Woman with breast straps. (Fig. 5.17) Bound woman. Kostienki
Figurine No. 83-2 from Kostienki. broken figurine No. 87. Photograph:
Drawing by George Taylor after Paul Bahn.

Delporte 1993.
adorned Avith beads, pendants, and other decorations. Only on occa-

sion do the Venus figurines show traces of clothing. The parka worn
by the Bouret figure from Siberia is of potentially unisex design, but
there is evidence for more sex-specific clothing in the Venus figurines
from the southern Russia site of Kostienki.
One of the Kostienki statuettes seems to be wearing some strap-
ping that falls in a F from her neck to converge at the top of the
cleavage between her full breasts. From this point, two further straps
run over the tops of her breasts, then disappear under her arms.
Since I have not seen a published rear view of this figurine, I do not
know where the straps go around at the back, but the arms are being
firmly held down behind, with shoulders back, so that the breasts are
pushed forAvard. That some sense gendered
this strapping wâs in
clothing can be deduced from the \vay the bands accentuate the
breasts, an effect that would probably be lost on a male torso.
A second, broken Kostienki figurine represents a vulva, upper

thighs, and part of a rounded abdomen, Avith hands tied together at
the Avrists resting on it. In both figurines the strapwork or belts have
Venus in Furs 141
a sort of feathering incision, a convention typically reserved to

depict hair (as in the first figurine) or fur (as in many examples, like
the doe-woman). It would thus seem most likely that these are
bands of fur.
Given the tundra climate at this time, these clothing items can
hardly be considered functional in any insulating sense. Nor are they

decorous — in our terms, at least — as both breasts and vulva are ex-
posed. Indeed, in common wîth a standard convention of erotic or
sexual dressing, the fur strapping, which fails to be either functional
or demure, drav^s attention to the sexual aspects of the body. The
physical poses, and the tied wrists of the second figure, indicate a
submissiveness and an inability to resist. Is some form of sexual
bondage being played out? Are these representations of women
about to be initiated? Are they captives from a raiding expedition?
My necessarily subjective interpretation of these sculptures is
that they are explicitly sexual, sharing themes of objectification and

possession that I feel are inherent in all the so-called Venus figurines.
I also think that these objects were not fantasies without reality. De-
spite the "unreal" facelessness of the first figurine, the strapwork
gives the sense of being modeled after a familiar reality. Similarly,
with the second figure, I would submit that a sculptor ^vho can depict
hands tied together has a pretty good notion of how hands actually
are tied together.

Although much of the Ice Age Eurasian material remains am-
biguous, the existence of a vigorous sexual culture is not in any
doubt. The overall trend of my interpretation has been to suggest that
there were gender differences in both space and activity, with the
caves in particular constituting a reserved space for one section of so-
ciety to the exclusion of another (probably the exclusion of women
by men). Such an interpretation begs the complex question, which I
first broached in relation to the Hua, of what constitutes a "man" or a

"woman" in any particular society. Around 10,000 years ago, the ice
age cultural system — its cave art, figurines, and so on — was suddenly
abandoned as the ice sheets receded and the climate, within the space
of a few centuries, became dramatically warmer.

Cnapter 6
Tke Milk of
tne Vulture vJoaa ess
There idno finer investment for any community

"
than putting milk into babied.
Winston Churchill
X he colonization of the globe by modern humans was not just a

migration, was a multiplication. As people adapted environments to
it
themselves and crossed continents, they met some dangers, but they
mostly found animals that were fatally untutored in the ^vays of the
culture-using, weapon-making, meat-eating, upright-Avalking ape.
The biggest animals vanished from three continents: mammoths from
Europe, giant marsupials from Australia, and mastodons from Amer-
ica. Human population rose, and in at least five separate regions of
the world, farming was invented, involving the domestication of
plants and animals and the creation of the cultivated in opposition to
the wild. The effects of settling down to invest in the land ^vere revo-
lutionary, both from a social and an ecological point of vievv^. I argue

that while hunter-gatherer sex had been modeled on an idea of shar-
The Milk of the Vulture Goddess 143
ing and complementarity, early was voyeuristic, re-

agriculturalist sex
pressive, homophobic, and focused on reproduction. Afraid of the

wild, farmers set out to destroy it.
Dance<i with Treed
As the temperature rose and the Ice Age came to an end, tundra
metamorphosed woodland. In Britain the climate reached a
into
peak temperature higher than today's, and for a short time lime
trees grew in southern Scotland. Landscapes sprang into abundant
life. The communities of postglacial Europe are collectively known
as Mesolithic, literally "Middle Stone Age." Their stone technolo-
gy—small, elegant points that wêre used to tip arrows — indicates
that their economic life had a broad basis. The unfolding wood-
lands provided rich hunting grounds. Human population rose
along vvîth these enriched resources. People often returned to earli-
er dwelling places in the seasonal round, places that had different
functions.
Star Carr in Yorkshire, on the North Sea coast of England, is
one of the most famous Mesolithic camps and wâs probably a sum-
mer hunting camp. On the basis of a very careful analysis of the ani-
mal materials preserved at various places in the area, Pete Rowley-
Conwy has reconstructed the people's seasonal movements. Star Carr
vâs probably just one locationamong several. Rowley-Conwy postu-
lates that an entire community moved from Barry's Island, the winter
base camp, to a summer base camp by the sea, from which hunting
parties would take off at times back inland to Star Carr. These
Mesolithic people also used a number of smaller sites in the hills, but
\\orw and w^hen is not fully clear.
The reconstruction (Figure 6.1) shows what a Mesolithic winter

base camp, built on an insulating brushwood platform, could have
looked like. The inspiration for this painting comes from the exca\'a-
tions at Star Carr, which, before the work by Rowley- Co nw^- and
others, had been thought a winter rather than a summer camp. The
picture is also based on practices of modern hunter-gatherers in simi-

(Fig. 6.1) A Mesolithic hunting camp. Reconstruction painting: the author.
lar environments: the shape of the fish-drying racks is copied from

the North American Copper Indians. Indeed, much of Mesohthic ar-
chaeology has grown out of careful observations of living hunter-
gatherer peoples.
Studying indigenous Ufeways can help archaeologists working
on the Mesolithic, as well as other periods, know what to look for in
the archaeological record. One study of the Inuit of Alaska has
sho^vn that they have highly complex seasonal movements and spe-
cialized sites. In addition to their base camps, hunting camps, and
kill-and-butcher sites, they also have what archaeologist Lewis Bin-
ford has recognized as "lovers' camps" — places where new couples
can get away from it all to cement the bonds of their relationship in ,
peace and quiet. So far, lovers' camps have not been recognized for
the European Mesolithic. But other parallels with present-day in-
digenous lifeways can be seen.
For the hunters, Mesolithic Europe wâs a time of plenty. This
abundance is reflected in their art, in the symbolism of intertwining
male and female. In a burial at Skateholm in S^veden, a male and
* f:?# .
' .vS^?
|i\\jl ; (Fig- 6.2) TheAddaura

-^Y
U\(
'
'
-s.
V'X"^ scene. Rock engraving,
-y:#^^:.-*H/ Sicily. Drawing by George

Taylor after Sandars 1968:
%. ^^ly
..//
'\
'ik,-U:,);'K^J
x
•> vv-^-^V:
plate 84.
female skeleton are apparently cuddling up together in death. In a

rock engraving from Addaura, Sicily, two young men are rolling
over each other, their erections perhaps indicating some homosexual
interest, ^vhile around them men and vômen dance. At Lepenski
Vir, in the Iron Gates Gorge of the Lower Danube, the sculptural
art associates fish and humans in a series of complex androgynous
representations (Figure ^S) that are impossible to identify as male
or female. Although many researchers regard the upright phallic
shape at the base of some of the torsos as penises, they are longitudi-
nally grooved, so that they also look vulvar. This ambiguity seems
dehberate, playing on the underlying anatomical similarities between
women and men.
The sculptures' fishlike faces support such an interpretation.
Lepenski Vir was a semipermanent camp on the banks of what was
then one of the richest fishing rivers in Europe. The Lepenski Vir
people depended for their livelihood on the seasonal breeding move-
ments of fish, and surviving fishbones leave no doubt as to the impor-
tance of fish like salmon in their diet. They must have been struck by
the salmon's sexual anatomy: salmon heads are clearly male and fe-
male, but their genital openings are identical. The androgynous

sculptures play on this ambiguity, suggesting a corresponding simi-
larity in humans. Perhaps the Lepenski Vir people mythologized hu-
mans as having once been salmon.
(Fig. 6.7)) Fish-woman-man sculpture: Lepenski Vir.
Photograph courtesy of John Chapman.
Mesolithic communities differ dramatically from those of the

preceding Ice Age in social structure. Obvious signs of gender in-
equality are fewer, and £erw durable elements of sexual culture sur-
vive. During the glacial period, w^hen survival depended on big-game
hunting, the nutritional contribution from gathering may have been
relatively small. Women could not hunt big game v^^hile they vvêre
pregnant, and they may have had to be relatively fat to bring a child
to term under the extreme conditions. Men would have been able to
take advantage of this vulnerability, as they have been on many occa-
sions throughout prehistory and history.
When the ice melted, however, women gained the potential to be

increasingly autonomous at a basic nutritional level. In principle, they
could simply walk away. Although men could use violence or the
threat of violence as coercion against them, they had lost their basic
economic lever — which may be reflected in the relative egalitarianism
of the Mesolithic period. Such egalitarianism, if it existed, did not
The growling population of the Near East introduced yet another

last.
economic factor into the equation that was eventually to reforge

women's economic inequality in bonds so durable that they persist
into the present day: farming, and its concomitant rules of production
and property.
Logging the Wildwood
Human beings, far from being cast out of the garden, turned them-
selves out of Eden, In the space of only a few thousand years, the
hunter-gatherer way of life, based on an intimate knowledge of the
bounty of nature, has almost vanished from the earth. Although it is
often said that "a thousand years ago, a squirrel could cross England
from the Severn through the Midlands to the Wash without setting
foot on the ground," that forest represented a regro^vth. The original
great greenwood that spread over Europe at the end of the last ice
age had long ago been cut down. Indeed, there have been many cy-
cles of forest clearance and regeneration since the glaciers receded —
but mainly of clearance.
NeAv evidence from ancient pollen preserved in peat bogs and
waterlogged tree stumps shows that the earliest systematic clearance
of the forests took place in Britain between 4000 and 3500 B.C.,
shortly after the start of ^vhat is termed the Neolithic period. While
some have spoken of an "Amazon-style felling of ancient oaks," oth-
ers believe the process of clearing the forests ^vas more gradual and
patchy. A second bout of clearance, between 2000 B.C. and A.D. 300,
using new^ly developed metal tools, is estimated to have removed half
the entire ^voodland cover in southern Britain. In mainland Europe
the clearances began much earlier — around 6000 B.C. in the Balkans.
Why vvôuld people ^vho had lived so long among trees — the
Mesolithic communities, w^hose detailed kno^vledge of the natural
world provided them with such a good living — suddenly start remov-
ing the pivotal element in their ecosystem, the trees? Why would they
turn to the plow^ and the ox team?
Farming involves the reproductive control of plants and animals
by humans for their own purposes. It requires that stud animals and
seed corn be managed and that distribution of the food produced be
controlled. Communities that farmed had to settle down in villages in
order to protect the fields that they had cleared and fenced. Shifting
to a sedentary life changes the rules of human reproduction by reduc-
ing birth spacing, as ^ve wîll see. Moreover, ^vith farming, the human
relationship with the environment shifts from one of trust to one of
148 The P re h it) to ry of Sex
exploitation. At the same time, the earth itself is made symbolically

female. "Mother Earth" becomes the focus of plowing, crop sowing,
and the burial of the dead — a creature who can be made to bear fruit
and receive, at the proper time, her human children back into her
Avomb.
The Old Testament, which was written by farmers, describes a
vôrld in which men are in control of society, where violence is com-
monplace, where God is male, and where the earth is female. Adam
and Eve were expelled from the garden where they had lived upon
the fruit of the trees. In punishment they were to cultivate ground
that had been cursed by God. Their sons, Cain and Abel, personify
the two principal elements of farming, animal husbandry and the cul-
tivation of crops: "Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain ^vas a tiller of
the ground." Cain, having murdered Abel, is told in turn by God that
he is "cursed from the earth, ^vhich hath opened her mouth to receive
thy brother's blood from thy hand."
The Great Goddet^d
A strange modern belief, built up particularly around the work of

Marija Gimbutas, holds that the first farmers lived in an idyllic,
goddess-worshipping pcutorale. (For Gimbutas 's theories on the Up-

per Paleolithic, see Chapter 5.) Female figurines have been found in
great numbers during excavations of early Neolithic farming villages,
though formed of clay rather than carved out of stone or ivory. "In
art and mythical imagery," Gimbutas wrote, "it is not possible to

dra^v a line between the two eras. Paleolithic and Neolithic." People
in both periods ^vorshipped a supreme female deity, the "Goddess
Creatrix." But Gimbutas considered the farming communities to be
more civilized than their hunter-gatherer forebears'. They were set-
tled and, she argued, they were settled around women. Men married
into households ^vhere descent and inheritance passed through the fe-
male line —a culture that vâs "matrifocal and probably matrilinear,

agricultural and sedentary, egalitarian and peaceful."
One of Gimbutas's followers, meteorologist-turned-ancient-

mysteries-researcher George Terence Meaden (whose work she en-
dorsed) has claimed that the farming cultures of Britain — Uke those
who built Stonehenge — ^vere a "classless, balanced society" that en-
joyed "the serenity of the Age of Goddess." This notion has a wide
appeal and has found a place as "fact" in the writings of feminist soci-
ologists and New Age mystics alike. This chapter shows why they are
misguided. I believe that the first farmers in Europe had a fundamen-
tally exploitative attitude to^vard everything, including sex — being vi-
olent, unbalanced people, ^vhose idea of a good time was felling trees,
erecting great stone phalluses, and sanctifying them with sacrificial
victims, often women and children.

The Genesis story was probably down around 900
first written
B.C., almost 3,000 years ago, but farming originated much earlier, at
the end of the last ice age. Its emergence may have been connected to
the changes in environment that were then taking place. Around
12,000 years ago the glaciers were making their final retreat. While
meltwater raised sea levels and caused coastal flooding in some areas,
in other places the removal of the great ^veight of ice caused the land
to spring back up, so that new coasts appeared. The Bering land
bridge was created, forming a corridor bet^veen ice and sea over
which people could move out of eastern Siberia and into North
America. These hunters subsequently ate their wây south through
herds of mastodon.
In the meantime the sea level rose in the Levant, at the eastern
edge of the Mediterranean Sea. The hunter-gatherer communities of
this region had knoAvledge of at least 250 useful species of wild plant,
w^hich they gathered as they carefully moved around the landscape

according to the season. They hunted gazelle and fished and lived
well. In fact, at the time when the sea level rose, their population was
increasing. Suddenly their rich maritime resources were gone, lost to
the rising waters. Communities were hard pressed, and it is therefore

not surprising that they turned to an alternative mode of food pro-
duction: cultivating the land.
One of the earliest farming villages was Jericho, which was
built in the earthquake zone of the Jordan valley. Jericho was occu-
pied from around 8500 B.C. to 7'5 B.C., when Herod relocated ^vhat
was by then a city. So frequently rene^ved were Jericho's defensive
^valls over the millennia that they became the subject of biblical leg-
end. The Jericho people came to depend on about a dozen plants,
cultivating w^heat and barley in the adjacent floodplain. Wild wheat
and barley had never grovv^n naturally on the plain, since the seasonal
flooding rotted any seed. But humans could manage the fertile mar-
gin, planting and harvesting it and holding back grain for the next
season's planting. The implications of this system wêre profound.
The transition to farming was a one-wây street forhumans and

plants alike. Humans quickly lost the detailed knowledge of wild
plant foods that had been cumulatively built up over the preceding
tens if not hundreds of thousands of years. In turn, the few plants
they harvested rapidly became dependent on humans for their prop-
agation. When an ear of wild barley is ripe, a shake of the stem ^vill
dislodge the grains, which fall to the ground to germinate the follo^v-
ing year. On a lake edge the grains that fall when the plant is cut rot.
Only those ^vith a slightly tougher "rachis" connecting them to the
stem remained for the people of Jericho to gather in and thresh,
keeping some back as seed corn. Gro^vn from this reserve, the next
on the ear better, and the same process of selec-
season's crop stayed
tionwas again made at harvest time. At every stage of human pro-
cessing some grain was lost, and on average, it was the smaller
grains that were lost. Soon barley and wheat became domesticated.
Their grains had groAvn larger and did not fall easily unless
threshed.
Just as the reproduction of plants became dependent on human
society, so society came to depend on the plants. By investing time
and effort in cultivating the land, and by protecting their investment ^
from Avild animals and other human groups, people at Jericho and
other locations in the Near East became tied to one place and devel-
oped new ideas about ownership. People began to erect fences and
claim the land ^vithin as their own. (The idea of property began, ac-
cording to nineteenth-century political thinker Pierre- Joseph Proud-
hon, when they found someone stupid enough to believe them.)
Although prehistoric hunter- gatherers had often stored food and in-
vested effort in managing the natural returns of the environment,

agriculture put these activities on a quahtatively new plane. The seed
grain was crucial to individual survival, and it had to be stored and
protected. Whoever controlled it had political povêr of a sort not
seen before in human history.
The Domet^tic Round
Australian archaeologist and prehistorian V. Gordon Childe thought

that there had been three great revolutions in human affairs: the
Farming or "Neolithic" Revolution, the Urban Revolution, and the

Industrial Revolution. Each vâs accompanied by population in-
crease, political centralization, and an extension of human control

over the environment. The term Neolithic means "New Stone Age"
and ^vas adopted because the stone-tool technology of the new farm-
ing cultures wâs different from what had gone before. Instead of be-
ing simply chipped, tools ^vere now also ground, so as to produce a
smooth, rounded surface. Other kinds of grinding became essential in
early farming communities too, as grain had to be ground into flour.
Theya Molleson of the Natural History Museum in London has con-

ducted studies of 162 Neolithic skeletons dating to between 11,500
and 7,500 years ago from the farming village of Abu Hureyra in mod-
ern Syria. She believes that women had ground the grain, on their
knees, leaning forward over a "saddle quern" —a
was flat slab that
slo^vly ^vorn into a concave shape as a flat grindstone was moved
back and forth across it. Her conclusion is based on the marked
repetitive strain injuries that damaged the vertebrae in female skele-
tons and caused severe osteoarthritis of the toes, curvature of the
thigh, and "housemaid's knee" — the growth of bony extensions on the
kneecaps.
Any economic upheaval has the potential to alter gender rela-
tions, but it is hard to predict how. When the prehistoric Caddoan
Mound Builders of Texas switched from hunting and gathering to
farming, the sexual dimorphism in height between men and women
was markedly reduced. Women's size increased dramatically, ^vllile
men's increased only slightly. Farming may have brought nutritional

improvements from \vhich vômen benefited disproportionately.
When farming was adopted in the Mississippi valley, the reverse hap-
pened: everyone got smaller, but the women much more so; sexual di-
morphism thus became more marked.
Molleson's studies were enabled by the Neolithic fashion for
burying the dead. Their treatment of the dead suggests that human
societies under^vent a marked shift in religious ideas. In political
terms, burying the dead in the ground can reflect not only a concern
wîth lineage — the sequence of human generations and the associated
property inheritance^ — but a general territorial claim by the entire so-
ciety. One's ancestors invested their labor in tilling the earth, and
when they died, they vvêre physically incorporated back into it. The
position of the dead in Neolithic graves is often contracted, ^vith the
knees up and arms tucked in, in the fetal position. Arranging the
corpse in this vvây required special treatment, usually involving bind-
ing the limbs into position. It is impossible not to reach the general
conclusion that the earth itself ^vas now considered as a sort of
womb, ^vith the buried body awaiting rebirth.
The farming cycle itself involved a cycle of rebirth through the
opening of the earth, the planting of seed, and its seasonal germination;
after harvesting the corn in its prime, the residue — the seed — is kept
aside for the next year. At Jericho new faces were plastered onto
skulls using the fertile floodplain mud, and cow^rie shells to represent
the eyes. Cowries are a near-universal "natural symbol" for female
genitalia and suggest the female power of birth required for rebirth.
But at Jericho the skulls also remind us of the creation of Adam in the
Book of Genesis, sculpted from mud by a patriarchal God.
Women became ever more involved in birth in the Neolithic.
The simple fact of staying in one place reduces the spacings between
births. The problem of accumulating sufficient body fat wâs essen-
tially eliminated with the advent of a generally reliable, cultivated

food supply. Other factors probably contributed to more frequent
childbirths too. The loss of detailed hunter-gatherer plant knowledge
may have meant that the contraceptive uses of many plants ^vere for-
gotten. More significantly, the routines of corn grinding, hoeing, and

harvesting are less compatible with continuous breast-feeding than
are hunter-gatherer lifevvâys. Among hunter-gatherers, breast-feed-
ing on demand and late weaning are the norm, with all their contra-
ceptive benefits. (See Chapter 3.) The most important element in
such contraception is not the amount of milk the child takes but the
frequency of feeding. A three-year-old may drink as much or more
milk as a three-month-old, but a woman's chances of conceiving
Mobile nursing a three-year-old are much higher because the fre-
quency of the nursing sessions is reduced to a point where prolactin
levels in her body are too low to inhibit ovulation.
The backbreaking work of grain processing, and the sharply de-
fined and intensive work periods demanded by the agricultural year,
particularly at harvest time, must have encouraged Neolithic women
to schedule breast-feeding at intervals rather than do it nearly contin-
uously. They thus would have run the risk of their prolactin levels
dropping while their infant was still young. Although we have no di-
rect evidence for this precise mechanism, population did rise, and by
5500 B.C. there is clear evidence of deliberate ^veaning. It wâs for this
purpose that fired pottery seems to have been invented. According to

Theya Molleson's analyses of tooth wear in Neolithic infants, fired
pottery allowed grain to be boiled into porridge gruel that could be

used as a weaning food.
It is hard not to conclude that the position of women deterio-
rated in the Neolithic period. Yet from burials in the earliest periods
there is no particular evidence that men were conspicuously wealth-
ier. Further, many of the key innovations, such as the domestication
of plants and the making of pottery, were most closely associated
with ^vomen. The broad gender division of labor of the old hunter-
gatherer days seems to have been retained, as it continues into the
present. Margaret Ehrenberg cites a study of 104 modern horticul-
tural societies— those that raise crops on small plots without using
plows or heavy machinery— that found that women were solely re-
sponsible for cultivation in 50 percent of cases, as opposed to only 17

percent where men were solely responsible. Ehrenberg notes that this
gender division of labor continues in such societies despite "decades

or even centuries of contact ^vith societies vv^hose ideology ^vould en-

courage men to take on greater roles in production." Men tend to get
involved in farming at the point where animals become important,
initially for meat, but later and more significantly, for pulling loads —
enabling heavy plowing and bulk transport.
There are many different ways of farming. The "package" of
techniques and technologies varies from place to place, as do the en-
vironment and the people ^vho live in it. Around 8500 B.C., two thou-
sand years after the first systematic cultivation of plants, men who
had previously hunted gazelles began to pen animals, notably sheep,
close to their villages. In this ^vay sheep, and later goats and cows,
became domesticated. The fattest and best of the wild population
were selected, and those with unpleasant tempers ^vere sorted out.
The animals that remained became larger and more docile and pro-
vided a year-round source of meat for the villagers, as well as manure
that could be put back on the land to help retain its fertility.
There is much debate among archaeologists about hovv^ "revolu-

tionary" Neolithic farming actually was. My view is that the signifi-
cance of the change can hardly be overestimated. At different times
within the last 10,000 to 12,000 years, the switch to farming seems
to have occurred independently, in five or six different parts of the
world, including China, India, and the Americas. In the Americas

the hunters who helped wîpe out the mastodons eventually settled
down in places such as coastal Peru and began to cultivate maize by
around 5,000 years ago. In each region farming led to a second revo-
lution: the development of cities, dense populations, craft specializa-
tion, political hierarchy, and complex recording and accounting
systems, including calendrics, mathematics, and writing. The reason
for the switch to farming, however, ^vas not necessarily the same in
each region. That is to say, people may have chosen or been forced ,
into deliberate cultivation for a number of reasons. Still, in every
case it was necessarily a one-way process, characterized by loss of
hunter-gatherer knowledge and a rising population to support.

Nevertheless, a preceding steady increase in global population prob-
ably played some part. By 10,000 years ago, humans had reached
most of the places in the world Avhere they Under pres-
live today.
sure, they could no longer easily move to a better area, since the
next place was already occupied. Once people made the switch to
farming and their populations rose above the carrying capacity of
their cultivated territory, there was a pressure to expand by displac-
ing others.
It was by such overspill colonization that farming Avas brought
to Europe, where its impact on existing societies was dramatic, fun-
damentally altering cultural attitudes toward sex and reproduction.
The retreat of the ice from Europe had prompted many changes in
human life, but the switch to farming had not been one of them. The
Mesolithic communities that used sites like Star Carr and Lepenski
Vir did experience a general rise in population, consistent with the
fact that the congenially warm post—ice age environment was created
very rapidly and had originally been very thinly populated. Although
it is hard to get good estimates, Mesolithic population groAvth may
have been beginning to level out just when farming was introduced.
By the time farming became fully established, the population of the
Continent had probably increased fivefold.

The initial movement of farming people into Europe, around
6000 B.C., ^vas from modern Turkey into the Balkans. Farming then
spread around the coasts and islands of the Mediterranean. Some-
times migrants introduced it, but in other places local Mesolithic pop-
ulations adopted elements of the agricultural repertoire — pottery, or
domesticated animals, or cultivatable plants, or some mixture of
these — that were already available. This mixture of colonization and
adoption was reprised in central and western Europe more than a
thousand years later, beginning around 4500 B.C., and reached
Britain around 3800 B.C. The earliest Neolithic societies in the
Balkans-— and in the Mediterranean — produced large numbers of
clay figurines in the shape of human females. These figurines are
Gimbutas's principal evidence for the existence of a goddess-centered
farming religion, built on old roots but refreshed by contact with
Anatolia. Much of her theory of a matrifocal, goddess-worshipping,
agricultural society rests on the interpretation of these figures and on
evidence from one of the most famous of the Anatolian farming vil-
lages — Qatal Hiiyiik, on the Konya Plain of modern Turkey.

Qatal Hilyilk
During the 1960s archaeologist James Mellaart excavated fourteen

buildings in a settlement of almost urban proportions at Qatal Hu^yiik,
dating to bet^veen 6200 and 5500 B.C. The houses ^vere originally
entered from above, by ladders. Their internal layout, sculptures, and
wall paintings are well preserved, and the burials ^vere under the
floors. Mellaart 's publication of the primary evidence has been erratic;
current ^vork by Ian Hodder of Cambridge University may shed light
on some of the mysteries. Gimbutas reads the symbolism in the houses

as relating to ^vorship of the Great Mother Goddess, personified for
her by a clay idol depicting a "majestic enthroned Goddess, flanked by
felines . . . giving birth to the child ^vho emerges from between her
legs. " But it is hard to make the child out clearly — it ^
may be there, but

then again it may not; the position of the ^voman s knees suggests that
she is sitting rather than squatting. It is clearly not a familiar depiction
of childbirth. It may well be, as Gimbutas claims, an image of a deity

giving birth, but that does not make it the principal or supreme deity
for the ^vhole of Old Europe.
Some of the Qatal Hiiyiik houses have great sculpted horned
bull's heads sticking out from their inner ^valls. Although they are
rather virile-looking, Gimbutas claims that they too are symbolic of
the goddess. She compares the curved configuration of the paired
horns on either side of the muzzle with the layout of the uterus, fal-
lopian tubes, and ovaries in the human female. This comparison is
hard to take seriously. It is of course possible that the Qatal Hiiyiik

people had a fair conception of internal anatomy. Human viscera
^vere probably wêll knov^n, as indicated by the evidence for violence
in the Neolithic (which, incidentally, runs counter to Gimbutas 's
claims for a peace-loving matriarchal society). The phenomenon of
MitteUchmerz (ovulation pain; see Chapter 4, on menstrual syn-
chrony) might have led Neolithic people to understand the reproduc-
tive significance of the ovaries. But a formal comparison between a
highly schematic modern medical diagram of the female reproductive
tract and the equally stylized prehistoric depiction of a bull's head
(Fig. 6.4) The "Great

Goddess." Drawing by
George Taylor after
Gimbutas 1989.
and horns is unconvincing. Nevertheless, Mellaart too has claimed —

without proper photographic documentation —that mural paintings
within the houses depict women giving birth to both human children
and horned bulls. We know that cattle were of major importance in
the settlement's farming economy.
The most difficult evidence from Qatal Hiijmk for the Gimbutas
theory is the so-called breasts — paired mounds of clay that are stuck to
the inner walls of the houses. Female figurines from Qatal Hiiyiik have
breasts ^vith the nipples prodded in — little dents rather than protru-
sions — which is probably of little significance beyond the fact that
dented nipples ^vere easier to make in miniature than raised nipples.

But the mounds on the ^vall have nipples made of vulture beaks.
Griffon vultures — the species in question — also seem to appear in wall
paintings from the site (although again, these are not yet convincingly
published). In the light of what has been said already about weaning,
perhaps these sculptures represent the moment of independence from
the mother, when the child must turn away and, like the vulture, pick
at meat. Perhaps they symbolize a connection between the baby, nega-
tively envisaged as parasitic on its mothers flesh, and the vulture,
thought of as a parasite of corpses. Certainly in some societies weaning
is accomplished through negative conditioning, sometimes by coating
the nipples with lemon juice or another bitter substance. The attach-
-^t
.-V/%^.%-v ^ 4£^^
'.----«i^*il' _
m^- '"•• ^'\'-^'' .
#*ifi:
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14
r. ..^r:. '"f>ô
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^;-: v =
(Fig. 6.5) Temple of the Vulture Goddess, Qatal Hiiyiik. A molded breast form juts from
the left-hand wall above the bull's head; the far wall carries images of the "Vulture Goddess."
Reconstruction painting by Alan Sorrell, reproduced courtesy oi lUiuitrated London New,).
ment of vulture beaks to the nipple is not known, lio\vever. But then
the mounded bumps on the wall may not have been meant as breasts at
all. Not all of them are paired, and some occur one above the other.
Not all have vulture beaks — some have foxes' teeth, some have Avild-
boar tusks, and one has a weasel skull.
Women of Clay
Ian Hodder has been particularly interested in the symbolism at

Qatal Hiiyiik. He does not necessarily believe that it supports the
"Great Mother Goddess' theories, but he does see evidence of a gen-
eral tension between the Avild and the domestic, ideas that only really
took form when humans stopped living with nature and began,
through farming, to oppose themselves to it. For my part, I do not see
much in Qatal Hiiyiik that strongly supports the existence of a peace-
ful matriarchal religion. The things on the walls are creepy and sug-
gest a community ill at ease with the world. I would rather have one
Damien Hirst's sheep pickled in formaldehyde in my
of British artist
living room than protruding vulture-beaked breasts; it would be less
disturbing. The Qatal Hiiyiik evidence hints at a society whose atti-
tudes toward children were far more complex and perhaps more sys-
tematically exploitative than those of the preceding Paleolithic and
Mesolithic periods. This is borne out to some degree by other evi-
dence from Neolithic Europe.

The central problem with Gimbutas's Mother Goddess theory
for the European Neolithic is that, just as with the ice age Venuses,
very few of the clay figurines are distinctively inotherj. Generally
speaking, the depiction of motherhood has presented no great prob-
lem in art. From the Virgin Mary to the Indian goddess Hariti, the
standard imagery is of a child suckling (see Figure 8.8). Alternatively,

an artist may show a child sitting on its mother's knee, being born, or
dangling on the end of the umbilical cord —a popular depiction in
prehistoric rock paintings, from Aboriginal Australia to South Africa.
Strangely, among the several hundred known Neolithic figurines,

there is only one image of a mother breast-feeding — the so-called
Madonna from Gradac, from a 5000 B.C. site in the valley of the
Morava River in former Yugoslavia. Sculptures of childbirth are also
extremely rare.
Possibly sensing this difficulty, Gimbutas relied on a wide vari-
ety of other, possibly supporting indications for motherhood, such as
symbolization of the length of pregnancy. A small female figurine
from the temple site of Hagar Qim in Malta, dating to the fourth mil-
lennium B.C., has nine deep-incised lines across her back. Gimbutas
describes the figurine in the following terms: "With upraised legs and
hand at swôllen vulva, this figurine appears ready to give birth. Do
the nine lines across her back represent the nine months of gesta-
tion?" This speculation rests on the assumption that the woman is de-
picted as pregnant, which seems arguable, and on the symbolism of

nine. But in fact no natural symbolism of nine attaches to pregnancy.
The length of pregnancy may be nine months on our modern twelve-

month calendar, but it is ten months by the lunar calendar, which was
almost certainly the one used in the Neolithic period.
160 The F rehid tory of Sex
(Fig. ^.6t) Masturbating female, Hagar Qim, Malta, showing back and front. Drawing by
George Taylor after Gimbutas 1989.
At the time of Hippocrates, the reckoning of full term vsâs calcu-

lated as ten naturally observable lunar months from the last men-
strual period. The lunar month is 29 days, 12 hours, AA minutes, and
3 seconds long, but it is observed simply as 29 days: on this basis, 10
months are equal to 290 days or 41 weeks and 3 days. Modern calcu-
lations of gestation time vary and are based on variations of Naegele's
rule that reckons the estimated date of delivery as nine calendar
months plus seven days after the first day of the last menstrual pe-
riod — that is, between 280 and 283 days, according to the length of
the months included. Actual lengths of pregnancy vary: one study
showed the average length of first pregnancy to be 288 days, and 283
days for subsequent ones. Different societies opt for different esti-
mates: the French calculate the due date as 41 weeks from the time of
last menstruation, while the British and Americans reckon 40 vvêeks.
In any case, the nine stripes on the back of the Hagar Qim
wôman are unlikely to symbolize full-term pregnancy. Judging from
the figure's recumbent position, \vith one hand languidly reaching be-
hind the head and the other reaching dovv^n to the top of the labia, she
is more likely to be masturbating than giving birth. A recumbent po-
sition is a very bad one in which to give birth and was virtually un-
known before the modern period, when it came to be imposed by

male obstetricians who wanted to wrest active control of the process
away from wômen.
But what was the purpose of the Hagar Oim figure? Was it ed-
ucative, symboUc, or erotic? If the Neolithic figurines in general are
not Mother Goddesses, then what are they? One clue may lie in the
clay itself, the basic material of agricultural fertility. These figurines
personify the earth as female. They do not have children because the
earth does not bring forth children — it produces crops. Furthermore,
the seed only germinates in the ground with water and sunlight. The
clay for the figurines must be wetted to be worked, and then sub-
jected to the heat of the kiln, the terrestrial version of the solar flame.
Perhaps the figurines each contain a seed, sown in the clay.
Watchful Matriarchy
Female figurines are much less common outside the East Euro-
pean—Balkan and Aegean—Mediterranean areas, even though it was
from eastern Europe that farming was first brought into northern and
western Europe. The community that introduced farming is kno^vn
to archaeologists as the LBK culture — the Linearbandkeramlky a Ger-
man term that refers to their pottery, which is incised \vith curved
and geometric lines reminiscent of field boundaries and row upon
row of crops. The LBK people spread swiftly from the Hungarian
plain and wêstern Ukraine into what is no-sv Germany, the Nether-
lands, and northeastern France between 5500 B.C. and 5000 B.C.
Traces of LBK villages are found exclusively on light, sandy loess

soils— the easiest to clear and cultivate but also the most rapidly ex-
hausted. There is good evidence that clearings were used for a num-
ber of years, abandoned, and then returned to when some of their
fertility had come back. The evidence includes overlapping patterns
of pestholes relating to successive villages, each comprising several
distinctive longhouses.
The longhouses are among the most distinctive features of the
LBK. Measuring around 20 feet wide and 50 to 100 feet long (with
some shorter, and some at 150 feet), the longhouses were designed as
permanent dwelling structures and ^vere probably single-storied. Their
ground plans shovs^ a consistent yet enigmatic division into three parts.
The size of an LBK longhouse Avas probably related to the sort of fam-
ily that lived in it, although parts of the house could have been used for
stalling animals. A comparison of one-family housing in different soci-
eties today shows that matrilocal extended families tend to construct
bigger houses than patrilocal families. One reason is that in societies
^vhere men marry into a community from the outside so that sisters
stay together in a community ^vith their various husbands, the women
are more likely to share tasks under one roof. In societies ^vhere
women marry into a norw community, brothers tend to maintain their

own separate households within the village. As Ehrenberg has pointed
out, the LBK longhouses fall wîthin the defined parameters of a typical
matrilocal residence pattern. Some researchers have suggested, on the
basis of a very limited modern survey, a correlation between monoga-
mous marriage and rectangular houses and polygamous marriage and
round houses, on w^hich basis the LBK communities would have been
monogamous. LBK monogamy is highly speculative, however, as no
convincing connection has been established between marriage type
and house shape.
The archaeological traces of the LBK culture reflect a frontier
mentality. Like ^vhite settlers moving in wagon trains across the Old
West, through the traditional hunting grounds of the Indian tribes,
the lives of LBK settlers must have been hazardous. They moved
much more slowly than did those on the Oregon Trail, taking around
five hundred years to reach the Atlantic seaboard. We do not know
whether they were aiming for the coast, or whether their advance
was simply the result of a growing population that gradually spread
farther west. But whatever the case, rising population was an essen- t
tial component in their advance. Some archaeologists argue that the

switch to farming in northern and vvêstern Europe was the result of
the adoption of available techniques, domesticated animals, and crops
by indigenous Mesolithic communities, but this can be only a part of
the story — a part that occurred on the fringes of the main spread of
intrusive colonizers.
That the LBK people were settlers In a strange land Is clear

from the uniform appearance of the LBK culture as it spread. The
longhouses, the pottery, the mode of burial — crouched, fetal-type
burials within villages, sometimes beneath the house floors — all speak
of a conservative tradition. As with the North American pioneers, a
rigidly ordered Avay of life may have bolstered the Neolithic incomers
in their adversity. The preexisting Mesolithic communities were un-
hkely to have given up their forest environments wilhngly. Archaeo-
logically speaking, the evidence for violent death in this period is
quite extensive. Both "sides" were efficient killers. The Mesolithic de-
velopment of ever more efficient arrowheads was answered by the
Neolithic development of the barbed-and-tanged arrowhead, which
had good penetration, caused extensive internal hemorrhaging, and
stayed in the body if the shaft was pulled out. It may have been
specifically designed for killing people and was certainly used to
great effect to do just that, as two male skeletons from a Neolithic site
in Spain show. One of the men seems to have been shot from below,
as if he wêre hiding in a tree or standing on a fortification. The shot
penetrated his abdomen and lodged in the inner face of one of the
lumbar vertebrae; it ^vas accurate and skillful and would have caused
almost instantaneous death.
French obstetrician Michel Odent associates aggression princi-
pally with the way babies are born and how they are treated in the
very first weeks of life. The most aggressive societies, he notes, tend
to separate mother and baby at the moment of birth and withhold
colostrum, the yelloAvish protein-rich, antibody-packed nutrient that
the breasts produce for the first few days after birth. This separation
not only contributes to higher mortality rates among the constitution-

ally less robust, it provides the ground conditions for a kind of primal
anger in the infant. Withholding colostrum disrupts the subsequent
flow of normal milk and makes nursing harder to establish. Such so-
cieties may place additional limits on the infant's access to the com-
fort and security of the breast, by "timing" feeds, isolating the inlant
in a cot at night, and weaning early.
The production of children must have occupied much of

women's time, and Neolithic women probably had more ol them
164 The Prehijtory of Sex
than Paleolithic women. Although ^ve do not have direct evidence

for Neolithic birth spacing, comparisons bet^veen modern hunter-
gatherer and sedentary communities suggest a birth spacing of
around five years for the former and one to two years for the latter.
One reason agricultural women had children more often, as previ-
ously mentioned, Avas the erosion of demand breast-feeding among

many sedentary agricultural societies. The ready availability of
weaning foods — like porridges, ^vhich could be cooked in the dis-
tinctive round-bottomed LBK pots — could have contributed to early

weaning among the LBK. So could the demands of a heavier ^vork
schedule — modern hunter-gatherers, even those ^vho have been
pushed into marginal environments (as most of them have been)
appear to ^vork much less in order to stay alive and well than do
farmers. It is also unlikely, at first, that the Neolithic settlers would
have knov^n much about the contraceptive effects of the plant
species they encountered in their push north and ^vest. They may
even have deliberately encouraged population growth: in frontier
situations it is often the side that physically expands fastest that suc-
ceeds. Finally, farmers may also value children for their labor in a
more direct way than hunter-gatherers do: farming involves many
simple and repetitive tasks, such as weeding, that can be delegated
to the young. The Mesolithic economy of postglacial Europe ^vas a
thriving one, yet it gave way, mile by mile, ineluctably, to a farming
economy.
The Rootd of Homophobia
The idea that longhouses vvêre the focus of extended matrilocal fam-
ilies is supported by evidence that the inner, domestic sphere was at
the cultural heart of the earliest farming communities. It has been
argued that the advent of permanent houses meant that sex became
more private, allo^ving an intimacy between t^vo people that had
been denied in the open mobile communities of the hunter-gather-
ers. It seems to me, hoAvever, that the reverse is likely to have been
the case. Among pastoral steppe dAvellers today, a couple merely
places a marker on the ground and retreats into the lush grass
beyond it to ensure perfect privacy. But the big-family atmosphere
of the longhouse, with a hostile forest beyond, must have provided
the perfect structure for elders to monitor the reproductive lives of
their sons and daughters.
The voyeuristic side of sex was probably encouraged by the
close proximity of animals. Children's first ideas about sex must have
come from observing stud animals, the behavior of bulls with their
harems. Both at Qatal Hiiyiik and in the LBK villages, it seems most
implausible that the culture regarded the bull as an embodiment of
the "Great Mother Goddess," wîth fallopian-tube-shaped horns.
More likely, the bull was considered an embodiment of quick and
functional male sexuality vîth a succession of relatively passive fe-
males. This sort of sex education, coupled with the abject lack of pri-
vacy in the closely confined rooms of the Anatolian village and in the
peep-through wattles that partitioned rooms in the European long-

houses, must have done little to encourage the finer aspects of hetero-
sexual lovemaking.
Longhouse society might even have been polygynous. The evi-
dence for violent death among men may indicate that there was a
skewed female-to-male ratio among the living, allo\ving wêalthy
stockbreeders to behave like their own stud animals.
Speculating further, conditions for homosexual liaisons were
probably still more abject, while the lives of intersex individuals may
have been brief. I believe that the Neolithic period saw the true birth
of homophobia; the Old Testament, which is in part the manifesto of
a rural farming society, is stiff with it. Domestic animals display ho-
mosexual behavior relatively often, but it is not "functional" in the
eyes of the stockman; if the whole herd did it, the system would col-
lapse. Therefore, as eagerly as the fertilizing activities of the stud bull
are encouraged, alternative, "dysfunctional" behavior is not. There is
evidence that the birthrate of intersex animals goes up under domes-

tication; such animals were probably not allowed to live long and
may have been taboo as food, due to worries about contagion. Hu-
man children born with similar ambiguities might well have been
treated the same way.
The new permanence of houses and villages heralded the estab-
Hshment of a number of binary oppositions, between wild and domes-

tic, inside and outside, male and female, that took meaning from each
other. These binaries wêre conceived of as necessary opposites. The
products of nature were domesticated and brought inside, while the
products of culture were spread outward, into the wild. The bound-
ary was always clearly marked, by a door or a fence. 0\vnership ^vas
stressed to a far greater degree than in previous societies. The very
decoration of the pottery betrays an obsession with demarcation. The
definition of the sexes and of sexual activity was no exception to this
pattern andwas soon symbolized in an explosion of massive anthro-
pomorphic landscape monuments.
Cnapter 7
-L ne vJrave or
tne Vjrolaen JLeni
The childhood t^howd the man,

A*t morning dhow*^ the day.
John Milton,
Paradise Regained
I do not believe that women built Stonehenge. Perhaps they had a

hand in it, and a woman was certainly sacrificed in one of its founda-
tion ditches, but like guns and rockets, it is essentially a male monu-
ment. I believe that the making of Stonehenge was ordered by a man
and that he was unhappy. When the midsummer sun rises over the
heel stone and penetrates the center of the circle with a shaft of light,
it is a sign that the sun is at the height of its po\vers. It can be seen as
a sexual symbol — the sun god firing his semen into the hollow space.
But it can also be seen as the fulfillment of a prediction, a massive

overstatement of the power of human calculation and, by extension,
power over the forces of nature.
In this chapter I argue that the familiar landscape of prehistoric
Britain, the great standing stones and earth mounds, ^vas not only
created as a stage for a cosmic sexual symbolism but is a huge exer-

cise in psychological compensation for the loss of control, and atten-
dant rage at the ^vorld, that Stone Age boys were made to feel when
they were first weaned. I believe that males, in particular, were sin-
gled out for a harsh initiation into life by an increasingly populous

and belligerent society that required warriors.
Children of War
A grim insight into the realities of early farming life comes from the
excavation of a mass grave on the edge of an LBK village near Tal-
heim in southwestern Germany. Thirty-four contorted skeletons vvêre
found, thrown into a single pit. The bone traumas of most are consis-
tent with killing by stone axes and cudgels. But two of the individuals
^vere shot dead wîth arrows. The lack of any characteristic "parrying
fractures" — injuries sustained while defending oneself — suggests,

with the rest of the evidence, a surprise attack followed by summary
executions. The corpses were stripped of their belongings, then
dumped. Some believe that the Talheim pit contains virtually the en-
tire population of the LBK village. The dead comprised seven chil-
dren in the one-to-six-year age range, nine juveniles, and eighteen

adults. As far as sex and age can be determined, there were nine
adult men, three of whom were over fifty years old, and one who was
between sixty and seventy, and seven ^vomen, six of them of child-
bearing age. There are two interesting omissions in the group: babies
less than a year old (completely absent) and older vvômen (only one).
The absence of young infants in the Talheim mass grave sug-
gests to Konrad Spindler (the archaeologist who heads the Iceman,
team) that the reason for the massacre was "child abduction, prac-
tised by some primitive people to add new^ blood to their OAvn popula-
tion." That is, the village was exterminated to capture the children.
"Certain age limits were set in order to facilitate the linguistic and
cultural integration of these young children into their neAv commu-
nity." Moreover, "there was no cannibalism," Spindler notes, "as has
The Grave of the Golden Penis 69
(Fig. 7.1) Goat suckling human infant. After
Briining 1908, Fig. 13; reproduced courtesy
of the Wellcome Institute Library, London.
not infrequently been observed at other Neolithic sites. The Talheim

bodies lack the tell-tale cutting and slaughtering marks on their
bones." The fact that the bodies were in fact buried — hygienically
disposed of — suggests that the attackers wished to take possession of
the entire village, "complete with houses, livestock, fields and stores."
If the massacred group was indeed the entire population of the vil-
lage, then the impression is that it ^vas a patrilocal extended family,

vîth a group of senior men and their younger wives but no women
"elders." Further analysis, such as genetic testing of the bones, may
throw more light on this.
Spindler's hypothesis suggests a grisly scenario in ^vhich these

orphaned children grew up as the helpmates of their parents' murder-
ers, unwîttingly toiling close to the unmarked mass grave. In
Spindler's scenario, some of the young infant survivors from the Tal-
heim massacre might have been too young for full weaning. Several
solutions for keeping young infants alive after the death of their
mother suggest themselves. First, the infants could have been raised
on cereal gruels alone; their mortality on such a diet at such an age
would have been high, however, as it would have been nutritionalK'
inadequate and would have given them no antibody protection. Sec-

ond, the infants could have been wet-nursed; this diet would have
provided good nutrition and some antibody protection, but it would
have depended on the availability of women to do the job— women
whose own babies had died. The third option wôuld have been to
suckle the infants directly onto a domestic animal, such as a goat.
This third option, bizarre as it at first seems, Avas standard practice in
foundling hospitals in Renaissance and early modern Europe. Animal
nursing provides some level of nutrition, although there appears to be
nc antibody benefit; in fact, the child is exposed to the animal's dis-
eases. We will never actually know if the Talheim massacre was in
part a baby raid or if it was, if the infants were nursed by animals.

But we do knoAv that the use of nonhuman milk became Avidespread
in the later Neolithic period.
Baby Booming
By around 3500 B.C., fifteen hundred years after the peak of the LBK
culture, some Late Neolithic communities in Europe ^vere definitely
using animals to produce milk for human consumption. We know^ this
from the range of pottery vessels used for manipulating liquids and
semiliquids — jugs and cups, strainers and boilers. Archaeologist
Andrew Sherratt has termed this development, which also involved the
use of oxen for draft and sheep for wool, the "secondary products rev-
olution," to distinguish it from the use of animals for their primary
products alone — meat, leather, and bone. Evidence of these uses can be
found in the Near East during the same period: they are clearly depict-
ed in art. The use of animals for plowing Avas certainly a later Neolithic
development — only then did human settlement move away from the
loess soils to the potentially richer but harder to work clay soils. But ani-
mal milk may have been utilized much earlier than Sherratt initially sug-
gested. Archaeologist Peter Bogucki has argued that the age and sex
structure ofLBK cattle herds suggests that they were kept as dairy ani- ^
mals; he has also identified some strainers among LBK pottery.

Direct infant nursing by animals seems the most likely path for
the development of dairy farming. Perhaps the original venue was
within the longhouse itself, where infants could be left in the care of
older relatives, with the odd goat on tap, while the parents toiled in
the forest clearings. It must have seemed like a natural progression —

(Fig. 7.2) A breast-shaped weaning vessel:

Barton-upon-Humber, Anglo-Saxon period.
,, ,^,. ,
_^ , ,, Photograph: Kevin Harvey.
human babies and young animals alike drink milk, and both wômen
and female animals produce it. But despite our modern Western fa-
miliarity with the idea, for adult humans to regularly drink the food of
calves and lambs ^vithout ill effect is, on the face of it, rather bizarre
and vvôuld have taken some time to become established. Only then
could it become culturally elaborated, involving specific types of ves-
sels — strainers and weaning cups. Weaning cups are known from
early farming cultures in France, Italy, and the Carpathian basin, as
^vell as from the grave of twin babies at Jebel Moya in the Sudan,
dating to the early introduction of pastoralism to Africa in the first
millennium B.C. Such vessels, initially used solely for children, were
later joined by jugs, cups, and bowls for grown-ups. These vessels
were used not only for raw milk (which may not have been drunk
much at all) but for foods never before seen — cheese, yogurt, and al-
coholic koumiss. (Such close contact with animals was not without
risk. Skeletal studies demonstrate that tuberculosis was first spread
from cows to humans in this period; its first transmission could have
been during direct infant suckling.)
Although weaning regimes typically result in higher infant mor-
172 The P re h Id to ry of Sex
tality, inpurely demographic terms they are outweighed by the

greater number of conceptions that can be sustained to full term. The
increase in population during the European Neolithic is similar to
that which took place in other parts of the world during the transition
to farming. It may have been
at some level deliberately manipulated,
certainly by the time animal management began to figure largely in

the economy. One of Marija Gimbutas's main contentions wâs that
the later Neolithic and early Bronze Age periods ^vere characterized
by obvious gender inequalities. She thought that these inequalities
arose rapidly and vvêre the result of the immigration of pastorally
based communities, the Kurgan cultures, from the steppelands of
eastern Europe. But it is possible to accept immigration to explain in-
creased gender inequality while not subscribing to the view that the
earlier Neolithic ^vas characterized by peaceful equality between the
sexes. The management of herds, developing as it did out of the hunt-
ing in hunter-gatherer economies, tends to be principally associated
with men, as indicated by male burials with paired oxen.
Men and Animalt^
Pecked rock art stretches from upland Britain and Ireland, Scandi-
navia, and the Alps in the northvvêst, eastward into Uzbekistan,
Siberia, Mongolia, and beyond. In many places it suggests a continu-
ous tradition of territorial marking by shepherds and co^vherds that
began in the Neolithic and has lasted into the present day. Individual
images can be dated more or less accurately using various stylistic
criteria; in the Val Camonica in northern Italy, for example, some

men carry long halberds of a type kno^vn from the adjacent lowland
Bronze Age cemeteries.
One scene from the Val Camonica (Figure 7. "6) sho^vs four hu-
man figures. The one on the left is holding a goat and leading two
oxen, one of Avhich is The oxen are harnessed to a
definitely male.
plow that is being driven by a second figure. The bulge beneath the
legs of this second figure could suggest biological maleness, but it is
not certain. Behind the plow^ team appears a stooping figure ^vho is
(Fig. 7.3) Plowing, hoeing, and infant-carrying: Val Camonica. Drawing by
George Taylor after Anati 1965.
hoeing and carrying a baby in a papoose on her/his back. Whatever

its nrythographic significance, the basic elements of the drawing show
a sexual division of labor — that babies are not carried by those who
plow. The conventional interpretation would be that the plow team
figures are male and the hoeing, baby-carrying figure female.
The association between men and animals is also made clear in
a number of scenes of bestiality. In one from the Val Camonica, a
man is penetrating what appears to be a donkey. Those from Siberia
are particularly interesting, sho^ving copulation among moose, as
MAell as men copulating — or attempting to copulate — wîth moose, the
man in one case being on skis (Figure 7.5). These animals are not
domesticated but, as social anthropologist Tim Ingold has observed
among modern herders in Lapland, managed herds of wild animals.
Bestiality scenes seem to stress the poAver of the penis. In several
rock engravings from southern Scandinavia, the penis is to the fore,
where it links figures together, making it difficult to see who the

penis belongs to or what sex each person in a group is. A "marriage
scene from the Bohuslan site may have homosexual content, some
have suggested. Homosexual imagery seems fairly clear in a group
of three figures from Mongolia, published by the Russian rock art
researcher Nora Novgorodova; but the touching penises may be
nothing more than a symbolic juxtaposition, merely indicating the
two combatants. Other images, as yet unpub-
essential maleness of
lished by Novgorodova, show clear sex scenes, with a central

woman fellating one man while having vaginal (or possibly anal)
intercourse Avith another. Novgorodova believes that these scenes
(Fig. 7. A) Man having sex with donkey: Val Camonica. (Part of the novelty of this scene is that
donkeys were a recent introduction to Alpine Europe at the time the image was created, around
3000 B.C.) Tracing of rock surface: Christopher Chippindale.
\r^
(Fig. 7.5) Skier attempting intercourse with moose: Angara River.
Tracing from Martynov 1991; fig. 25.2.

are of purely ritual or symbolic significance. But what can be drawn

can be done, and it would be surprising if a community that was this
explicit in its art did not actually engage in the activities depicted.
Still, I suppose a question mark must hang over the plausibiHty of

the ski scene with the moose.
The fertilizing power of the penis and the reproductive value of
semen must have been well known to those who managed animals.
The essence of keeping a meat or dairy herd is not just in the patterns
of slaughter but in controlling the ratios of the sexes and their mating
patterns. Minimally, only one stud bull is needed to ensure the conti-
nuity of a dairy herd, but oftentimes he must be kept separate from

the co^vs. The control of animal sexuality by men may have had its
analogue in control of the sexuality of human females. The rise of the

idea of property, in land, in herds, and in ^vomen, would have placed
new emphasis on exclusive rights of sexual access, as promised by
certain forms of marriage. In an exploitative economy, virginity may
have been valued in both land and women. Early farming societies
were probably the first to formulate rape laws, not so much to protect
^vomen as to defend property and lines of inheritance. The penis as

an image, so obvious in ice age art but virtually absent from the sur-
viving archaeological record of the Mesolithic period, again comes to
the fore in the Neolithic.
Varna: Grave 43
In 1968 a cemetery of more than 250 graves vvâs discovered at Varna,

on the Bulgarian Black Sea They date to a little before 4000
coast.
B.C. —after the main LBK spread and only about seven hundred
years before the Iceman lived, at a time when copper and gold were
being used on a grand scale for the first time in eastern Europe. (The
copper ax that Otzi carried with him may well have been traded Irom
somewhere in this metal-rich Balkan region.) Some of the graves
were too poorly preserved to tell much about, and some were devoid
of bones; the remaining 150 or so have been classified as either men's
or women's graves. Grave 43 is one of the richest burials, containing
176 The PrehijtoryofSex
many wonderful metal objects. The skeleton held a ceremonial cop-

per ax in its right hand. The wooden haft survives only as a series of
beautifully finished gold bands or cylinders. There are gold arm rings
and gold disks with holes that shov\^ that they were once sewn onto
an elaborate garment.
The most unusual object in Grave 43 is a sheet-gold artifact that
in shape and size resembles the end of a penis. It wâs found between
the legs of the skeleton. It is usually referred to as a "penis sheath,"
but because it is both unique and incomplete, and because I do not
Avant to prejudice any other conclusions that might be dra^vn about
its function, I call it a "penis piece." It is made of a single piece of
hammered sheet gold and is about two inches long and almost an
inch and a half in diameter. Small perforations dot the "rim," suggest-
ing that it was once sewn to some organic material, such as calfskin.
(The people buried at Varna kept cattle, as vê know from the animal
bones found in settlements of this period, as Avell as from gold coav-
shaped clothing appliques found in other graves in the Varna ceme-

tery.) The thing was clearly an object of beauty, made to be seen. But
the question is: Did it have a particular function?
It seems unlikely that the gold-tipped penis piece from Varna
^vas a particularly fancy condom, as the tip has a hole in it. But this
hole in itself suggests that the piece could have been actually worn on
the penis, as it would have allowed both urination and ejaculation. It
could, of course, have functioned as a condom in the sense of provid-
ing some protection against sexual disease transmission. It is, after
all, made of a hypoallergenic material, suitable for contact with deli-

cate body The piece might have been sew^n to some condom-
tissue.
like animal membrane, although it could have been sewn directly

onto the skin of the penis itself. (Anyone with any doubts about the
feasibility of such a thing need only glance at one of the specialist
magazines devoted to the increasingly popular art of decorative geni-
tal piercing.) Could somebody have ejaculated out of the Varna penis
piece in a bizarre fertility ritual, either copulatory or masturbatory?
Its diameter ^vould certainly have made it a snug fit for an erect pe-
nis, but then people are various, and we do not know ^vhat the aver-
age size ^vas for Varna males at that time. Its "erect" dimensions
The Grave of the Golden P ENIS 177
.A
(Fig. 7.^) The Grave of the Golden Penis: Varna cemetery, Grave No. A'6; 4000 B.C.
Photograph: Vitaly Vitanov Agency.
would seem to fall at the louver end of the normal modern range. The
penis piece Avould cover the glans area and part of the shaft, leaving
the rest of the shaft of the penis, membrane-covered or not, open to
sensory contact.
Similar to the Varna penis piece are the penis sheaths that are
worn quite widely among tribal peoples of the ^vorld's tropical belts.
Despite their name, such sheaths are not for contraception, although
they typically have no hole in the end. A. comparative survey by anthro-
pologists suggests that they have usually been ^vorn as a mark of mod-
esty or decorum. The men who wear them wear little clothing elsewhere
on the body. Although such sheaths are necessarily phallic in form, they
are never lew^d and reflect none of the anatomical detail of a penis. Their
purpose is to symbolize manly status in an abstract wây. They are rigid
and opaque, and they keep the real state of the penis private. In essence
they are fig leaves, but effective ones. As such sheaths have no hole, they
are removed when the man wishes to urinate.
The Varna penis piece does not look like a device of this sort be-
cause of the hole in the end and because the climate in which it was
worn was not tropical. (Gilding one's penis is hardly modest in any
context.) Although the summers may be hot along the coast of the
Black Sea, the winters are fairly bitter, and from the clothing evi-
dence from this period, we can infer that people vvêre Avell covered.
Indeed, the positioning of the gold fashion objects and appliques in

Grave AT) suggest that the body had bare arms that were adorned
vvîth arm rings, but a covered torso and legs. The torso had a fair
density of small se^vn-on gold buttons or sequins, ^vhile each knee
had its own golden disk decoration, originally se^vn onto trousers or,
more probably, leggings like the Iceman's. There Avas also an elabo-
rate headdress, with rows of large gold disks.
In this context the gold-tipped penis piece seems more akin to a
Renaissance codpiece—-emphasizing the possession of an organ that

was actually Avell covered (and presumably flaccid) beneath. Like the
briefly fashionable Renaissance examples that stood out and up, the
piece might actually have been padded so as to appear erect rather
than dangling, which would certainly have made a dramatic show of
the hole, otherwise not easily visible. It is clearly a piece that ^vas
made to be seen. But the reconstruction of the clothing of the corpse

compKcates this reasoning.
If a body is buried "fresh," with clothes on, it will decompose In
the ground amid much movement. The viscera will swell and possibly
burst, sometimes causing small items, such as necklace beads, to rico-
chet around the coffin ^vhen their threading gives way. Even with a
corpse that has been buried without a coffm— that was lowered into
the grave pit on a bier, for example — and directly covered over with
earth, small jewelry items may subsequently be found some distance
from their original places. It is possible to restrict such movement by
placing the body in a tight winding cloth, or by trussing the legs and
arms into a fetal position for a "contracted" burial, lying on one side.
There are three basic grave types at Varna: ones where the body is
laid out long on its back (extended inhumation), ones where the body
lies on one side, ^vith knees up (contracted inhumation), and ones
with no body (possibly representing those lost at sea).
The grave with the penis piece is an extended inhumation, with

little sign that clothing and je^velry items have been much displaced.
This probably means that the body was displayed for some time fol-
lowing biological death and before the social death marked by the fu-
neral rites. During body would probably have been
this time the
secluded in a death hut, from which a terrible stench would have em-
anated, signaling the swelling of the viscera and their subsequent re-
laxation as the stomach gases ^vere vented and the initial putrefaction
processes ran their swift course. The body would then have been in a
floppy and fairly stable condition, at which stage it could have been
dressed. The indications of clothing excavated at Varna are, there-
fore, traces of grave clothes. It is possible that the penis piece was
worn only in death, a symbolic penis for use in the afterlife.
The Golden Penid: Male Ornament or

Female Substitute?
In only one grave in the Varna cemetery does a penis piece suiAîve.
(There may have once been others, made entirely of perishable mate-
rials, of Avhich no trace has been found.) Could it have been the grave
of some unfortunate Avho — unlike Otzi — had been emasculated? The
answer is unknowable, but then, no such scenario is really necessary
to explain the penis piece, as Grave 43 is probably the "richest" in the
entire cemetery in terms of the number and wealth of the status ob-
jects and clothing elements Avithin. Whoever was buried in it was a
person of considerable importance to the community, in death at
least. The Renaissance codpiece comparison again seems to fit best.
This was an individual of high status— the "Man with the Golden Pe-
nis." . . . But was he really a man at all?
If the penis piece Avas primarily a symbolic status symbol, it
need not have been worn over a real penis. The erect codpieces of the
Renaissance were self-standing fashion items, strapped on over un-
dergarments. The penis piece couLd have been ^vorn by a biological
woman, either in life or in death. Obviously, before speculating fur-
ther Ave should ascertain the sex of the skeleton, ^vhich we have sim-
ply assumed until now to be male.
At this point certainty begins to slip awây. Although the exca-
vation report for the Varna cemetery records the skeleton as male,
the criteria by w^hich this determination was made are open to ques-
tion. (The skeleton on which the grave goods are displayed in pho-
tographs is not the original skeleton; it is in fact a plastic model.)
Grave 43 may have contained the body of someone ^vho ^vas in all
respects male, who had a masculine skeleton and a standard XY sex
genotype. Or it may be the skeleton of a person who \vas genetically
female —a priestess perhaps, ^vho ritually played out some myth.
(The Hazda of Ethiopia have a myth about a woman who ties a
zebra s penis to herself and uses it to satisfy her beautiful wives.) Or
the skeleton might easily be of "uncertain" sex. Out of a cemetery of
more than 150 surviving skeletons, one or two might represent the
remains of intersex individuals of one kind or another. Grave A'5
could thus contain the remains of a genetic woman v^ho, for exam-
ple, had AGS — a condition that caused her gender orientation to be
"male" in life and that left various malelike features on her skeleton,
so that the physical anthropologist — perhaps already influenced by
the grave goods — pronounced the bones male. This would be one
way to explain why only one skeleton in the entire cemetery had a
gold penis piece.
The person buried in Grave 45 was clearly singled out in death
to wear a striking and extraordinary appendage — a gold-tipped
phallus. Since, unlike the erect codpieces of the Renaissance, this
object had a hole in the end, we must consider it a strong possibility
that it was designed to ejaculate — most probably by being worn
over an erect penis but possibly artificially, by having something
pumped up through it. A comparable modern object wôuld be the
strap-on ejaculating dildo (mass produced and widely available on a
global level, but not often discussed). Such plastic or rubber penises
have a hole in the end with a tube running down to a fake scrotum,
Avhich can be filled with something such as cream; squeezing the

scrotum causes the cream to ejaculate. The gold-tipped penis piece
Avas certainly part of something more complex. It coul? originally
have been fitted up with some natural membrane and tubing from
the cattle and sheep kept by the Varna people, and the small — and
thus rare and valuable — amount of milk and cream that these early
domesticates produced could have been used as the fake or symbolic
semen.
I am not saying that the Varna object id the surviving part of a
strap-on ejaculating dildo. For one thing, its context is clearly alien.
The modern dildo is used during private sexual activity or in sexual
performances of one kind or another; it is not usually associated

^vith funerary rites. Nevertheless, the Varna piece does look as if it
were made to function — the hole in the end would have been a bit of
a letdown if nothing had come out of it. And if something did come
out of it, then it seems likely that it was as part of a public "ritual"
display.
I realize that I could easily be accused of anachronism, of back-

projecting the weird and wonderful sexual activities of the modern
world onto the clean-living, simple, and wholesome peoples ol the
prehistoric past. Many people believe that in the past, closer to our
"cave man" and "cave woman" roots, we can observe the "natural,
free from the confusions and decadence of modern civilization. But
people of the same biological type as us — our species — have been
182 The Prehljtory of Sex
(Fig. 7.7) Masturbating
male; Larisa. Drawing by

George Taylor after
Gimbutas 1989; fig. 281.47.
around for 100,000 years, with the same underlying curiosities and
fascinations about and death. As soon as there are
life v^ritten
records, from around 5,000 years ago in the Near East, ^ve find ref-
erences to many of the sexual practices — homosexuality, male and

female transsexualism and transvestism, masturbation ^ familiar to
us today.
The Masturbating Godhead
That a religious ritual, ^vhether performed by a man or a woman,

could have focused on the male ejaculatory function is clear from
ancient Egyptian and Sumerian texts. In surviving Egyptian reli-
gious documents, male masturbation is the basic act in the most pop-
ular creation myth. Pyramid Utterance 527, dating to around 2600
B.C., says that "Atum [the sun god] was creative in that he proceed-
ed to masturbate with himself in Heliopolis; he put his penis in his
hand that he might obtain the pleasure of emission thereby and

— that is Shu and Tefnut." This
there were born brother and sister
creative masturbation ^vas most often thought of as taking place in
water, sometimes with the help of the hand goddess, lusas; the cul-
minating ejaculation formed the Nile flood, upon which the whole
civilization depended. Temple priestesses at Karnak were known as
"hands of god" as they facilitated the divine annual spasm. Similarly,
in Mesopotamian literature, Enki "stood up full of lust like an
attacking bull, lifted his penis, ejaculated, filled the Tigris with flow-
ing ^vater."
A small clay figurine in the form of a masturbating male fig-
ure, from the Greek Neolithic Dimini culture, dates to the same
time as the Varna cemetery (5000-4500 B.C.). Found near Larisa, it
has parallels with the masturbating woman from Hagar Qim. The
idea of semen as a natural "fertilizer" was not confined to agricul-
tural society. The Zuni of North America used to take one of their
"men-^vomen" — anatomically male cross-gender people — and lead
him/her out over the mesa in the "spring riding" ritual, during
^vhich he/she would be masturbated in order to ensure the return
of wildlife.
The Invention of Mother Earth
The emphasis on the generative po^ver of the male organ, the engen-
dering of the earth as female, and the distinctive psychological out-
look induced by early ^veaning and a harsh attitude toward infants
may perhaps constitute a series of intertwined influences on the
British Neolithic. Together they may throw new light on the underly-
ing motives for constructing monuments like Stonehenge and the
elaborate long barrows into which the dead were placed.
The switch to farming in Britain is in many respects enigmatic.
The earliest phases of forest clearance, dated according to the pollen
record, are not associated with many traces of permanent settlement,
and nothing like the longhouse villages of the LBK is known. In-
stead, there are field monuments. It seems likely that these monu-
ments Avere erected in a preexisting practical and symbolic
landscape — a network of routes and special places that had developed
during the preceding Mesolithic. Apart from these monuments, the
main observable change that came with farming was in the treatment
of the dead. For the Mesolithic ^ve have Kttle idea about standard
modes of disposing of corpses, except that they v^êre not buried in
the ground. Bodies were returned to the cycle of hfe in some Avay,
quite possibly by being exposed to the elements and carrion birds.
Exposure platforms and mortuary enclosures seem to have a
continuing significance, but at sites such as Fussell's Lodge they are
associated with long mounds, within vv^hich are stone-built cham-
bers — charnel houses or "keeping places" for the dead — in which
bones wêre arranged and rearranged many times.
The basic symbolism of grave mounds derives from the practi-
cal fact of displaced soil. If you dig a hole and place a body in it,
then shovel the earth back, some soil is left over. The amount is in
direct proportion to the size of the interred body. By enlarging the

mound with extra soil, the symbolic importance^ the imagined
"size" of the person interred — can be increased. In farming cul-
tures, the cycle of death and rebirth in the agricultural year sug-
gests an analogy with human life and death and seems to cast light
on the mystery of what happens next. In the long barrows, bones

are placed like seeds in a ^vomb of earth, as if wâiting for the
moment of rebirth. Often, the ground beneath the barrovv^s has
been plowed. British archaeologists have usually considered this
plowing fortuitous — the construction of a ritual monument sealing

evidence of basic economic life. Yet some of the plovv^ marks have a
strange vigorousness, as for example those under South Street
Long Barrow. The plo^v marks are probably not coincidental.
Patzold believes that similar plowîng under German round bar-
ro^vs vâs deliberate, serving to prepare the ground for the "plant-
ing" of the dead.
The shape of many of the long barrows suggests genitals.
Most notably, the long form has often been considered phallic.
Indeed, the long form of the earthen mound is appropriate for sym-
bolizing the propagation of a male patrilineage, the documentation
of a land claim, and the inheritance of property from father to son.
The way into the long barro^v, howêver, has a female anatomical
aspect. It is often described as an opening bet^veen two "arms" — an
unfortunate coyness that obscures the obvious fact that arms do
not converge on an opening, legs do. The feeling of entering into

one of these places has been appropriately evoked by the archaeo-
logical photographer Mick Sharp, here talking of an E^nglish
Neolithic burial mound:
Dark, damp, and smelling of the earth pressing in from all
sides; Hetty Peglar s Tump in Gloucestershire retains well
the atmosphere of the earth mother s womb. The place

from which we vêre born again, through the constricted
entrance, the souls of the dead, and where the bones rested
securely in the belly of their creation.
Across the English Channel in Brittany, and in the chalk-cut
tombs of the Marne region, the female associations of Neolithic tomb

shapes are enhanced by stylized but unambiguous female representa-
tions on the walls of the inner chamber, depicting face, breasts, and
neck ornamentation, or simply paired breasts on their own. At
Carnac, Brittany, a remarkable virtuosic representation, worthy of
Picasso, succeeds in being both a large vulva, viewed in close-up,
wîth breasts above and beyond, and at the same time a face — the
breasts also serve as eyes.
Ho^v were the dead thought to rise? A particularly dramatic sce-
nario is suggested in the orientation of many of the tomb entrances,
perhaps best illustrated by the passage grave of Newgrange in the
Bend in the Boyne, Ireland. Newgrange is a great, pregnant-looking

round or slightly kidney-shaped mound, edged around its base with
curbstones that are decorated with swirling designs (to which
Gimbutas and others attribute vulvar and "Great Goddess" signifi-
cance). A stone-lined passage that leads into the mound terminates

in a burial chamber with a stunning vaulted roof, formed of dr^'-laid,
corbeled courses of stone. The outer entrance to the passage is curi-
ous, in that it has a main doorway, above whose lintel is a narrow

slit, as if The whole monument is oriented so that on one
for letters.
day of the year — the winter solstice of December 21 —a shaft of sun-
(Fig. 7.8) Midwinter sunrise at Newgrange. Co. Meath, Ireland. Photograph: Con Brogan.
light can enter the narrow opening and strike the back wall of the
burial chamber. The some seventeen minutes.
effect lasts for
The idea conveyed by the whole is of the sun as a male fertiliz-
ing power, whose shafts of light have analogies with the fertilizing
penises of men and stud animals, as well as connections with the
earth-penetrating power of the plow and the fork. {Fork is an Indo-
European word that was originally at one Mv'iXh fuck.) The idea of the
female sex as a field into which grain is sown is common among farm-
ing cultures and can be found in Talmudic, Egyptian, and Vedic writ-
ings. The idea of the female earth mound being entered by the male
force is startlingly embodied at Newgrange. The resurrection of the
bodies of the dead is symbolically connected to the resurrection of the

year itself — the point of exact midwinter, after which the sun must
begin to come back or there vîll be no spring. Such symbolic orienta-
tions are kno^vn from other Neolithic sites, such as the vaulted tomb
of Maes Howe in the Orkneys. The relative positions of sun and
earth at different times of year have altered somewhat since the mon-
uments vvêre first built, but it can be calculated that, if one had stood
by the phallic stone of Kintraw in Scotland in 1800 B.C. (Figure 7.9),
one would have witnessed a spectacular sight. As Mick Sharp writes,
"Looking over the site from ^vhat may be an artificial platform on the
hillslope to the north-east, the midwinter sun, after setting behind a
mountain peak on Jura, vvôuld have briefly flashed into life again at
the bottom of a V-shaped cleft." At Stonehenge it is the midsummer
sun that rises over the heel stone, as seen from the central sanctuary
area. Many of these effects could have been directly observed only by
a small group of select people, even though the monuments them-
selves often embody the labor of many hundreds.
Erecting Stones
It is hard to say whether all the Neolithic megaliths have one over-
arching meaning. These great architectural stones, lound on both
sides of the Channel, in Britain and in Brittany, were erected singlv,
in lines, or in circles. At Stonehenge they were slotted together at

^pp^»S*:>.;v iii
(Fig. 7.9) Standing stone; Kintraw. Ix)ch Craignish, Mid Argyll, Scotland.
Photograph: Mick Sharp.
their most complex. In one sense they are a replacement for the trees
that were felled to create the vistas in which they can be seen. But
they also have an undeniably phallic aspect. Among the impressive
monuments around Carnac in Brittany is the Grand Menhir Brise,
^vhich lies broken in three fragments, possibly after toppling at the
moment of its unsuccessful erection (around 4000 B.C.), but which

wôuld have stood over sixty feet high.
From around 2500 B.C. onward, as the long barrows were going
out of use, communities in Britain began to put up stone circles. The
detailed geometry and astronomical alignments of these circles have
often been overstated — particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, when a
variety of nonarchaeologists claimed that the circles ^vere prehistoric
computers and celestial observatories. Even if the weather in
Neolithic Britain was slightly better than it is today, the rarely ob-
servable star sets wôuld have made getting any detailed alignments
subject to cloudy disappointment. The monuments could only func-
tion if there \vas a degree of lee^vay in their erection, and they were
oriented toward major events — midwinter and midsummer sunrises

and sunsets, and various moonsets —^that would be seriously dis-
rupted only by a ^vhole week of completely overcast weather.
To investigate the basic motives for megalithic architecture, it is
necessary to examine the social organization of early farming cultures

and in particular the enculturation of children. I have argued that
during the Neolithic period as a whole, children were increasingly
seen as a potential labor force whose numbers could be increased by
early weaning. Attitudes toward them were not sentimental, as wit-
ness the Talheim massacre and a number of archaeological discover-
ies in Britain. At the site of Woodhenge — a wood-built counterpart to
nearby Stonehenge, which survived only as concentric circles of large
fdled-in postholes and a shallow-ditch-and-bank perimeter— the body

of a three-year-old girl was found, her skull split by an ax blow. John
Barber, ^vho has excavated many sites in Scotland, suggests that sev-
eral infant burials around passage graves— ten at Ouanterness,
twenty-four at Isbister — represent systematic infanticide of neonates.
At Stonehenge a woman and child ^vere buried in the great ditch
close to the entrance to the monument. Attitudes toward (at least
some) vvômen seem to have been no better than those towârd some
unfortunate children. There are many potentially sacrificial burials of
Mômen at Neolithic sites, such as one from the Curragh Henge in
Ireland, where a woman appears to have been buried alive. Ian

Kinnes of the British Museum remarks that "while there are not
many bodies, where there are they tend to be women, and people are
thinking in terms of special sacrificial dedications."

It may be time to risk a psychological profile of Neolithic soci-
ety.Such a thing has been attempted from time to time, most recently
by Peter Ellis, who sees the megalithic monuments as evidence of a
"collectively held obsession" creating "a landscape of detached sexual
objects." This idea is suggestive, and when it is brought together with

theories of developmental psychologists and of obstetrician Michel
Odent, the combination may indicate what lay at the root of
Neolithic culture.
In many hunter-gatherer societies, children continue to nurse to
the age of five or six, and they derive great comfort from the uncon-
ditional love that breast-feeding represents, embodjdng the principles
of trust, reliance, and sharing. On the basis of this early experience,

far from becoming dependent individuals, they display remarkable
autonomy based on a strong inner sense of their ovv^n value. Early
weaning practices are generally associated with the opposite psycho-
logical tendencies. Warrior societies, for example, often withhold
colostrum from a ne^vborn infant and give him or her water instead.
The infant is understandably angry about the fact, except that it lacks
the cognitive abilities to understand anger, so the event becomes an
unconscious primal focus for aggression in later life. Deliberate
^veaning comes in twô forms or stages. First, nursing is limited, and
finally the mother ends all breast-feeding. Early ^veaning, as we have
seen, is common in farming societies, where birth spacing is reduced.
The specific results of such conditioning processes vary from
community to community. They may manifest themselves as a cul-
tural obsession with breasts, idealizing them to the point where virtu-
ally no one feels she possesses or has access to precisely the "right"
sort (as in modern America). But there may be more systematic ef-
fects as well. In particular, the weaning process typically arouses re-
sistance in the child — it cries. For weaning to succeed, the crying

must be ignored, as it also must be if the child is to sleep alone. The
modern term for this approach is "controlled crying," where the child
is allovvêd to cry a little more each day before its needs —^for food,
comfort, or attention — are attended to. The child eventually shuts up.
The reason it does so is connected to a basic animal instinct that can
be precisely observed in the young of most mammals and birds. The
instinct, stated as a rule, is: "If you cry and no one comes, you have
been abandoned; because you have been abandoned, you are in grave
danger and you will increase your chances of survival by conserving
energy; crying is costly in energy terms; therefore stop crying." The
human child does precisely this. Before it ceases crying, however, it
must adopt the psychological state equivalent to knovs^ledge of aban-

donment.
The conditioning brought about by "controlled crying" connects
closely with one of the most influential theories of depression, Martin
Seligman's theory of "learned helplessness." Seligman argued that if a
particular response to a situation — such as crying when one Is hun-

gry—is met with no relief, or if it is not possible to correlate the rehef
that comes with the experience of any internal physical or psycholog-
ical state, the person begins to feel detached from reality and power-
less to affect it. The depressive effects of this early experience of
powêrlessness can, hovvêver, be mitigated by arranging one's life
around predictable events. By having a rigid routine and being able

to predict v^hat will follow^, the person is able to compensate for their
primal distrust of the world.
With this in mind, we can look again at the megalithic monu-
ments, of ^vhich Alison Sheridan, an archaeologist at the National
Museum of Scotland, has said, "The message may have been 'We can
control time and the seasons. We can compel the sun to appear in the
same place.' "

Sheridan sees this control as important for a farming
society, dependent on the procession of the seasons. But the basic or-
ganization of the agrarian calendar does not need the grand architec-
ture of Stonehenge. I believe that British Neolithic society was in
some way soothed by the massively overstated predictive poAver of

the monuments. They were therapeutic. As Samuel Johnson so per-
cipiently put it, faced ^vith the Great Pyramid of Cheops, "I consider
this mighty structure as a monument of the insufficiency of human
enjoyments."
Never Mind the Quality
All these predictive monuments, be they passage graves, standing

stones, stone circles, or long or round mounds, have a form that is
at times suggestive of a "landscape of detached sexual objects," yet
their size may have been closely related to an agricultural ethos of
"bigger is better." In contrast to foraging societies, in which peo-
ple's main concern was the and gathering of almost
identification
infinitely varied resources, agricultural society depends on the

maximization of only a few resources. The basic idea is to generate
a surplus. Quantity thus supplants quality — in food, in labor, in
children, in sex. The big monuments of the Neolithic seem to pro-

192 The Pre h LJ to ry of Sex
ject ideas of big penis power and big ^vomb power onto a depleted
natural environment.
Of course, these ideas ^vere probably not starkly conscious. The
Neolithic communities must have believed in a male force flowing
from the sun god and a female one embedded in earth, and the com-
plexity of their myriad local nuances must forever elude us. As histo-
rian of religion Jane Harrison wrote in 1921:
Man has made himself representations of beings stronger

and more splendid than himself, he has lost all sense that
they are really projections of his own desire and to these
beings he hands over his conflict, he no longer needs to

banish conflict into the unconscious but gods will see to it
and fight on his side.
The basic dyad of a bountiful yet passive Mother Nature, and a

virile, potentially vengeful, bearded man ruling the heavens, is an
idea that took firm root in Eurasia during the Neolithic. Incorporated
into grand systems of religious thought, its influence can still at times
be strong. Christian belief and symbolism incorporate much of it. The

£Am2001: A Space Odyjdey projected "god" as an inscrutable but clearly
phallic megalith that makes its appearance on various planets and
moons— where the passive, spherical female ova aAvaited its creative
touch. Most profoundly, the idea of a basic dichotomy in the world,
of a struggle between man (in the deliberately sex-specific sense) and
nature, is what lies behind our continuing lunatic progress tovârd
ever deeper ecological disaster.
Cnapter 8
Onaman
nd jl\ mazons
'You're born naked and the redt i^ drag.
RuPaul Andre Charles
D, ismissed by its critics as fanciful nonsense, Herodotus s H'utory,
the life^vork of a fifth-century B.C. Greek from a polyglot town in
Asia Minor, is the earliest and still one of the most remarkable ac-
counts of human diversity. Ostensibly the story of ho^v the small yet
democratic Greek states beat the might of authoritarian Persia, it is in
reality a vehicle for talking about the history of all of the peoples of
the world, as far as Herodotus had been able to know them through
his extensive travels. His brand of history Avas not narrowly political.
Amazons and eunuchs, transvestite shamans and cannibals, were-

^volves and griffins — all are included in his melange of firsthand ob-
servation, merchants' tales, and carefully recorded myths. All are
astutely assessed for their value in understanding different social cus-

toms, religious beliefs, and sexual mores. Today archaeology^ is in a
position to corroborate much of what Herodotus believed.

One of the best known of the ancient myths concerns the

Amazons. According to Herodotus's account, the Amazons ^vere a
race of \varrior ^vomen, enemies of the Greeks, who hved in the
steppelands of what is no^v Ukraine and southern Russia — lands

knoAvn in Herodotus' time as Scythia (to the west of the Don River)
and Sauromatia (later called Sartnatla, to the east of the Don). This
nryth has exerted a powerful hold over the male psyche. In the nine-
teenth century it influenced Johann Jacob Bachofen ^vhen he for-
mulated his idea of the politics oi Mutterrecht or matriarchy. Equally,
the myth has been dismissed as nonsense, notably by Bachofen's

detractors.
In this chapter I argue that social gender increased in impor-
tance from the end of the Neolithic onward, Avith the growth of
political complexity in Europe. The development of more intensive
plov^^ agriculture, the increasing use of metals, and the growth of
trade in the Bronze and Iron Ages allowed individuals to become
rich. Their insignia of rank, stressed in elaborate and ostentatious
personal burial monuments, used an insignia of sex —^the elabora-
tion of codes of dress for men and v^ômen — for credibility. If peo-
ple accepted that men and women naturally dressed differently,
then the naturalness of other divisions, such as bet^veen rich and
poor, that are actually supported by no biological reality, wâs more
believable.
But the insignia of sex was actually an insignia of gender. From
the earliest establishment of a system of "men's" and "women's" buri-
als, a significant minority of biological women and men were buried
wîth opposite grave furnishings — women cross-dressed as men, and
men cross-dressed as women. Culture began to co-opt biology in the
Iron Age with new physical categories, such as eu-
the creation of
nuchs, and the use of the earliest known hormone treatments to femi-
nize biological men. Sexual diversity and sexual kno^vledge
blossomed vv^hen the Celts adopted techniques derived from oriental
Tantric yoga. But for the spread of Christianity, at precisely this time,
the sexual culture of Europe might have developed along very differ-
ent lines.
Shamans and Amazons 195
Burled Gender
In the Neolithic long barrows, differentiation by sex was not particu-

larly clear or consistent. Occasionally we find spatial separations be-
tween male and female skeletons, as in the Cotswold-Severn-type
tomb at Lanhill, \vhere females predominate in the south chamber
and males in the north. Gender categories for the dead
became more
marked in the succeeding Beaker period (2600-1800 B.C.), when
metal was coming into use in northern and western Europe for the
first time. The so-called Beaker people Avere usually buried singly, ac-
companied by a bell-shaped pottery beaker; the female skeletons

were buried facing south or southwest, the males facing north or
northeast. The most likely reason for this distinction is that the dead
in Beaker society Avere considered to rise and move off in different di-
rections according to sex, implying a sex-segregated heaven.
In Britain and on the Continent, male graves typically include a
little copper dagger, w^hich — along with "spacer plates" that may have
functioned as archery wrist-guards — expressed some notion of man-
hood. Men got the richest grave goods and were buried alone, under
round barroAvs. Such barrow^s dot the environs of the earlier mega-
lithic monuments and seem to have supplanted them, at the same
time dra^ving on their physical authority as statements in the land-
scape. The association of men with daggers, however, is not consis-
tent. In cemeteries near Brno in Moravia, some biologically female
graves have also been found with copper daggers, suggesting that as
soon as a standardized sex-gender burial practice was established, it
was subverted by those who did not fit into it easily.
The advent of metal provided a new focus for sexual divisions of
labor and the creation of ideas of gender. Metal was associated with
the male principle at this time, an association that correlates with the
disappearance of megalithic monuments and remains fairly constant
thereafter. The new phallic symbols were daggers and swords. Again,
the distinction between sex and gender must be fully appreciated. As

Andrew Reid and Rachel MacLean note in a recent anthropological
study of iron production in Igurwa, in the old Karagwe kingdom in
present-day Uganda:
Frequently, the presence of ^vo^len, and more importantly

the presence of female fertility, is regarded as threatening
to the act of smelting and is therefore prohibited , . . [but]
it is not "women qiia women" who pose the danger, as chil-

dren and postmenopausal vvômen may not be excluded; it is
rather the dangerous, ambiguous, and therefore uncontrol-
lable, po^ver of a ^voman's fertility. This poAver could dam-
age the embryonic iron and therefore, to prevent failure,
not only are women excluded from the smelt itself, but
smelters are frequently prohibited from engaging in sexual
intercourse before and during the smelt.
As more and more of Eurasia ^vas brought under the plow^, the
new metal technology developed further, with soft copper alloys giv-
ing ^vay to tin-bronze, and then iron. Mining became wîdespread. In
the southern regions urban centers sprang up, and networks of trade
and exchange spread out, dealing in amber, colored glass, and even-
tually slaves. As Eurasia became more densely populated, society be-
came more ethnically mixed. Functionally specialized groups
emerged that could survive only Avithin the framewôrk of the broader
economy. The elite horse-riding Scythians of the steppelands, for ex-
ample, Avere at the apex of an economic system that extended across
the Avhole of the Old World, linking Europe to China and India.
Within this system Avere local patterns of subsistence — sedentary
agriculture, seasonal pastoralism, and fully nomadic pastoralism;
there Avere traders and professional soldiers, engineers and pirates,
nobility and slaves.
Previously — in the longhouses of the Neolithic, for example —

people's place in society had been governed by birth, which funda-
mentally established their identity in the eyes of their family and
tribe. But the specialization and nonautonomy of many Bronze and
Iron Age groups meant that they had to enhance their images in or-
der to be recognizable in the croAvd. They accomplished this by using

marks of allegiance — tokens of ethnicity. One of the freeze-preserved
Scythian-culture bodies at Pazyryk in the Siberian Altai is heavily
tattooed in the "animal style" art so typical of the steppes. The tattoos
served to identify him anywhere in the world, in life or in death.
Along with the Celts, Thracians, Persians, Greeks, and others, the
Scythians also adorned themselves with fine decorated metal work. In
the preceding tribal-agricultural period, a village could express Its
personality through the nuances of its pottery designs, but the elite
arts of theBronze and Iron Ages were portable and unbreakable; the
objects were to be worn on the body, and to move with it.
Buried Wlve^
Particular Bronze and Iron Age communities at times displayed rela-
tive equality between the sexes, and women could even become lead-
ers within some — as did Boudicca (or Boadicea), queen of the East
Anglian Iceni tribe, who in A.D. 60 led a revolt against the Roman oc-
cupation. But men and wômen more often had unequal access to
wealth. As a rule, ^vomen were economically disadvantaged, which is
often reflected by their position in burial. Herodotus says that when a

Thracian chief died, his wives would vie -with one another to be ad-
judged the favorite; Avhoever was chosen had the honor of being put
to death by the graveside and passing into the other world with him.
The wives ^vho were not chosen were publicly shamed. Archaeologi-
cal evidence that is at least congruent ^vith this story comes from a
grave at Vratsa in Bulgaria, excavated by Bogdan Nikolov in 1965.
Around 350 B.C. a mature male was buried, and next to him a female
wîth a dagger in her ribs. Whether she was a ^villing participant is be-
yond archaeological method to determine.
Single female skeletons often occur next to those of wealthy men

in the richer barrows of Thrace and Scythia. This seems to contradict
Herodotus s very clear statement that Scythian nobles might make a

number of diplomatic marriages. It may be that although polygyny
was practiced, a man's wives were ranked. Behind the polygamous fa-
cade might lie complexity, with concubines, diplomatic-exchange
wives, and a lineage wife — the principal lady and mother of the legiti-
mate heirs. Scythian kings certainly seem to have kept their options
198 The Pre hid tony of Sex
open, as inheritance passed through the male line ^ but by the un-
usual practice of ultimogeniture, or everything going to the last-born.
Ultimogeniture may have been a mechanism that attempted to ensure
the allegiance of one's older and more experienced sons, who could
not hope to inherit, while keeping everybody guessing as to the iden-
tity of the true heir (the king could continue to have children as long
as he lived).
The jewêlry and ornamentation that people wore or carried with
them often bore portrayals of activities — parts of stories, perhaps —
from the lives of gods or heroes. A set of beautiful fourth-century-B.C.
silver-gilt horse harness decorations, found at Letnitsa in north-
central Bulgaria, seem to shovv^ various scenes from a narrative. Both
men and ^vomen are depicted, as well as what appears to be an am-
biguous or intersex figure. Perhaps the most striking of the Letnitsa
plaques displays a scene that is most usually described as a hlerogamy
or sacred marriage (Figure 8.1). The explicit sexuality of this scene
seems to have blinded scholars to ^vhat is really going on, as it is not a

sexual marriage betvcêen equals, whether humans or gods, at all.
Rather, it seems clear that the man is being seduced, even raped.
The biological sexes of the figures are indicated clearly enough.
The male is seated, wearing a mail coat and trousers, his head tied in
a topknot; his erect penis projects from his clothing, and his testicles
are also clearly on vicAv. He is being straddled from above by a fe-
male, Avhose clearly dra^vn vulva, surrounded by pubic hair, envelops

his penis. One of her feet appears to the bottom right, beneath and
behind the man. (It could easily be mistaken for a little cushion.) Al-
though she is also clothed, her femininity is emphasized by the circu-
lar depiction of breasts on the front of her dress— possibly the
depiction is intended to be realistic, with her breasts actually poking
through holes in the garment, but more likely it is an artistic conven-
tion. My interpretation of this scene as a male seduction or rape is
not based on the female-superior position depicted here; it was, after

all, one of the most commonly used positions in the Hindu, Chinese,
and Egyptian civilizations, as well as among communities ^vorld^vide
up until the arrival of English and American missionaries with their
o^vn peculiar ideas of sexual propriety.

(Fig. 8.1) TheLetnits
"seduction. "
Bridle
decoration, Letnitsa,
Bulgaria. Photograph:
National Historical
Museum, Sofia.
Rather, my interpretation is based on the presence of the sec-

ond woman, ^vho stands to the left of the couple. This "attendant"
holds two objects. In her right hand she carries a vessel, presumably
containing some beverage, alcoholic or otherwise; in her left she
holds a leafy branch, Avhich arches over the couple and obscures the
man's vision. The artist has positioned this branch very carefully, to
show that the man cannot see who is having sex with him. His semi-
clothed, seated position, coupled with the mysterious drink, suggest
that he was drugged. We may never kno^v precisely w^hat story lies
behind this picture. It could just be a metaphorical depiction of the

blindness of love, but it seems much more physical and conspiratori-
al than that. If its central motif is in fact forced sex, the piece would
be virtually unique, in that the seducer and her helper are female.
Whether this plaque depicts a myth, a real event, or something
imagined by the silversmith we do not know. It seems either to
embody a male fear of being overpowered by women, or a female

fantasy of control and domination.
Amazon Power
Other fears about the power of women surface in the legend of the
ferocious Amazons. Its resonances have gone wide and deep, so that
—
200 The P reh id to ry of Sex
^vhen sixteenth-century Portuguese explorers found fighting ^vomen

in a region of the BraziUan rainforest, they named the region and its
principal river accordingly^ — the Amazon. The precise meaning of the

\vord Amazon is unclear, but one possibility is that it means 'without a
breast" a-mazod in ancient Greek. According to the legend, Ama-
zons only had one breast. Hippocrates discussed the Amazons at
some length, saying that mothers cauterized their daughters' left
breast region before puberty so that it ^vould not later develop. The
purpose vvâs to facilitate shooting from the bow, during Avhich the
breast might get in the ^vay. Although this idea seems far-fetched,
^vomen archers today do use a leather restraint to keep their breast
clear of the bowstring — but in this case the right breast. If Amazon
^vomen once existed, w^hy Avould they have wished to remove the left
breast? One answer is that it vvôuld have been difficult to wear a

chest restraint w^hile riding. The steppe nomads rode small, agile, fast
horses, and they had to combine strength with suppleness to control
them. In modern archery the reason the right breast is restrained is
that the longbow draw goes back to the right-hand side of the body.
With a short, composite reflex bow fired from horseback, however,

the draw is short and across the body. The left nipple is in the firing
line, and the firing line would not have been a good place to be, ^vhen
one considers the po^ver of these bo^vs: they could fire armor-
piercing arroAvs with a speed approaching that of a crossbow bolt.
Another possible explanation of the one-breasted story is that it
is symbolic, representing women ^vho ^vere half men. Some of the

hermaphroditic deities of India are depicted with one side of the body
female, with a voluptuous breast, and the other side male and flat. It
is also possible that both things are true: that it was a real practice
^vith symbolic overtones. According to Hippocrates, Amazon Avomen

fought until they had killed and scalped three of the enemy, at vv^hich
point they Avere free to marry and have children (for whom they
would need their remaining breast). Subsequently they had no need
'
to ride "unless compelled to do so by a general expedition.

Herodotus says something similar and gives us the indigenous name
for these women: Oiorpata, which meant "slayers of men."
Herodotus records a tale about the Amazons that purports to

explain the origin of the strange half-Scythian language spoken to the

east of the Don River in Sauromatia. A band of young male Scythi-
ans skirmished with an alien band, the story goes. When they
stripped the dead of their armor, they discovered that they were in
fact women— the Amazons. They decided not to fight the Amazons
anymore but instead to court them, figuring that the offspring of their
matings would be noble and ferocious warriors. The Scythian lads

pitched their camp opposite the Amazon camp and waited until about
noon, ^vhen the wômen would come out in pairs to urinate. Two of
the Scythians crept up on a pair of Amazon women and, being re-
ceived by them, had sex with them. Although neither could speak the
other's language, they resolve to return the next day, each bringing
another friend. So it went, until the two camps were lustily amalga-
mated. The Scythians could not learn the Amazons' language, but the
Amazons sho\ved rather greater ability in learning, albeit imperfectly,
the Scythian tongue. The Scjrthians then suggested that the Amazons
return home with them to their parents' dominions to be their wives.
But the Amazons retorted, "We cannot live with your women. For we
and they have not the same customs. We shoot the bow and the
"
javelin and ride horses but, for 'women's tasks' ^ve know them not.
The Scythians settled with the Amazons in what was Sauromatia,
and because the Amazons never quite mastered the Scythian lan-
guage, Sarmatian arose as a dialect variant. Herodotus 's mythical ac-

count indicates that the area to the east of the Don River, known in
classical times as Sauromatia, ^vould be the place for archaeologists to

women.
look for traces of these warrior
Burials of warrior ^vomen first came to notice in the mid-
nineteenth century, ^vhen some graves in the Caucasus Mountains on
the Terek River were opened. One grave contained a skeleton of
strongly female type, buried with armor, a sheaf of arrows, a slate dis-
cus, and an iron knife. A series of graves from a nearby site at Aul
Stepan Zminda contained many female warriors and their mounts,
although they were dated later than the Scythian period. Modern ex-
cavations around the royal barrow of Chertomlyk in Ukraine lound

that four out of fifty warrior graves were of this "Amazon" t\^pe: one
of them was buried with an arrowhead embedded in her back, an-
202 The Prehit^tory of Sex
(Fig. 8.2) Burial of an "Amazon." Mound No. 20
at Cholodnyi Yar, Ukraine. The principal burial
appears biologically female, with a young male at her
feet. Source: Bobrinskoi 1887-1901 in Rolle 1989.
other had a massive iron shield, and a third had a small child. This
last burial suggests a slight variation on the accounts given by
Herodotus and Hippocrates.
Around forty female warrior burials are currently knov^n in the
Scythian region, while in Sauromatia around 20 percent of all the
Iron Age vârrior burials are said to be female. Striking though this
percentage is, it is likely to be an underestimate. The skeletons have

been sexed through comparison ^vith modern populations, yet they
are likely to display a higher frequency of traits designated "mascu-
line." That the Amazons were, according to Hippocrates, able to reg-
ulate their reproductive lives may indicate that they used oral fertility
controls (such as Artemuiu and Ferula, effective agents that grew in
the region) But . it is also possible that they were amenorrheic due to
the extremely physical nature of their training. Like some female ath-
letes today, they may have traded their body fat for muscle to the
point vv^here they Avere not fertile. Whether or not this vâs so, the
Amazons likely retained narrovv^ malelike pelvises later into life than
vvôuld normally be the case. Not only is this hormonal factor likely to
hinder the archaeological identification of their skeletons, but short-

term sexual selection pressures may have endowed such women with
physiques that ^vere genetically more "masculine."
The Amazon rule that only women who had killed three of the
enemy could start a family would mean, if strictly adhered to, that
only those women
with the greatest military prowess would pass
on their genes. Under such conditions any woman with a masculin-
izing hormone imbalance, such as adreno-genital syndrome, would
actually be at a reproductive advantage. Rather than being ostra-
cized for excessive masculinity, she could take her pick from
among the best suitors. This notion is of course hypothetical, but
the underlying point is that a radically different set of physical
were valued in Scythian women as opposed to ice age
qualities
women. The Amazon burials occur alongside more "feminine"
female burials in Scythia, demonstrating that it was not obligatory
to serve as a warrior woman.
The story of the Amazons is deep in the popular psyche. For
many ^vomen today, the myth conjures up images of greater empower-
ment. Yet from a sociological point of view^, the existence of such
^vomen in the Iron Age steppelands is thought to be anomalous. Engels
argued that pastoral nomadism marked a new stage in the oppression
of women by men, and many Marxist-inspired sociologists followed in
this approach. Maria Mies writes, for example, "It is most probably
correct to say that the martial pastoral nomads were the fathers of all
dominance relations, particularly that of men over women." Could the
Amazons have emerged because of this dominance?
More modern ethnography provides many examples of females
cross-dressing and adopting male roles. Walter Williams has recent-
ly surveyed them in The Spirit and the Fledh: Sexual Diverdity in
American Indian Culture. The Amazonian Amazons were described

thus by Pedro de Magalhaes de Gandovo in 1576: "They wear their
hair cut in the same way as the men, and go to war with bows and
arrows and pursue game, always in company with men; each has a
woman to serve her, to whom she says she is married, and they treat
each other and speak with each other as man and wife." These
Amazons maintained what Williams calls a heterogender relationship,

despite their biological homosexuality; wives did not consider them-
selves lesbian. If the marriage terminated, they could marr)^ a bio-
logical man without any trouble. This is a common pattern in North
America, but it differed in Scythia, at least as far as the Greeks

understood it.
Among several of the Alaskan peoples, such as the Kaska and

the Ingalik, having a son Avas extremely important, as the family's
survival depended on big game, the hunting of Avhich was a male gen-
der pursuit. Thus a family that had only daughters ^vould select one
of them — usually around the age of five — to "be like a man"; such
^vomen-men often became outstanding hunters. Among the Ingalik
they would participate in the men-only s^veat baths, where their bio-
logical sex would apparently be ignored.
Economic factors may have been important in Scythia too,
especially economic factors introduced by outsiders that caused

deep changes in Scythian society. Such a phenomenon, too, has a
historical analogy. In sixteenth-century Canada the arrival of
European fur traders sharply tilted the existing po^ver balance
between native men and wômen. Before European contact, a fairly
sex-egalitarian society had existed, like that proposed in Chapter 6

for Mesolithic Europe. To be sure, there Avas a gender division of
labor, where most Avomen did food-gathering, weaving, and so on,
while most men hunted. Some men and Avomen did each other's
Avork, often cross-dressing in the process, but only on an individual,
personality- trait basis. Either sphere could provide a path to wealth
and a position as a revered elder. When the Europeans arrived, they
were interested only in furs, for which they traded guns and blan-
kets. In the process they made the native hunters — the vast majority
of whom Avere men — much richer than the Avomen. In the face of
marked gender inequality, biological women increasingly adopted
male gender roles as they vied to maintain their personal status —îf
not that of their gender. The pattern for Scythia may have been
somcAvhat similar.
The reason Herodotus and Hippocrates knew so much about

Scythia was that the Greeks had set up trading colonies along the
coasts of the Black Sea. Through these colonies flowed grain and
slaves for Athens and other city-states. It ^vas against this back-
ground that, between 700 and 350 B.C., the nomadic martial elites of
the steppes rose to po\ver. Their game was slaving and extortion, and
their rewards were some of the finest artworks of gold and silver that
Greek craftspeople ever made. Herodotus mentions that the Isse-
dones, one of the tribes that lived farthest from the Black Sea, proba-
bly somewhere around the Ural Mountains, had a society where
women and men exercised equal political power; closer to the
colonies such was not the case, and it is clear archaeologically that
here the richest and most elaborate burials of all are those of men.
The real Amazons behind the mj^h, the heavily armed women
of Chertomlyk, may well have been a group of women in the higher
echelons of steppe society who took their chances to go on raids and

trade slaves with the Greeks for some financial reward. Female par-
ticipation in lucrative raiding may have hardened into a system of
military obligation, as Hippocrates implies. That women might have
been drafted during this period is supported by reports from discov-
eries at the other end of the steppe, in China, where a female army of
life-size terra-cotta figures is said to have been excavated.
The rise of farming societies and, subsequently, urban states has
aWays tended to produce an economically disadvantaged position for
women. The reasons are complex but have something to do wîth the
fact that child-rearing is hardly ever recognized as a job in market
economic terms. If resources are allocated on the basis of market pro-
duction, and the production of children is omitted from the category
of gainful work, then wômen who have children will not have the
same opportunities to earn social credit (money). Under such condi-
tions, as women's perceived economic importance diminishes, female
sexuality typically becomes a commodity, with all that this implies for
the experience of sexuality in general.
Sex Slavery and Recreation
By the Iron Age, there is increasing evidence in Europe for female

sex professionals, as well as sexual slavery. Perhaps the best archaeo-
logical guides to the incidence of prostitution are the so-called brothel
tokens of ancient Rome. These little coinlike objects have long been
improperly understood, and the sexual imagery that appears on them

'^^"^1.^:^
it ^^ "4i'"vv.
L -''
.. - \*'v>'/' (Fiff. 8.3) Roman brothel tokens. Three
•
\ .„
''\, i '
I
'
'
' "!' examples, showmg obverse and reverse.
Drawings by George Taylor from images

"^t.s^
supplied by Aleksander Bursche.
has consigned all too many of them to the locked basements of muse-
ums. Each brothel token has a sex scene on one side and a number on
the other, an arrangement that puzzled experts until recently, as there
appeared to be no obvious relationship between the two sides. But
Aleksander Bursche of the University of Warsa\v, a coin specialist,
has recently been able to order the tokens into a chronological se-
quence from the early to late Roman periods, on the basis of minor
stylistic changes.
The Roman era as a whole vvâs inflationary, a fact that allows
Bursche to show two things. First, the later tokens had higher values;
and second and more important, the particular positions depicted on
the tokens of each period — early,
^
middle, and late — accord wîth the
tokens' relative values. To the untrained eye, it might be difficult to
see ^vhy fellatio should be cheaper than vaginal intercourse from the
rear, but Bursche was able to confirm his hunch that a systematic re-
lationship indeed existed by conducting a blind test on present-day

Warsaw prostitutes. He asked them which positions and acts they
charge more for. Their scale accorded precisely with the Roman
scale. For prostitutes who see a lot of clients, one of the greatest haz-
ards is vaginal soreness; thus deep penetrating positions, such as sex

from behind, are more painful and therefore cost more.
The brothel tokens also have broader sociological importance.
Found all over Europe, wherever the Roman army went, they repre-
sent an institutionalized form of professional sex that crossed all lan-
guage barriers. A mercenary from Libya or Dacia could decide what

he wanted and obtain it from a Caledonian prostitute during his tour
of duty on Hadrian's Wall. She, on the other hand, knew precisely

what the man had paid for. The tokens imply an established sex in-
dustry that did everything from design and manufacture the tokens
themselves to maintaining brothel premises. Although the wômen
must have been able to keep a tally of the remunerative value of their
^vork, they did not have control over the finances. The people \vho
ran the brothels received the money. It may be that the women never
received any money at all and were slaves. Or they may have done
the job in return for protection and a roof over their head in a war-
torn and increasingly lawless society.
The prostitutes in a given place wêre not necessarily of local ori-
gin. Herodotus, writing of the Thracians in the fifth century B.C., says
that they sold their daughters into slavery in Greece; the most attrac-
tive or skilled women may well have been traded elseAvhere. Careful
analysis of skeletal pitting can now prove that sj^hilis was present in
Roman Europe; it must have been spread in part through the brothel
network, although its incidence seems to have stayed fairly low.
The brothel tokens provide unambiguous evidence for the exis-
tence of an established repertoire of "sexual positions. "

How this
repertoire emerged, and when, is presently unclear. Unusual depic-

tions of sex occur in earlier Iron Age Europe, notably on the great
bronze wine-drinking buckets or dituLie of Etruscan culture in north-

ern Italy and the southeast Alpine Hallstatt culture. The pictures
document many items of everyday use that do not normally surxne in
the archaeological record. Beds and mattresses, for example, are
shown in wonderful undulating movement beneath a pair of explicitly

depicted heterosexual lovers. This Iron Age ditula art provides some
of the first direct evidence we have for sex on beds in prehistoric Eu-
rope, although beds are likely to have been used since much earlier
times. One princely burial from Hochdorf in Germany, dating to the
same period as the ditula (the fifth century B.C.), contained a splen-
didly ornate bed, presumably supplied for pleasure as well as rest in
the afterlife.
Nor was sex confined to the bedroom in the ditula depictions.
Scenes of apparently simple merriment — wîth people drinking and

feasting, while trials of personal strength go on around them — often
have a sexual edge as vêll. One type of scene occurs again and again
on the dituLae. Two men are involved in some form of competition
with each other; the prize, a ditula of wine, usually stands on a jar-
diniere placed between them. Their competition may be physical —
sometimes they strip down and do something that involves holding
up dumbbells, their erect penises defiantly facing each other across
the tournament floor. Or the competition may be cerebral, as when
they sit at either end of a chaise longue, ^vith musical instruments,
trying to outdo each other's virtuosity.
The most extraordinary scene of this type involves sex. It
occurs on a short piece of beaten-bronze belt plate. Although it is
unfortunately fragmentary, the image can nevertheless be recon-
m.
Jatf*if?^?fM -^^
(Fig. 8.4) The missionary

position; Sanzeno. Scene from
a bronze jituUi, Italy. Drawing

by George Taylor after
iv Kastelic 1965.
(Fig. 8.5) A competitive sex game, Brezje. A fragmentary bronze belt plate from Brezje, Slovenia.
Decorated in the "Situla Style." Author's reconstruction, drawn by George Taylor.
structed with confidence, due to the formulaic nature of such scenes.

Given the prudery that has often hidden or destroyed such archaeo-
logical evidence, we are perhaps lucky that this piece survives at all;
its fragmentary state may well have resulted from an attempt to

destroy it at some time. In the fragment, a couple are having inter-
course; the vvôman is perched on a stool with her legs high, to facili-
tate the man's entry, and she is ^vearing a heavy head scarf. The man
is looking aAvay from her, back over the prize stand, where the
amphora of wine is clearly in vievv^. Here the scene ends, but it is vir-
tually certain that it was replicated on the other side of the stand,
wîth the other man looking back over his shoulder too. Clearly a
sexual competition of some kind is depicted, apparently primarily
between the men. But what wêre the rules? Are they trying to stare
each other out? Or is it a case of seeing who can last longer, or suc-
ceed in defloration more quickly, or perhaps simply ejaculate first?
Is the woman, along with her lost counterpart, a prostitute, or is she

the wife of the man, or does her rather demure headcovering indi-
cate that shewas a virgin?

What does seem clear is that this competition did not locus on
the woman's desire or pleasure. The man is more interested in his
sporting rival than in his partner. Her blank expression carries no
"
hint of mounting orgasm but implies that she is an ahenated vessel for
his temporary use. Certainly the bronzesmith felt no need to hint at
pleasure, or indeed any other explicit emotion, when her features

were traced.
Tran^veîtite Shaman^)
Not all Age men ^vere rampaging macho boors. Although the
Iron
Scythian nomads of the Black Sea steppes were one of the most fero-
cious military forces of the period, they were also, according to Hip-
pocrates, "the most impotent of men," especially the warrior elite.
Not only did they spend "most of their time on their horses, so that
they do not handle the parts but, ovîng to cold and fatigue forget
about sexual passion"; they also wore pants, and the "constant jolting
of their horses" made them unfit for intercourse. Hippocrates con-
cluded that "the great majority among the Scythians become impo-
tent, do women's vvôrk, Kve like women and converse accordingly . . .
they put on women's clothes, holding that they have lost their man-
hood." That is, they wêre transvestites. Herodotus says that they suf-
fered from the "female sickness."
Was there any reality behind this description? From what we
know about Hippocrates, it seems unlikely that he would make up
factual evidence, although his explanation of underlying processes
might not be acceptable in modern terms. The idea that the constant
jolting of horses can make men unfit for intercourse mirrors a vvêll-
kno^vn modern complaint. In Australia it is known as "geographer's

balls," brought on by the bumping of Land- Rovers across the out-
back. It is also documented among avid cyclists. Damage to the testes
caused in this way can be lasting. First blood appears in the semen,
and later the ejaculatory and erectile functions are lost. The appear-^
ance of blood may provide a clue to the mysterious "female sickness,
but there are other possibilities as well. Spending too long in the sad-
dle is not just bad for the genitalia, it is also affects the anus. The
English surgeon John Arderne pioneered operations on knights re-
turning from the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453) to cure them of
anal fistulae — holes that appear in the anal and rectal wall as a result
of poor blood circulation and partial atrophy in some muscles during
many years in the saddle. Scythian military adventures were of simi-
lar long duration to the Hundred Years' War campaigns. Herodotus
records one campaign that lasted twenty-eight years.
Hippocrates s reference to the problems of pants-wearing also
makes sense in the light of modern medical knowledge. In primates
the testes are on the outside of the body, so that sperm develop at a
lower temperature. Sperm that can survive at a couple of degrees be-
low core body temperature may have a better chance of hanging on
for an extended period in the vagina. In any case sperm do not de-
velop properly at core body temperature levels — levels that can be

artificially produced by wearing tight-fitting pants. The Scythians'
style of life could have caused them to suffer from a variety of ail-
ments around the genital region, some of which could have produced
symptoms that were recorded as a "female sickness."
Herodotus, for his part, described the transvestites among the
Scythians as "androgynous" and said that they were known as Ena-
rees. Because the Scythians spoke an Iranian language, one of the
constituent languages of the Indo-European group, their words can
be connected wîth related words in other Indo-European languages.
The Sanskrit word nana means "man," so that a-nara or e-nara could
mean "vîthout manhood." Herodotus wrote that the priestess of the
temple of Ascalon had smitten the Enarees with the sickness and that
they thereafter became diviners or prophets. They carried out divina-
tions for kings and other leaders in some fashion that involved braid-
ing and unbraiding strips of lime bark. Their position was at once
elevated and vulnerable: their pronouncements were revered, but if
they turned out to be incorrect, they were put to death.

In the light of the general correspondences between Herodotus s
other descriptions of Sc3rthia and the archaeological evidence, we

should be inclined to trust him on the transvestite soothsayers, the
Enarees. There is a great deal of evidence from around the world for
people similar to the Enarees as Herodotus describes them. In North
America the general term berdache is used for males who dress as fe-
males. Like the Amazonian Amazons, they may be involved in long-

lasting relationships that are culturally heterogender but biologically
homosexual. The men who take up with such partners are considered
no different from other married men. Among some Plains Indians,
berdache wêre ritually and physically created by making prepubes-
cent boys ride bareback until their testes Avere destroyed, causing
feminizing hormonal changes in their development. Rough equiva-
lents to the berdache occur or occurred in Polynesia (mahLu), India
(hljraj), Europe (ecu trad), and parts of Asia and Africa, sometimes
involving alteration or mutilation of the genital region. Trans vestite

shamanism is also well known from modern Siberia, a region that the
Scythians had great contact ^vith in their time.

According to Hippocrates, the transvestite Scythians constituted
a large part of the biologically male elite population — those Avho rode
horses and ^vere subsequently disabled by it. Herodotus, on the other
hand, implies that they had a much more specialized role as prophets
or soothsayers. Whoever the Enarees were, they cannot be simply
identified as effeminate or homosexual men. There was gender-cross-
ing but no gender-blurring in Scythia; one noble male who began to
dress in Greek fashion, in long flowing robes rather than trousers,

and to frequent taverns \vith Greek men, among w^hom homosexual
behavior was a relative commonplace, ^vas lynched by his Scythian
peers on the ground that he had become effeminate. Clearly there
wâs a crucial difference between effeminacy and "losing one's man-
hood " to become a soothsayer.
Love Potions and Gender Drugtf
Could the Enarees have made themselves look like Avomen? Scythian
men are depicted in Greek art as having great bushy beards; any gen-
der-crossers among them wôuld have had to cope Avith that — unlike
the berdache of the Americas, v^^here male beard growth is typically
Did they shave? Certainly good bronze razors
slight or nonexistent.
had been available in Europe since the middle of the preceding

Bronze Age, but they are not usually found in Scythia. A solution to
this dilemma and a clue to the true identity of the Enarees comes
from the first-century-B.C. poet Ovid, who was exiled to Tomls, a

Greek Black Sea colony on the edge of the Scythian steppe where he
wrote his famous love poems. In Amorej 1, verse 8, Ovid writes:
"She's a witch, mutters magical cantrips, can make rivers run uphill,
knows the best aphrodisiacs — when to use herbal brews or the
whirring bull-roarer, how to extract that stuff from a mare in heat."
This final, puzzling reference to horses is repeated in the poem On Fa-
cial Treatment for Ladled: "Put no faith in herbals and potions, abjure
the deadly stuff distilled by a mare in heat."
An extract of pregnant mares' urine is marketed today under

the trade name Freniarln, by Ayerst Organics, Inc., of Canada, and
is used by male-to-female transsexuals as part of their hormone
therapy. It is a rich source of complex conjugated estriols that fem-
inize the skin, suppress beard growth, and cause a degree of breast
development. Could it be that Ovid learned his witch's potions in
Tomis? Scythia had been known since the time of Homer as the
land of the mare-milkers, and strange as it may seem, it is not at all
unusual for pastoralist people to drink the urine of their animals.

Indeed, camels' urine is a national drink of Mongolia today. This
practice might have given the warlike Scythians distinct tactical
advantages at times: if you are unsure whether the water sources
ahead of you have been poisoned or polluted by your enemy, it
may be a sensible measure to "filter" it first through your horses.

All in all, it seems most unlikely that the Scythians would not have
kno^vn w^hat effect pregnant mares' urine could have on male phys-
ical development.
Ovid also refers to more dramatic physical modifications. In
Amored 2, verse 3, he writes: "Bad luck that your mistress should
have a keeper who is neither male nor female, who can't enjoy true
sex! The man who was first to sever boys' genital members should
have been castrated himself." The original Greek text seems to imply
a castration involving both the penis and testicles. It sounds a little
like the creation oi hljrad in modern India — feminized boj^s with
amputated sex organs who earn a living by dancing, divination, and
prostitution.
Although Ovid's writings throw important new light on the

possible identity of the Enarees and how^ they might have managed
their female appearance, they have yet to be identified archaeologi-
cally. Some burials, such as that of a Sarmatian "priestess" from the
Sokolova barrow on the southern Bug River, dating to the time that
Ovid was ^vriting, contain such strange grave goods that they arouse
speculation that the remains of an Enaree lies within. The skeleton
in the Sokolova barro^v is described as that of a 40-to-45-year-old
woman, but the published metrical data are inconclusive. The grave
goods include rare Egyptian imports, as well as various models and
symbols — a phallus, a cowrie shell (a traditional vagina symbol),
and a sculpture of a Avoman in childbirth. In
addition, there is a unique bronze mirror —

usually a female cosmetic aid. Its handle is
made in the form of a bearded man sitting
in a lotus position, wearing a long dress,

and holding a ritual drinking vessel of
a type that accompanied the body in
death. Although little can be said
for certain without a fuller analysis
of the bones, the soft-tissue recon-
I
struction of the face is definitely
masculine. Any subsequent work
conducted in the light of the Greek
w^ritten evidence would have to take
into account the fact that the skeleton
of a biological male ^vho had drunk
pregnant mares' urine out of a ritual
container all his life might wêll be dif-
ficult to recognize as male by today's

standards.
(Fig. 8.6) The "priestess" of the Sokolova Mogila,
southern Bug region, Ukraine. Reconstruction from
Kovpanenko 1991.
Tan trie Sex in

Iron Age Denmark
An ambiguous Enaree-like person — beardless, with flowing robes,

yet also breastless — is depicted holding a mirror and standing in the
company of a three-legged serpent on one of the Letnitsa plaques
(see "Buried Wives," earlier in this chapter). Another figure, very like
the one on the Sokolova mirror handle, occurs on one of the greatest
art objects that the prehistoric world produced — the Gundestrup
cauldron — although the Gundestrup figure has no beard and is
clearly androgynous. The cauldron itself was made in the second cen-
tury B.C. in southeastern Europe, probably in what is now the Tran-
sylvanian region of Romania, and was lost on waste ground in
Jutland, Denmark, some years later. A bog grew up around it, and it
was rediscovered by peat cutters in 1891.
The cauldron is made of several silver plaques that fit together around
a great hemispherical bowl. They are decorated with fantastic scenes of
people and mythical beasts. The outward-facing plaques depict gods and
goddesses, and since the gods have beards
and the goddesses have breasts, they set up
grammar for expressing
a kind of pictorial
gender. In contrast to them there are a
number of androgynous figures. The most
striking seems at first to be sitting in a
cross-legged pose, eyes in trance, ^vearing

a stag-antlered cap and holding a neck
ring in his/her right hand. A rather phallic
ram-headed snake is in the left hand, and
the figure — often identified as the Celtic god
Cernunnos — is surrounded by animals.
The figure is of indeterminate sex, with nei-
ther breasts nor beard. What is most impor- ^^.^ g -^ Androgynous t.gure:
tant is the pose. The legs are not actually on Letnitsa. Bridle decoration, Lemitsa.
the ground but are raised up. Although it Bulgaria. Photograph: National
is hard to see it at first, the whole figure is Historical Museum, Sofia.

(Fig. 8.8) Goddess on the Gundestrup cauldron. One of the outer plates: The small figure
resting in the crook of the goddess's arm probably represents a breast-feeding infant.
Photograph courtesy of Flernming Kaul.
(Fig. 8.9) Androgynous horned figure;
Gundestrup. Detail from one of the
cauldron's inner plates. Photograph:
Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen.
(Fig. 8.10) Tantric transvestite: Mohenjo-Daro. Broken
seal impress, c. 2000 B.C . Drawing by George Taylor

after Taylor 1992.
levitated on one toe. (The ground line is clearly defined by the adjacent
stag's hooves.) The right heel is sandwiched between the left thigh and
the crotch, so as to put pressure directly on the perineum — the point
between the scrotum and anus. The figure has been depicted in one of the
advanced positions (cuianaj) of Tantric Yoga, a type of yoga that varies
from the more recent ascetic tradition in that it focuses on animal ener-
gies. Those who practice it may use both sex and drugs in order to reach
altered states of consciousness.
A closely similar image to the one on the cauldron comes from
the great city site of Mohenjo-Daro, in the Indus valley of South
Asia. It is dated to an earlier period, around 2000 B.C., and appears
on a seal stone rather than a piece of decorative metaWork. Never-
theless the type of person represented is very similar. Through com-
parisons with other images from the Indus valley civilization, it is
possible to say that the figure is dressed as a woman within the

canons of the time. Yet the figure also clearly displays testicles and an
erect penis. This man-woman wears great horns and is, like the Gun-
destrup figure, surrounded by animals. Most strikingly, the figure too
is in a Tantric cuana, this time with both heels placed against the per-
ineum. Thomas McEvilly of Rice University has investigated the
background to this figure and concluded that it marks the earliest de-
(Fig. 8.1 1) Androgynous and part-bestial
figure (sho\ving bare breasts and hairy
shoulders); Gundestrup. Photograph: the author.
piction of Tantric or sexual yoga on the Indian subcontinent. The

Tantric yogic and steppe shamanic traditions, McEvilly notes, are
closely interwoven.
The figure on the Gundestrup cauldron seems to represent a
particular type of individual, someone with intersex or ambiguous
sex qualities — a person ^vho brought together the female, male, and
animal worlds in one body. He/she seems to have a shamanic nature
and to have entered some sort of altered state of consciousness by
channeling sexual energy. A second shamanic figure is sho^vn on the
base of the cauldron, wielding a sword, vîth animal hair on the
shoulders and distinct breasts (Fig. 8.11). These figures may repre-
sent the Enarees Herodotus spoke of.
It is ironic that such a sophisticated form of sexual expression

should have reached Europe with Christianity following so closely^
on its heels. Had historical circumstances been different, the courts
of Medieval Europe might have thrilled to the erotic dances of

Indian-style courtesans, surrounded by voluptuous sexual imagery,
as on the Hindu temples of the Deccan. But things did not turn out
that way. The connection between ritual and sex went underground,
when it was not incorporated in obscure fashion into the fabric of
the Catholic Church.
Bad Sex
In both Pagan and early Christian Europe, in the centuries that fol-
lowed the fall of the Roman Empire, brutal interdictions on inappro-

priate sex can be archaeologically traced. Interpretation is hampered,
however, by a lack of properly thorough forensic reports on some of
the most important human material, such as the large number of bod-
ies preserved in the bogs of Scandinavia and parts of Britain and the
Low Countries, many with traces of violent and possibly ritualized
death. The historical data is much better and supports various specu-
lations about the archaeological evidence.
In the early medieval period King Harald Bluetooth had his un-
faithful wîfe Queen Gunnhild dro^vned in a bog. Hers was appar-
ently a standard penalty for adultery and was sometimes also applied
to the female victims of rape and incest. Such executions required no
judicial process and Avould follo\v extremely swiftly on discovery. As
semen can remain identifiable in the vagina for about ten days, the
bodies would almost certainly have contained semen at the time of
death, and owing to its chemical composition, it would stand a fair
chance of being preserved along with everything else. The Roman

author Tacitus, writing in the early second century A.D. about the
German tribes, says that "adultery in that populous nation is rare in
the extreme, and punishment is summary and left to the husband. He

shaves off his ^vife's hair, strips her in the presence of kinsmen,
thrusts her from his house and flogs her through the whole \allage."
Her ultimate punishment would probably have been like that
recorded by Tacitus for other evildoers: "drowned in mire and swamp

with a hurdle put over them." Yet when the body of an adolescent
German girl of the first century A.D. was found in a peat bog at
Windeby in Denmark, naked, shaven-headed, blindfolded, and

weighted down vîth a halter around her neck, the forensic scientists
made no attempt to identify traces of semen.
There is also some archaeological evidence for rape that casts
light on the attitudes to^vard it. The skeleton of a sixteen-year-old fe-

male —êxcavated from a sixth- or seventh- century A.D. Anglo-Saxon
cemetery at Worthy Park, Kingsworthy, in Hampshire — has lesions
on both thigh bones. The lesion on the right thigh is at the top and
wâs caused ^vhen two of the main tendons that connect to the pelvis
vêre torn away from the bone. Archaeologist Sonia HaAvkes and
pathologist Calvin Wells, writing in 1975, concluded that the "tearing
of [these] tendons, which is very uncommon in young persons of this
age, is almost invariably due to violent separation of the thighs Avhile
trying to resist this and bringing them tightly together. ... In other
wôrds, this lesion is typically the result of a brutal rape. . . . The le-
sion on the back of the left femur, just above the knee, could have
been the result of forcing her knees upAvards in order to facilitate
penetration." Although pathologists today would not draw quite such

firm conclusions about the specific causes of bone lesions, important
additional evidence supports their case.
The young wôman was buried wîthout grave goods of any
kind — a very rare circumstance and one that may be considered a
mark of some less-than-honorable status. The young woman in Grave
78 wâs buried not only without grave goods but facedoAvn, and judg-
ing by the position of her bones, she may have still been alive Avhen
the earth was shoveled in over her. These observations become rele-
vant in the light of contemporary historical evidence for attitudes to-
wârd rape victims. Wulfstan's Sermo Lap i ad Anglo j describes an

Anglo-Saxon man being made to stand by while his wife Avas raped
by a dozen Vikings. Wulfstan stressed the man's shame rather than
any concern for the ^voman. From Avhat is more generally knov^n of
Anglo-Saxon society at this time, it seems quite likely that a raped
Avoman would be put to death to expunge the dishonor that her rape
brought on the man's house.
The tradition of religious transvestism, documented for the later
IronAge communities of the steppes, seems to have continued into
Pagan Europe. Tacitus says that among a particular tribe of Ger-
Shamans AND Amazons 221
mans, the Naharvali, an ancient form of worship Is conducted In
groves, where "the presiding priest dresses hke a woman." The histo-
rian Bede, writing some six centuries later about the pagan rehgion of
the Germanic Anglo-Saxon settlers in the British Isles, is notably coy
about details, although he does let slip that the chief priest had to ride
a mare rather than a gelding (perhaps an on-the-hoof source of con-
jugated estriols?). It is interesting that in surviving folk tradition,
shamanistic or wizard powers are associated with divination using a
willow wand, as willow also is a source of conjugated estriols. Ar-
chaeologist Christopher Kniisel has recently begun to search for buri-
als of possibly transvestite priests among the records of already
excavated Anglo-Saxon graves.
In the end, Christianity may have used the transvestism of the
local pagan priesthood for its own purposes. The standard explana-
tion for modern clerical garb is that it derives from the togas of
Rome, but one has to ask precisely why this mode of dress— which is
not associated v^îth any inherently Christian values — was retained as

Christianity spread north. It may be that it neatly fitted local expecta-
tions of priests in dresses. Sexual elements in the church service per-
sisted into recent times, particularly in the sacrament of baptism. In
the later medieval period baptism was for adults; those who Avere to
be baptized would appear in church naked, to be dunked into the

font, the life-giving forces of which would be activated by shaking of
hot wax from a large white candle into the water. No clearer refer-
ence to the male and female principles could be envisaged. This basic
ritual carries us back in time to the grave of the golden penis and per-
haps beyond, to the painted caves of Lascaux.
Chivalry had been born as far back as the Iron Age. It had its
original inspiration among the horse riders of the steppes who, far
from home, pined for their loved ones. In Medieval Europe it was
transformed into the ideal of the wandering knight out to wm the
chaste, slender princess locked in her father's tower. Eventually, as in
the epic poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, love idealW became
quite removed from physicality. Sex would spoil it. The complexity' ol:
the issues raised by this separation is intimated in Malors^'s The Death
of Arthur, where the king's love for Queen Guinevere is necessarily

fe-.;
^.7.^.^
(Fig. 8.12) The Men-an-Tol, Cornwall. Photograph: Mick Sharp.
unconsummated because of his "groin "

injury. Lancelot cuckolds
Arthur and thereby confirms male fears about the promiscuity that
lies just beneath the chaste exterior of the noblest lady. Guinevere,
for her part, could easily have managed a sexual relationship without
getting pregnant. Knowledge of herbal birth control continued dow^n
to the very end of the medieval period and wsls a significant factor in
demographic stability.
Of course, all sorts of other sexual activity ^vent on. Homosexu-

ality Avas wîdespread in the monasteries, as penitentiary records
make clear, and it ^vas a common service that a youngman on his first
campaign rendered to older warriors. The segregation of men and
^vomen within the medieval castle created opportunities for discreet
lesbian liaisons of the sort that, throughout evolutionary time, prehis-

tory, and the early modern world, have left little material evidence.
The sexual imagery of the past was either reinterpreted and
kept alive, or else it Mâs reinterpreted and suppressed. At an
unknown date the ring-cut stone that had served as an entrance to
the Neolithic Men-an-Tol grave, which the shafts of the sun god
(Fig. 8.13) The Cerne Abbas Giant, Dorset.
Photograph: Bob Croxford.
once penetrated, was set up in the open between two stumpy phal-
luses and used for various folk rituals that healed through symbolic
rebirth. The great prehistoric chalk hill-figure of Cerne Abbas, who

once stood guard on the outer slope of a hill fort, wielding a club, his
penis erect in a show of virility and aggression rather than sexuality,
played host to a midsummer's-eve orgy of village lads and lasses.
Young women who were having difficulty getting pregnant would

walk up the hill to spend the night sleeping on the giant's penis. Less
affirmatively, Cernunnos, the horned god — the Celtic translation of

Indian Tantric practice and a symbol of religious transcendence
through sex — ^vas translated by Christianity into none other than
the Devil.
Sex and the Law^ of Sumptuary
As prehistory progressed toward the present, the rather varied nat-

ural bases of human sexuality seem to have become ever more stereo-
typed by culture. Before the Bronze Age, burials can be sexed onK'
by reference to biological features of the skeleton (with all the atten-
dant uncertainties), but later a firm code of grave goods emerged that
symbolized gender and masked sexual ambiguities. Gender objecti-

fied difference but at the same time overrode biology.
It can happen that a dead person is not represented bodily as the
sex that we would classify him or her as being in life. The ancient
Egyptian grave "1770" is an elaborate burial of someone who seems
skeletally to be a young female. She was buried wîth gold nipple cov-
ers (as is usual in female graves) but also with a prosthetic penis
(made of wrapped bandages; these are often provided in male
graves). After careful analysis, Egyptologist Rosalie David concluded
that the person probably drowned in the Nile and was recovered in
such a poor state that the biological sex was no longer clear. The em-
balmers hedged their bets, she believes, by providing both male and
female attributes for the journey to the other world. Another Egypt-
ian mummy was thought until very recently to be female, until X rays
shoAved that it is in fact a male who was deliberately buried as a
wôman — Avith careful bandaging to pad his/her hips and breasts. It is
important to distinguish here as elsewhere between the biological sex

by Avhich we classify a body today and the original social gender of
the person Avhen alive.
The appearance of gendered clothing is the moment Avhen a
more complex social hierarchy can begin to develop. Baby-carrying
slings, as I argued in Chapter I, Avere probably developed by hominid
females to carry their infants, but they could also have been used by
males. The context in which a thing is used gives it the potential to
become gendered — to take on, despite its inanimate nature, a sexual
identity. In reality, the division between people and things is not quite
as clear as we may imagine, Avhen it comes to sex and gender. In most
societies menstrual pads have a clear association with fertile women,
by virtue of actually containing some of their biological matter. To a
lesser extent, clothing absorbs the smells and secretions of the
wearer. It becomes "theirs," and in a society Avhere a sexual division
of labor exists, it also becomes a generically gendered item.
Specific men's and women's clothing probably emerged at the
point when clothing first was made, designed to meet a combination

of functional requirements — allowing access to breast-feeding or dif-
ferent modes of urination — and codes of mutual sexual attraction. In
-
the archaeological record, however, it took a long time before grave

goods took on a consistent association with biological sex. The reason
for the delay may be that in many small-scale prehistoric communi-
ties, over long time spans, the issue of "who you were" rested on your
individuality and your own special contribution to group life. Only
after the development of farming, as population rose, did a grosser
classification —yzvv/^ a woman or man, then an individual — come to the
forefront.
The emergence of strictly gendered clothing, of uniforms for

men and women that it was a crime to subvert (transvestism was a
grave Old Testament offense) aided the entrenchment of social in-
equality. When a king wearing acrown looks down on a shaven
headed slave, his symbolic impact and thus social power are
strengthened by the fact that all around him different grades of peo-
ple—guards, courtiers, ladies-in-waiting, scullery maids — are wear-
ing clothes that convey their different statuses. If they were wearing
anything they pleased, the king and slave would appear to be just two
more revelers at a fancy dress party.
Court clothing has the power that fancy dress lacks because it is
rule-governed. The very existence of gendered clothing lends cloth-

ing denoting other kinds of status something of the force of nature.
When vômen wear one type of clothes and men another, the clothing
is evidently different just as the biology is different; each sex wears
their "natural" clothing. This logic can be extended, by sleight-of-
hand, to justify the "natural" clothing of kings and paupers and thus
to naturalize the very existence of social hierarchy. Gender rules are
extended into sumptuary laws. It is therefore no accident that the so-

cieties where gender-crossing is most visible are those that have the
most rigorous laws about the "proper" garb of sex and class. Para-
doxically, they are the societies least tolerant of sexual ambiguitx; the
clothing id the sex. In Scythia, as we have seen, the Enarees could

dress as women and talk as women, but when one of their kings,
Scyles, blurred the boundaries by dressing in Greek robes and partic-
ipating in Dionysiac orgies, he vâs killed.

Identity can be defined in many ways. Biological sex, gender.
and social status all play their parts, as do physical type, tempera-
ment, and personal taste. How these and other aspects of a person
are projected after death is largely up to those who bury them. Ho^v
archaeologists sort out the different parameters hundreds or thou-
sands of years later is problematic. A cause celebre is the burial of the
so-called Princess of Vix, a spectacularly richly endo^ved grave of the
early fifth century B.C., discovered in 1953 near the ancient citadel of
Mont Lassois in Burgundy. Some people believe that the grave is that
of a ^vealthy woman, others that it belonged to a transvestite male
priest. The costume je^velry on the corpse is ambiguous, and so are
the bones. Although there were likely more wealthy men than ^vomen
in Iron Age Europe, some ^vomen did possess great wealth.
As the pelvis of the fragmentary Vix skeleton did not survive,
the only \vay, in the absence of DNA testing, to sex the remains is to
measure the skull. But then the skeleton's racial type becomes a cru-
cial factor. If the deceased was Nordic European, belonging to the
blond, tall, and robust physique commonly found in Denmark, then
the skull looks comfortably female. But if the "princess" belonged to
the more gracile Mediterranean stock, then "she" could easily have
been male.
Whether we like it or not, race is just as important in the defini-
tion of self as sex. It arises out of sex — out of the specific mate
choices that different people make. Yet its boundaries turn out to be
just as ambiguous as sexual boundaries.
Chapter 9
i he Iveturn of tke JOeast
witli Iwo Oacks:
Sex ana tne

Prenistory of Race
"Certainly no normal human being of modern

timed would willingly copulate with any of the
"
audtralopithecined.
John Baker,
Race
R ,ace is, at first sight, a strange subject to deal with in a

the prehistory of sex. It is
book on
also a sensitive subject, having a histor\'
checkered with claims that do not bear scrutiny. Race is where cul-
ture meets biology at a political level. Its dynamic is controlled b\'
sexual attraction and reproduction, on the one hand, and the

appalling realities of genocide on the other. Are human races ancient
in origin, marking distinctly different evolutionary paths? Or are
S4
(Fig. 9.1) Sexual anatomy of two nineteenth-century San women. (A)
The so-called "Hottentot Venus" (Cuvier 1824). (B) A woman of the

Korana tribe (Friedenthal 1910). (C) and (D): external genitalia of a San
woman (Lesueur 1800); (C) shows the long labia minora hanging down
together; (D) shows them separated. From Baker 1974, by kind permis-
sion of Oxford University Press.
they relatively recent phenomena, created as a function of the rapid

geographical and numerical expansion of anatomically modern
humans across the globe? Only the study of prehistory can provide
ans^vers.
Genitalia are among the most wonderfully varied of all human

attributes. Different lengths and shapes of clitoris, labia, penis, and
nipple are common to different peoples around the world. Such dif-
ferences fascinated Charles Dar^vin, who noted them down, along

with differences in natural hair growth in men and ^vomen, and the
variations in skin hue that Avere locally judged most beautiful. He
thought that these differences had arisen through sexual selection,
that different societies had different ideas of beauty and framed the
reproductive choices of individuals accordingly. Even less obvious
differences, Darwin believed, arose on the basis of such choices. For
example, ^vhen the Sand^vich Island maidens transferred lice to the
crews of European w^haling boats, the lice failed to live on board, in-
The Return of the Beast with Two Backs 229
dicating to Darwin some subtle difference in the constitution of the

blood of the sailors and the natives. Yet humans were, for Darwin,
clearlyone species: matings between people of markedly different ap-
pearance resulted in the birth of children as certainly as did matings
between people who looked alike.
The voyage of the Beagle brought different races together, but it
was not a unique event. Throughout time people have been on the
move, and as certainly as isolation and chance have fostered local pe-
culiarities in their makeup, people have met and merged with others
of different peculiarities. Some groups were temporarily isolated, like

the Tasmanians, cut off by rising seas. Given enough time alone, the
Tasmanians could have become a separate species, unable to inter-
breed ^vith other humans. But such a process would have required an
almost geological timescale; in reality, their isolation was rudely inter-
rupted by Europeans. Indeed, the Tasmanians soon ceased to exist as

a distinct group. Those ^vho did not intermarry died of disease or
were shot to provide specimens for Victorian museums and collec-
tors. In 1877 the last distinctive Tasmanian died — it was not a species
extinction but the genocide of a historically distinct people.
As the fossil record sho^vs, many groups of hominids emerged
only to die out. Human evolution has been part of a complex pattern
in ^vhich species seem to have divided off into various types and lived
in close proximity to one another for hundreds of thousands of years

before evolving further or becoming extinct. (See Chapter 1 and Fig-
ure 1.3.) It is an understatement to say that we do not fully under-
stand the differences between these ancient hominids, whether they
could have interbred despite the separate species and genus labels
that we have attached to their bones. The claim made by John Baker,
an Oxford zoologist, that normal moderns and australopithecines

would not have mated is untestable since australopithecines are ex-
tinct. But 1.6 million years ago, when our direct ancestors lived cheek
by jowl with several other types of hominid, opportunities must ha\ e

abounded. Did mutual sexual repugnance keep them apart, as Baker
implies? Were they genetically incompatible or mereW beha\'ioralK'
unsuited to one another?

I think that racism existed in prehistory. It was one o^ the forces
230 The Prehljtory of Sex
that poAvered the diversification of early hominids into separate

species and that uhimately forced the extinction of some groups. The
last to go were the Neanderthals, whose extinction around 26,000
years ago finally left us as the only species of upright-walking ho-
minid left on earth. But the legacy of our early prehistory lives on.
Although our genetic endo^vment shows us clearly to be one species,
^ve periodically and persistently respond to outAvardly different

groups cu {/they ^vere separate species — animals to be hunted, and
occasionally eaten.
But a different and complementary game was also played. Hy-
bridization — the crossing of distinct types — produces new forms with
ne^v qualities more quickly than does the continued evolution of ei-
ther of those two types alone. One of the most startling features of
the hominid fossil record, as archaeologists and paleontologists un-
cover it, is its variety, ^vhich consistently challenges interpretation.
Just how many separate species were there at any one time? Such is
the variation that almost no two fossils look exactly the same, giving
the impression of massive and continuous flux over several million
years. Hybrid types clearly have to be clever to stay alive, as their
numbers start low. Our emerging intelligence may have been sharp-
ened by the challenge of such physical diversity around us.
Increased population and the relative ease of global travel today

bring dramatically different kinds of people into daily contact Avith
one another on a scale that makes the total erosion of racial differ-
ences a logical possibility. If people met and reproduced at random,

then we ^vould soon become homogenized, in the state of panmixia;
but ^ve never actually do reproduce at random. The boundaries of

race, however fluid, represent differences in taste, in fashion, and in
identity that often become criteria for choosing mates.
Plato'd Two-Backed Hermaphrodites
Racial thinking dates back at least 2,500 years. When Shakespeare

used the phrase "the beast with two backs to describe the consum-
"
mated love of Desdemona and Othello, he may have been subtly

The Return of the Beast with Two Backs 23J
twisting an idea of love personified as two-indlviduals-in-one, first
found in Plato. In his dramatic debate on the nature of love, Ihc Syni-
poJLum, Plato has the comic plajAvright Aristophanes claim that origi-
nally, "each human being was a rounded whole, with double back
and flanks forming a complete circle; had four hands and an equal
it
number of legs, and two identically similar faces." Each had two sets
of sex organs. There were three different sexes: not only females and
males but hermaphrodites, who had a mixed pair of male and female
sex organs. Despite these, the original "processes of begetting and
birth had been carried out not by the physical union of the sexes, but
by emission onto the ground, as is the case with grasshoppers." These
primal humans moved with a rapid cartwheeling motion and were
proud and strong, so much so that the gods felt threatened by them.
Finally Zeus ordered Apollo to humble them by cutting them all in

half. Ever since, the individuals created by this division have at-
tempted to find their "other half" and appeared as male homosexuals,

lesbians, and heterosexuals accordingly. As Plato concludes Aristo-
phanes's speech, "The way to happiness for our race lies in fulfilling
the behests of Love, and each finding for himself the mate who prop-
erly belongs to him."
The Greek words translated as our race here can be broadly un-
derstood to mean humans in general, but Plato's dialogue implies a
narrower sense o^ race too. The "true" other half that should complete
each of our symmetries must be of the same color — as like as possible
to ourselves. Plato's Beast with Two Backs story is to explain not

only the force of homosexual and heterosexual love but the mainte-
nance of outAvard physical differences between Greeks and non-
Greeks, black-skinned Libyans, pasty-pale Scythians, and people of
different appearances who often worked as slaves in Greek house-
holds. As in the American South, much later, the easy sexual access
that owners had to those they owned must have produced man\' chil-
dren whose physical aspect publicly betrayed the asymmetrical cir-
cumstances of their conception.

When he returned from his Black Sea travels, Herodotus de-
scribed a dual-race society in Scythia, centered on a large wood-torti-
fied city (of a type now well known from archaeological exca\ ation).
The society, he made up of two ethnic groups speaking

vv^rote, v^âs
separate languages, the nomad Budini, "the true natives of the coun-
and the sedentary Geloni, who were "anciently Greeks who
try,"
moved avvây from their trading posts and settled among the Budini."
Herodotus makes clear that the Budini and Geloni were physically
distinct, the Budini "with very blue eyes and red hair," the Geloni like
them "neither in shape nor in colouring."
The physical idiosyncrasies of these two groups had been estab-
lished before they met, but while they lived together in Scythia their
distinctiveness wâs maintained (and possibly enhanced) through
their different although symbiotic vvâys of life. The Budini and
Geloni were not in competition with each other, and they had little
need for intermarriage as a diplomatic tool to keep the peace. Their

individual patterns of properly inheritance — one based on agrarian
land ownership, the other on mobile flocks and herds — meant that
marriages within each community were encouraged. Their different
physical appearances were probably important social identifiers, in-
corporated into the sense of identity, the ethnicity, of each group.
The Chosen Oned
From A.D. 1400 onward the European "voyages of discovery"

brought markedly different peoples from widely separated parts of
the globe into greater proximity with one another. While the ancient
Greeks seem to have believed that vv^hen the gods made humans, they
simply made them various, a Judeo- Christian framework wîth a sin-
gle god allowed that one people might be more "chosen" than an-
other. The theory of polygenesis, enthusiastically promoted by the
Calvinist thinker Isaac de la Peyrere in 1655, held that only the Jew^s
had descended from Adam, while other human groups had been the
result of earlier, less-practiced exercises in divine creation.
Polygenesis gave intellectual support to the exploitation of West

African slaves and indigenous Caribs in the plantations and mines of
the New World. The modes of life of non- European, nonurban, and
nonliterate peoples Avorldwide were considered primitive and uni-
The Return of the Beast with Two By\CKS 233
form. The stone some communities used suggested an ex-

tools that
planation for similar objects that had been found in Europe — prehis-
toric artifacts that had at first been thought the work of elves or
fairies but that now could be explained as the traces of "pre-

Adamites."
During the eighteenth century, as opinion weighed in against
the institution of slavery, French and Scottish Enlightenment
thinkers stressed the "psychic unity" of humanity — the behef that all
the peoples of the world share similar emotions and intellectual ca-
pacities despite individual differences in aptitude. Their different lev-
els of technological progress, it was thought, had to do with

differences in environment, time, and chance; "progress" could be
made by all. More radically, Jean- Jacques Rousseau promoted the
idea of "the noble savage," the claim that both prehistorically and in
so-called primitive society, people had lived in a harmony with the
world that Western civilization with all its attendant ills should
rightly envy.
But these Enlightenment doctrines were inconvenient for those

who benefited from the cheap labor of oppressed peoples. Although
polygenesis was no longer spoken of, nineteenth-century European
imperialism and romantic nationalism were associated \vith an em-
phasis on national "character" or "spirit" — qualities that came to be
seen as not simply cultural but deeper, bred in the bone. These ideas
were most influentially encapsulated in the writings of the French
royalist Count Joseph- Arthur de Gobineau, ^vhose Ejdciy on the In-
equality of the Human Raced (published in separate parts from 1853 to

1855 and never fully translated into English) set out to solve the
problem of why civilizations decline and fall. He expected to find a
single cause, and after examining economic and ideological factors
and rejecting them as too inconsistent to qualify, he resorted to a
racial theory.
Gobineau believed that only some peoples were culturalK' cre-
ative and that their ability was borne in their blood. When creati\e
people joined together to form nations, they intermarried and became

homogenized, but the cities that they built attracted outsiders — mi-
grant workers, traders, and slaves. This diversity created an interna-
tional society in ^vhich people ^vho had not shown themselves capable
of initiating civilization intermixed vvîth those that had. Gobineau sin-
gled out ten peoples, racially defined, as specially blessed, capable of
producing civilization: the Chinese, Egyptians, Assyrians, Indians,
Greeks, Romans, Mexicans, and Peruvians (all of whom produced

great urban monuments and systems of record), along with the "Al-
legheny civilization"— the mound-building Indian tribes of the Ap-

palachian plateau, stretching from Ohio dovv^n to Mississippi — and
finally "the Germanic races." Also-rans included the Armenians, who
had produced civilization despite a rocky, unfavorable homeland, and
the Jews, "a people capable in all it undertook, a free people, a strong
people, an intelligent people." That the Jews had not managed to
was because they had — ac-
build pyramids or create a great empire
cording to Gobineau — "hybridized" to some degree with the
Hamites, the descendants of Ham ^vho were thought to have colo-
nized Ethiopia and Abyssinia. (This speculation, as we shall see, ^vas
later developed for an overtly political purpose by Heinrich Himm-

ler.) Gobineau Avas thoroughly derogatory about other, blacker
Africans: "The European cannot hope to civilize the Negro."
Darwin's concept of human evolution strengthened beliefs in in-

nate racial inequality. The first edition of Felix- Archimede Pouchet's
treatise On the Multip tic ity of Human Raced, ^vhich came out in 1858, the
year before Origin of Speeled, proposed that the various races had been
the result of separate acts of spontaneous generation. But swayed by
Darwin's evolutionary biology, Pouchet revised the second edition to
suggest that a single apelike prehuman ancestor had given rise to sev-
eral distinct species of modern human, each of which was more
closely related to the ape-ancestor than to each other. Carl Vogt, on
the other hand, argued in 1863 that the evidence of racial difference
"leads us back not to a common stem, to a single intermediate forni
between man and apes, but to manifold lines of succession, v^^hich

were able to develop, more or less ^vithin local limits, from various
parallel lines of apes." Vogt believed that progressive improvement in
these various lines would tend to cause convergent development,

bending the branches "so that their tips came closer again to one an-
other." Many Europeans and Americans found it convenient to argue
that nonwhite races were quite simply earlier stages in human evolu-
tion that had somehow fallen out of the mainstream and stagnated.
In The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin sup-
ported the idea of a single common ancestor for modern humans. He
held them to be one species, whose regional differences were neverthe-
less explicable interms of their more recent evolution. These differ-
ences were not brought about primarily by the challenges of the
external natural environment but came from within the social envi-
ronment, where fme-tuned discriminations in mate choice led to the
selection not only of different visible features, such as eye and skin
color, but of mental differences too. Darwin envisaged a continuous
selection-driven moral ascent, from lowly, selfish, animal instincts to
elevated Victorian morals. Battle lines were thus drawn not just
between races but within them. Male temperance and female chastity
were on the rise, he thought, along wîth fidelity and courage, because
the richer social classes were outbreeding the poorer "intemperate,
profligate, and criminal classes," whose high fertility was outweighed
by heavy infant mortality. In 1878 his protege, George Romanes,
addressed the British Association on the subject of mental evolution,
illustrating his theme — in the absence of real prehistoric ancestors —
with a living exhibit of what The Timed described as "savages, young
children, idiots, and uneducated deaf-mutes."
Darwin's belief, which he maintained in the absence of any fossil
evidence, that modern humans emerged in Africa was not shared by

most of his contemporaries. In 1856 a strange skull had been discov-
ered in the valley of the river Neander, near Diisseldorf, Germany.
This skull, along with two skeletons discovered in Belgium in 1886,
convinced many scholars that the evolution from ape to human had
in fact occurred in Europe. The problem, however, was that the "Ne-
anderthals" were not really very apelike; early reconstructions were
based on a badly arthritic individual who gave every appearance ot
stooped apedom to an ill-informed public. In fact, behind the \\ea.\y
brow ridges and receding chins of Neanderthals were brains that

were as large or larger than those of modern people (though the\' may
have been less intelligent; see Chapter 1).
In 1912 human ancestor status was claimed for stranger-looking

and ostensibly older bones discovered at Piltdo\vn, in Sussex. "Pilt-
down Man" wâs eventually exposed as a fake. A deliberately stained

orangutan ja^v with filed-do^vn teeth, plus parts of an old but anatom-
ically "modern" human skull, had been planted together at a site
^vhere genuine extinct ^voolly rhino bones ^vere being found. That
Piltdown Man was accepted at all was due to the anatomical combi-
nation of a large braincase and brutish ja^v, which neatly fitted Avith
the Enlightenment belief that "man" had improved his natural, bestial
condition through the application of a rational intelligence.

Which of the several eminent scientists involved with the
Piltdo^vn site falsified the primary fossil evidence remains a mys-
tery, but their motivation presumably involved nationalism, if not
downright racism. Most Englishmen believed that their greatest-
great-grandparents must have been Englishmen too, or at least
European — certainly not African. If the supporting evidence had not
yet appeared, what harm would there be in preempting it? Such
nationalism still has immense appeal today. When a half-million-
year-old leg bone of archaic Homo japlend was recently discovered at
Boxgrove (not far from Piltdo^vn), the press hailed it as "the first
Englishman," notwithstanding the fact that Britain had no island
existence at that time (and notwithstanding Germaine Greer's cau-
tion about sexing leg bones). And in 1995, the "first European" was
promoted on the basis of new fossil finds from Orce in Andalusia,
even though, at this w^riting, it is not clear Avhether the limb bones
belong to Homo erectLU, as some researchers claim, or to an unidenti-
fied four-footed carnivore.
While Darwin saw sexual selection as the key to the creation of

human variation, he believed that groups like the Maoris could be re-
duced by a process of "natural selection." As he dryly observed in his
Beagle notebook, "natural selection is no^v acting on the inferior races

when put into competition wîth the New Zealanders." Francis Gal-
ton, one of Darwin's cousins, focused on the postulated intellectual
aspects of human breeding, arguing that all moral and mental traits
wêre hereditary in humans. He called for better, more scientific

breeding, as was already applied to racehorses, so that the "nobler
varieties of mankind" \vould prevail. These eugenic ideas later in-
spired Marie Stopes to popularize information about contraception,

as a way for the English lower classes (and those
who wore glasses)
to let off sexual steam without swamping subsequent generations
with their inferior traits. Since in Galton and Darwin's time, genes re-
mained undiscovered, Galton believed that the secret of heredity lay
in the blood, and his house overflowed with rabbits of assorted
breeds whom he subjected to regular transfusions of each other's
blood, in a vain attempt to get them to change coat color.
Nazid Prefer B loaded
Gobineau thought that blood of special nobility was to be found in
"the Germanic races" — northern Europeans of "Nordic" type— tall,

blond, and blue-eyed. He considered Nordics a branch of the greater
"Aryan race," inventors of the original Indo-European language, who
took their name from the Aryas, who appear in Indian epics as north-
ern invaders. The Aryans — allegedly — lay behind every Old World
civilization except the Assyrian; they had taken civilization from In-
dia to China. A version of this vie^v of history — global cultural
progress through the activity of a single, innately brilliant people —
was later developed by the English anatomist Grafton Eliot Smith, al-
though his hereditary geniuses of choice were the ancient Egyptians.

It has been most recently applied by Thor Heyerdahl in his strange
quest to demonstrate that all pyramids and large stone statues, in-
cluding those of the Americas and of remote Easter Island, must have
been the ^vork of the roving priests of Ra.
The most fervent promoter of the superiority of the Nordic race

was the German physical anthropologist and prehistorian Hans Giin-
ther. Giinther surveyed all the local physical types in Europe m his
book The Racial EUmentd of European Hutoiy. "A race shows itselt m a
human group which is marked off from every other human group
through its own proper combination of bodily and mental character-
istics, and in turn only produces its like," claimed Giinther. He went
on to define five races that could be found in both "pure and

"crossed" form in Europe: Nordic, Mediterranean, Dinaric, Alpine.
and East Baltic. Giinther considered himself Nordic and felt that
"Nordic eyes often have something shining, something radiant about
them." Mentally, Nordics were claimed to be fit for "statesmanlike
achievements," an assertion supported by a careful choice of portraits

showing eminent American and European "Nordic" men.
Giinther measured other races against the blue-eyed Avonder
boys: "If the Nordic race inclines to a sharp, bold profile, the
Mediterranean inclines to a pleasant, agreeable, as it were more wom-
anly, profile" and "shows but a slight sense of law and order." Dinaric
people, Avith "very prominent nose," broAvn eyes, and dark hair, found
especially in Bavaria, Austro- Hungary, northern Italy, and parts of
Poland and Romania, are slightly better: "For mental capacity I would
put the Dinaric race second among the races of Europe." The East
Baltics, found on the marches of Russia, ^vere "opposed to all individu-
ality, and always cultivating a dead level of thought for all"; they had
"little cleanliness, whether personal or in the home." Finally, the
Alpine race wâs "reflective, hard-wôrking, and narroAv- minded," but

also plagued by "petty criminals, small-time swindlers, sneak-thieves
and sexual perverts." Giinther's comments on other groups with a his-
tory in Europe, notably the "Hither Asiatic strain" (the Jews) and the
"Negro strain," were extremely derogatory.
In all his thinking, Giinther connected an — to him — unpleasant
outward physical appearance Avith the — to him — weaknesses in the
cultural and social lives of people who were not — like him — German.
In his view^, civilization deteriorated "in the direction of the lessening
of the strain of Nordic blood." Yet there is no such thing as Nordic
blood; it is not a distinctive strain, like a yeast culture. There are of
course blood groups, but these do not form pure and exclusive units,
and they are distributed at greater or lesser frequency ^vorld^vide. If
Giinther's OAvn blood had been supplied to a blood-compatible Tierra
del Fuegan, the latter s cultural behavior Avould have been altered not
one iota.
Mythical ideas of pure-breeding ^vere a central part of the Nazi-

led neopagan revival in Germany — an ideology that ^vas underpinned
by archaeology. The foundations had been laid by one of the most
influential prehistorians, Gustav Kossinna, who at the end of the nine-
teenth century developed the important concept of the "archaeological

culture"— the material manifestations of a pure people who shared the
same religion, appearance, and mentality. Kossinna claimed to be able
to trace a distinctively German type of settlement back into prehistory.
He believed that villages where German-speaking people had lived
could be distinguished from those of the ancient Slavs, Germany's
modern neighbors to the east, by virtue of their orderliness, cleanli-
ness, and attention to fme architectural detail.
Kossinna believed that some symbols, such as the Hakenkreuz or

swastika, and the runic alphabet were essentially German. Since the
swastika appears on ancient Greek pots and in Indian decorative mo-
tifs (where it is an array of nine points representing principal Hindu
deities), Kossinna concluded that Nordic German genius lay behind
these civilizations. Using his archaeological technique, he traced Ger-
man settlements back to the time when Tacitus w^rote his Gennaiiia
and beyond, into the Neolithic period. Kossinna was particularly in-
terested in proving that the Ostmark, the eastern region of what is to-
day Poland, was archaically German. After the German defeat in the
First World War, he was delegated to prepare a deposition for the
Treaty of Versailles, pressing Germany's claim to the region — a claim

that \vas rejected. After the war, Kossinna 's students came to fill in-
fluential positions in German universities, and after his death in 1921,
many were involved in the nascent Nazi party.

According to Giinther, cultural progress began with the inven-
tion of farming, an achievement that he— wrongly — attributed to the
tall, blond-haired, and blue-eyed Nordic race of Denmark (recently
annexed by Germany). This cultural benefit, he thought, had been

brought south around 1200 B.C., when the Nordics were believed to
have swept into Greece from the north and laid the foundations ol
Thus — for Giinther — all the achievements ot

classical civilization.
the Greeks were marked down to Germany. The high point ot this
racial lunacy was the bizarre claim that the Nordic nature oi the
best Greeks could be seen in their marble statues. SimpK' b\' \'iew-
ing them, with almost psychic skill, Gunther was swiftly able to inler
that they had had blue eyes and blond hair Nordics were thought to
have powered the rise of Rome too, but in this case their success
supposedly brought disaster. As the peoples of the empire mixed,

Giinther believed, the precious Nordic blood must have become
dangerously diluted.
Giinther termed this imagined process "denordization," and he
thought that it had triggered a wholesale decline, during which
Hither Asiatic moneylenders moved to Rome and began to contami-
nate the genes of the ruling elite. Apparently desperate when they
realized their mistake, the Romans tried to look more Nordic.
Giinther marshals some wonderfully selective evidence to support
this ludicrous theory: the poet Juvenal saying that Messalina used
"
to hide her black hair under a fair vîg; "rich upstarts (homined novi)
who "made their black-haired wives and daughters buy fair hair
from Germany"; and Herodian's description of the emperor

Caracalla "of African- Asiatic blood," who often used to "put on a
fair Avig and ^valk about in Germanic garb." In reality, it is as easy to
find references to the idle classes dressing up as Egyptians, or as
donkeys, or as the opposite sex. In the colorful world of ancient
Rome, playing at "barbarians" Avas one among many entertainments.
The fact that, according to Giinther, Nero possessed congenitally
blond hair and blue eyes can do little to inspire confidence in alleged
Nordic mental characteristics.
Because of all the mixed blood, Giinther argued, the fall of

Rome was inevitable. Weakened by miscegenation, the empire crum-
bled. The first intimation was the battle of the Teutoburger Wald in
Figs. 22'4a, 224b,-Julius Caesar Figs. 240a, 240b, -Lucius Caccilius Jucundus,
E, dark? H, dark; tall, fair-skinned banker in Pompeii.
Predominantly Hither Asiatic
(Fig. 9.2) The Racial ElemenUi of European H'utory. Two images from Giinther
1927. Reproduced by kind permission of Methuen & Co.

A.D. 9, when the Romans suffered their first major defeat

at the hands
of the Germanic tribes of the north. Nordic blood — in the form of an
influx of Germanic mercenaries — subsequently stayed Rome's fall (or
a while, Giinther believed. Ultimately, however, the Invidious influ-
ence of "Hither Asiatic, Oriental, Hamitic, and Negro elements" antJ
of Alpine and Dinaric people intruding in the north signaled — in
Giinther's version of events — "the end of everything, a true racial
morass, whose degeneration and decomposition bred those repellent
things we learn of from the last days of Rome."
For the Third Reich, the implication of this fanciful and deliber-
ately offensive race history was clear. Only by patrolling the boundaries
of race could the Germans hope to rule the world, as they believed
themselves functionally predestined to do. They were keen developers
of Galtons eugenic ideas and supported the concept of "racial hygiene,"
the removal of "bad blood." A cult of the body beautiful grew up, nud-
ism and exercise alternating with well-pressed folk costumes and shiny
uniforms. (While ostensibly heterosexual, the amusingly camp under-
tones of all this are not lost on Tom of Finland fans.)
Heinrich Himmler reinterpreted the archaeological data for the
European Upper Paleolithic in the light of the supposed connection
between Semitic and Hamitic races outlined by Gobineau. Identif)^-
ing the Venus figurines from Willendorf and Dolni Vestonice as dis-
among modern Bushman women,

playing steatopygia of the sort seen
he branded Ice Age Europeans as mixed-race "Hottentot- Jews " — an
inferior and impure stock that had been wiped out when the noble
Nordic German farmers swept down from the north.

The Nazi party organized many neopagan rallies, fusing
ancient religious symbols with Chiistian ones. They set up the noto-
rious stud farms, ^vhere effectively polygamous sex was encouraged
(perhaps organized is a better word) between girls of "good farnimg
stock" and the elite of the party organization. Concentration camps
were established, where, along with Jews and gypsies, homosexuals
and transvestites were incarcerated as biologically dysfunctional, ex-
members of human society. What the early German transvestite
priests of Tacitus would have thought is hard to say, but they were
not included in the Nazi m^yth. As the historian E. H. Hobsba^vm so

aptly put it, "getting one's history vv^rong is part of being a nation."
The Meaning of Race
The Nazi idea of racial purity still has currency in parts of the mod-
ern wôrld, even if it flies in the face of every scientific argument. Ar-
chaeologists and physical anthropologists working in South Africa
under the old apartheid regime came face-to-face with it, but they did
not cave in. Philip Tobias, for example, the leading authority on the
skeletal morphology of the Olduvai Homo hab'd'u fossils, produced an
pamphlet called The Meaning of Race that addressed the
influential
question head-on. Several things about race are now abundantly

clear to biological anthropologists. First, each person's appearance is
based on a unique combination of a vast number of genes and is fur-
ther affected by the circumstances of birth, growth, diet, and disease.
Second, there is much more genetic variation within any particular

group of people than between the averages of groups, although the
boundaries of groups cannot be easily draw^n. A study by Walter F.
Bodmer and Luca Cavalli-Sforza indicates that 85 percent of all vari-
able genes are typically present within individual cultures, ^vhile

there is an 8 percent variance between the average of different cul-
tures, and a further 7 percent difference between races at the global
level. The human species is thus "polytypic," and the idea of racial
purity — based on the exclusive possession of some special essence
("blood") —is a complete fiction.
Intriguingly, however, the observed 7 percent interracial genetic
variation is weighted to-ward visible characteristics — precisely those

features upon which sexual selection would most likely work, and
which may be altered most quickly. This explains the existence of
more or less distinctive populations of people. When individuals from
such distinctive populations interbreed, the children they produce are
of "mixed" race. This does not mean that their genes are any more
scrambled than anyone else's— they patently are not — but simply that
they are, initially, not very numerous. The proper study of race.
therefore, involves the observation of trends rather than the defini-
tion of sharp boundaries. Different classifications emerge, according
to whether one looks at blood types, skin color, cranial morphology,

dentition, or other geneticallygoverned variables. Measurement and
comparison of these variables have reality insofar as the trends do re-
flect something of the actual breeding choices that human popula-
tions have made and therefore they can help track our
in the past,
morphological development and geographical spread.

In 1924 the first true "missing link," the Aiutralopitheau afrlcaniu
skull from Taung in South Africa, was recognized, beginning a
process that has vindicated Darwin's belief in an African origin for
humanity (although he might have been surprised by the bewildering
variety of hominids now known to have graced the last four million
years). Today it is certain that one of our most important fossil ances-
tors, the Nariokotome boy, lived at a time — 1.6 million years ago —
when australopithecines Avere still plentiful (Chapter 1 and Figure
1.3) and the possibility of having sex with them was therefore real.
By classifying the Nariokotome boy as Homo, scholars are making the

claim that he belonged not only to a different species but to a differ-
ent genud from the other bipedal hominids of his time, the australo-
pithecines and paranthropines.
Some scholars, harking back to Pouchet, have argued that mod-
ern human racial diversity began when different groups o^ Homo (but
not australopithecines) left Africa and colonized the four corners of
the earth. There they slowly evolved into various distinct races, par-
allel to one another. Until quite recently some (European) scholars
have argued that European humans were the most evolutionaril\' dif-
ferent, uniquely gifted people with the capacity to produce Upper

Paleolithic cave art.
The Birth of RacUm
Much of the debate about human evolution turns on how species, sub-
species, and races are defined. Zoologists find such classifications dith-
cult enough among living creatures; doing it for long-extinct populations

of broken bones makes it infinitely harder. Dogs are remarkably varied

in their skeletons, yet they constitute a single species (although they are
capable of successful hybridization Avith wolf and coyote). Yet sheep
and goats, ^vhich belong not just to different species but to different
genuses, are a nightmare to distinguish from one another when their
bones occur during excavations. The eighteen or so modern species of

vervet monkey are indistinguishable skeletally, but they do not inter-
breed. German philosopher Immanuel Kant ^vas one of the first to
stress that species must be understood in terms of real breeding popu-
lations rather than in terms of the formal or apparent differences that
taxonomists can measure. Herring gulls prove his point.

Scandinavian herring gulls show racial differences from herring
gulls in Britain, which in turn show differences from those of Iceland.
The differences have mainly to do with the predominant markings of
the plumage, which are coded by a small number of genes. But each
population interbreeds with the next during occasional forays into
each other's home territories. Moving westward, right around the
North Pole, seven interbreeding races of a single species are encoun-
tered; but the seventh race, in northern Russia, does not interbreed
with the Scandinavian form at the point, over the White Sea, ^vhere
the circle is closed. Although genetically they could breed, their mat-
ing behaviors are too different. Instead of mating with each other,
they compete as separate groups in the constant battle for survival.
The total pattern, of continuous racial variation in one direction and a
species divide in the other, is termed a Formenkre'u.
Such Formenkre'u patterns must have characterized the evolution
of hominids from four million years ago onward. John Baker's claim
that "no normal human being of modern times would willingly copu-
late with any of the australopithecines" raises the question of ^vhat
kept incipient robust paranthropines, protohabilines, and ancestral
Homo ergodterj apart effectively enough for them to become separate
species.As part of the answer, imprinting should not be ruled out.
Early hominids almost certainly had less mental flexibility than mod-
ern humans, and like vervet monkeys, they would have been more
bound to their immediate subtypes. Nevertheless, this rule is not iron-
clad; as Robin Dunbar has sho^vn, for example, different species of
baboon will hybridize in the wild

under certain conditions. The key to
the emergence of subtypes of hominid, and their subsequent marked
speciation, is probably isolation. Although early hominids inhabited
the same grassland regions of eastern Africa, the ecological niches that
they exploited kept them apart. Incipient paranthropines were moving
toward specialization on heavy plant food, while incipient Homo
ergodter^d.^ developing meat-scavenging and hunting strategies.
Such niche-specialization, which was almost trivial at first, inex-

orably created "bottleneck" effects, wherein opportunities for mating
with members of another group became rarer, and within-group idio-
syncrasies in appearance gave rise to distinctive canons of beauty.

Sexual selection within groups, or between groups in the same niche,
can rapidly change the outward appearance of a population. As
Richard Dawkins strikingly puts it, "Nothing can stop the spread of
DNA that has no beneficial effect other than making males beautiful
to females" — and of course, vice versa. Add polygamy, and the
process accelerates, as both males and females wîth a favored feature
get better opportunities to breed — more choice in partners, and more
partners. Disfavored appearances may simply have been excluded
from the breeding pool, through infanticide or sexual avoidance. To-
day, cultural evaluations of skin shades can make people feel isolated,
as Carrie Allen McCray's poem evokes: "In ugly tones they / called
me 'Yaller Gal' / How lovely to have been / born black or brown /
Pure substance the artist / could put his pen to Not something in be-
/
tween— /diluted, undefined, unspecific." In prehistory, among small
foraging bands, the fatal sanction for looking different might ha\'e
been actual isolation. Even persistent minor discrimination in food
sharing would have had a significant adverse effect on the sur\'i\'al
chances of the disfavored and their offspring.

An even more distasteful mechanism may also have been in op-
eration. In the late eighteenth century, English antiquarian John

Frere first recognized that prehistoric flint artifacts were fashioned
by humans. He called them "weapons of war." Our modern lashion
for calling them all "tools" may be a little euphemistic. Throughout
more recent unambiguous weapons of war are ubiquitous

prehistory,
in the archaeological record. We simply do not know how, sa\-. the
a
massive "Acheulian hand axes, '

Avhich occur from 1.5 million to
150,000 years ago, were used. They could have been used for killing.
It now seems clear that several species or subspecies of human

existed over the period between a million and 150,000 years ago, dur-
ing which Homo erectiu/ergadter gave way to "late archaic japlenj."
Transitional fossils, such as the skull from Bodo in Ethiopia (Figure
1.3, number 14), are attributed to "early archaic dapienj" and are
found on sites where different types of "stone tools" vvêre also found.
The Bodo skull is covered Avith cut marks, and it appears to have
been deliberately defleshed. Was the Bodo person a crossbreed — an
unfortunate hybrid who perished at the hands of rival groups com-
peting for survival and maintaining their distinctiveness by patrolling
sexual boundaries? We do not know, but it is clear that warfare —^the
traces of which become ever more obvious as we move to\vard the
present — always has some racial component. This is not such an ex-
treme statement as it at first seems. A family that views itself as part
of a larger racial group may find itself embroiled in a civil war, with
members fighting on both sides. Although at the outset no tangible

ne^v physical differences can emerge between the two sides, the very
fact of division sets up conditions that limit breeding opportunities
across the battle line while tending to enhance them wîthin each
camp; ultimately, that is all races are — temporarily isolated gene
pools. When conflict is prolonged, the reduction in breeding across
the battle lines will cause— through the accumulation of genetic dif-
ferences and the emergence of different cultural canons of beauty —
slow differentiation of the hostile groups.
The "multiregional hypothesis," currently promoted by Milford
Wolpoff, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Michigan, devel-
ops an old line of argument. He postulates that racial difference
emerged very early on, and that the shared status of the ^vorld's races
as modern humans today came about only through a constant level of
interracial breeding on the peripheries of racial blocs. This inter-
breeding ensured, according to Wolpoff, that all "advanced" fea-

tures — such as a distinctively modern capacity for thought — became
established among all groups. His theories have been especially ea-
gerly received by the Chinese, who have their OAvn nationalistic rea-
sons for wanting to believe in a regional, 1 .S-mllllon-year-Ion^,

China-based evolution of modern Chinese from a local Homo crniiu
that had moved there from Africa.
While the multiregional hypothesis attracts some strong sup-
port, I believe, along with the majority of researchers, that anatomi-
cally modern humans emerged just once, in Africa, a mere 1 00,000 to
200,000 years ago. This out-of- Africa theory was initially based on
controversial research carried out by Rebecca Cann and others on
differences in mitochondrial DNA found in the placentas of women
from different parts of the world. This evidence at first suggested that
there was an "African Eve" — a modern human female who was an-
cestral to us all in that her children spread out of Africa, supplanting
all previously established erectlu populations.

According to this view, anatomically modern humans evolved in
eastern Africa sometime after 150,000 years ago and swept outward,
into the Near East by 100,000 years ago, and onward, replacing erec-
tud populations. Using boats for deep-sea navigation, they became, by

around 50,000 B.P., the first (and only) species of hominid to reach
Australia. Were Wolpoff's multiregional hypothesis true, modern hu-
man populations would be unlikely to be as similar as they^ are.
(Wolpoff maintains that processes such as "the exchange of women"

between groups maintained our global species identity.) The out-of-
Africa scenario suggests that modern humans must have had some
very crucial advantage over previous human types in order to com-
pletely outcompete them. Some mixing of different late archaic and
anatomically modern humans may be most likely, as detailed by^ Giin-
ther Brauer of the University of Hamburg, who sees replacement as

the major force, but also some absorption of more archaic groups by-
interbreeding and hybridization.
As for the spread of anatomically modern humans into Europe,
some researchers claim that the more archaic inhabitants, the Nean-
derthals, were outcompeted by the new species with whom the\
could not breed. Others disagree. All taxonomists class Neanderthals

in the same genus as us, Homo, but some see a species dillerence be-
tween Homo japlenj and Homo neanderthalen.i'u. Still others see a less
significant dubjpeciej divide, which they indicate b\' adding an extra

classificatory term between Homo dapienj daplenj and Homo daplerid ne-
anderthalend'u. Were the differences between them merely racial? If so,
why did the Neanderthal population remain distinctive, rather than

interbreeding with modern humans, right up to the point of extinc-
tion? Were there offspring of Neanderthal-modern liaisons? Were

they discriminated against? The data is ambiguous, which means that
the answers given to these questions often have a lot to do ^vith the
prejudices of individual researchers.
The Neanderthal situation in Europe may have been a little like
that of the herring gull. The ancestors of the Neanderthals, originally
a variation of late archaic daplend, may have reached the Levant and
subsequently Europe through a series of steps in Avhich their appear-
ance and cultural behavior became progressively more idiosyncratic.
When they eventually met up with anatomically modern humans,
who had evolved at the other end of the Formenkre'u, their dissimilari-
ties proved too great for any systematic interbreeding to occur.
But humans are not herring gulls. The gulls, experiments

demonstrate, are imprinted in infancy ^vith a fixed idea of vv^hat a po-
tential mate should look like by reference to their immediate family.
If researchers dye their parents pink, the grown gulls wîll respond
sexually only to pink-dyed mates. (Sadly, it is doubtful that the re-
searchers feel any continued obligation to confect these mates for
them.) Humans, on the other hand, are more complex. To be sure,
there is good evidence that sexual learning does involve some degree
of imprinting. Males have been known to fetishize objects such as
phone booths, cars, and safety pins to the point of excluding all other
sexual relationships, and there is a case of a woman w^ho was aroused
by particular letters of the alphabet. But humans are ordinarily not so
limited, and there is widespread evidence for sexual activities with
other species — conducted not as exclusive fetishes but simply as curi-
ous variations.
Bestiality may vvêll have been a part of Neolithic life (see Chap-
ter 7), and it can still be ^videly documented today. In rural America
high rates of sexual contact between male adolescents and farm ani-
mals have been reported. For city dwellers, inflatable substitutes are
available; mail-order catalogs exhort potential buyers to "enjoy the
pleasures of country without the smell." Dogs and cats are some-
life
times co-opted as sex partners; dogs are featured relatively often in

the erotic encounters that women reported to Nancy Friday. Nondo-
mesticated animals are also possibilities. To the prehistoric moose
pursued on skis (Figure 7.5) may be added a recent case of a man
with a male dolphin. Women (and sometimes men) insert snakes,
mice, and other small animals into different orifices, and in a wide va-
riety of poorly documented but believable accounts, chickens (alive
and dead), fish, and moths are used sexually in ways best left to the
imagination. Sex with captive primates has also been reported.
Raced Around the Globe
Hominid development over the last four million years was a veritable
evolutionary ferment. Types and species appeared and vanished at
such a rate that many more forms probably still await our discovery.
The rapid speciations, powered by sexual selection within possibly
polygamous communities, mirror the later emergence of races among
modern humans, for which similar mechanisms are implicated. It
seems doubtful that Owen Lovejoy's monogamy theory of human ori-
gins (see Chapter 1) could have genetically fixed the divergent trends
among modern humans quickly enough for the races to look as differ-
ent as they do today. Of course, most of the variation could have
arisen during the most recent historical period, when we know that
monogamy was not the global norm. But this possibility is not sup-
ported by studies that compare degrees of racial similarity with the
timing of global colonization.
When modern humans started their global spread, probabh' out
from Africa, bottlenecks became more frequent and more effective at
bolstering emergent racial variations. Certain parts of the world, such

as the Americas, could have been colonized by nonseagoing people
only during the brief appearance of land bridges, such as the one that
linked the Bering Strait around 13,000 years ago. Access to a place.
followed by geographical isolation, would have created "founder ef-
fects." That is, all genetic variation that occurred in the Americas be-
tween the Bering crossing and European contact v^âs set by the ge-
netic potentiahties of the pioneer groups. Some racial features are
Hkely to have been naturally selected, emerging as suitable for partic-

ular climates, but the correlations between features and climate are
not particularly consistent. Dark pigmentation is commoner in the
tropics, where it offers some protection from solar radiation, whereas

a pale complexion is more often found toward the poles, allowing
more natural production of vitamin D in the skin. But such "adapta-

tions" probably originated in fairly arbitrary cultural choices about
what features were deemed attractive. People with very dark skin
can be found in the Congo basin, Avhere clouds let through only
about three hours of direct sunlight each day (and not all of it gets
past the trees), while people with genetically fair skin inhabit the Ti-
betan plateau, where solar radiation is particularly intense. Whereas
animals adapt themselves to environments, humans adapt environ-
ments to themselves. With the aid of culture — bush hats, parkas, and
shades — anyone can live anjrwhere.
^
One slightly more regular correlation with climatic factors is
that between colder habitats and populations ^vith broader skulls and
higher faces. There is a noticeable division between European
and American Indian skull shapes (cold climate), on the one hand,
and Australo-Melanesian and African skull shapes (warm climate) on
the other. That this difference resulted from a climatic adaptation is
suggested because it cross-cuts other measures of similarity: the his-

tory of global colonization sho^vs a different type of distinction be-
t^veen Europeans and Africans on the one hand, and Australians,
American Indians, and Polynesians on the other.
The most detailed modern study of skull shape contradicts the
multiregional h3/pothesis of the origin of modern human races and sup-

ports the idea of a single recent origin of anatomically modern humans.
By using a statistical technique called principal components analydu, the
study grouped a sample of more than three thousand skulls from dif-
ferent human populations, both ancient and modern, into clusters of

most closely related types. The researchers found that Neanderthals,
including those from La Ferrassie 1 and La Chapelle, dated to around
35,000 years ago, are closer to the archaic Homo sapiens group, such as
skull number
5 from Skhul cave in Israel, dated to around 90,000 years
ago, than they are to modern humans. At the same time and in the
same region, early anatomically modern humans, a distinctive group,
overlapped with the archaics (as demonstrated by skeletons from
Oafzeh, within 25 miles of Skhul, dated to 92,000 B.R). Yet they are
nevertheless more closely linked to modern human populations than to
the archaics and Neanderthals. These findings indicate that the sepa-
rate-species definition of Neanderthals is probably correct, although
with some possible later hybridization in Europe.
Although Neanderthal skeletons typically show high numbers of
injuries, their eventual extinction was probably the result not so
much of direct conflict with moderns as of competition for limited re-
sources and differences in fertility. Neanderthals were physically big-
ger and heavier than moderns, and therefore they may have
reproduced more slowly. Ezra Zubrow of the State University of
New York at Buffalo has shown in a computer simulation that the
Neanderthals would have needed only a slightly lower fertility for
moderns to completely replace them in time.
Skeletal variability is greatest among peoples in the two re-
gions — the Americas and Polynesia — that were colonized last. In

other places, a sIoav process of intermingling has homogenized skele-
tal features, even if it has periodically emphasized particular skin col-
orings — the marks of ethnic affiliation and immediate ancestry. In
North America skeletal features coincide with genetic, linguistic, and
dental features in wâys that suggest that people crossed the Bering
Strait in a sequence of three migrations, forming the paleoindians, the
Na-Dene of the northwestern coast, and the Eskimo- Aleuts. Archae-
ological evidence for the Plains Indians suggests that they represent a
mix of several diverse groups, "suggesting that any common cranial
and skeletal form is a late development."
Incct^t and Ownership
Fine-tuned local racial differences are created, maintamed. and dis-
solved in different ways in different kinds of societies. The Plams In-

dians, for example, practiced outmarriage. Such exogamy is a typical

pattern for hunter-gatherer or forager groups (as it is among pri-
mates), for whom survival depends on good communication and al-
liance networks. Agriculturalists, on the other hand, often have more

endogamous or inmarrying systems, designed to keep clan property
together. These systems sometimes lead to a high incidence of
brother-sister marriage, as in historical times both in rural Norfolk
and in Ireland.
As wê sacw in Chapter 6, farming was spread in Neolithic Europe

primarily by movements of people, such as the LBK longhouse
dwellers. The earliest knoAvledge of metal in central and western
Europe may also be associated ^vith the immigration of a group known
as the Beaker Folk (although the skeletal data is ambiguous). With
respect to Bronze Age cultures, an increasing focus on ethnicity, along
wîth the elaborate marking of gender in burials, make it easier to

determine probable mating patterns. In Avestern Europe Freindfraiien
appear — 'Toreign women" — ^vhose jewelry is clearly of more eastern
origin. In the sixth-century-B.C. Iron Age multiple burial mound of the
Magdalenenberg, near Villingen in Baden- Wiirttemberg, a woman's
grave contained a typically Spanish decorative belt plate, suggesting
that she herself came from Spain. Of course, the belt plate could have
been acquired by trade, but such traded items do not regularly appear
in this period and they were essentially made to express association.
That Avomen within the richer sections of society sometimes married

into faraway communities is supported by literary evidence.
Herodotus records polygyny and diplomatic intermarriage among the
Scythian and Thracian elites. In Roman times alliances among various
Celtic tribes of ^vestern Europe were secured by intermarriage at the
chiefly level, as recorded by Caesar, whose campaigns brought him

into contact and confrontation with them.
Concerns about lineage and race came to the fore in the Iron
Age. The perfection of animal management since the Neolithic meant
that stockbreeding wâs deliberately carried out for particular fea-
tures, especially in horses. It is not surprising that people should have
applied breeding techniques to themselves as ^vell. This practice has
already been hinted at in the Scj^hians-and-Amazons story, where

the Sc3Athian men were attracted to the idea that the Amazon women
would be able to bear them strong children. As 1 suggested in Chap-
ter 8, more "masculine" genetic traits might have become quite
rapidly fixed in the elite female population. Herodotus is clear that in
Scythia polygamy was common, which would have sped up the ef-
fects of sexual selection. As endemic warfare and the export of slaves
winnowed the existing Scythian population, polygamy would have

provided the means for a rapid directional change that could estab-
lish ne-w local or regional racial types.
This said, deliberate breeding may well have been used for pur-
poses that were more social and hierarchical than regional. Its great-
est impact would have been on martial elites who intermarried over
wide distances to create alliances. Alexander the Great encouraged
his generals to marry into the best aristocratic Asian families; by do-
ing so he thought that they would produce a vigorous new generation
vîth the best qualities of both peoples. Ideas of purity and hybrid ity
are also reflected in the art of the time. The griffon was a composite
beast, with eagle's wings and beak, lion s claws, and the scales of a
fish or reptile, encompassing the armored and aggressive aspects of

life on air, sea, and land. The griffon was joined in art by the centaur,
the faun, and many other "half-and-half" creatures.
The activities of traders, slavers, mercenaries, nomads, and

other itinerants created ever more multiethnic societies in Eurasia,
and peoples went to great lengths to make themselves appear recog-
nizably distinct. The skeletons of Huns buried in fifth-century A.D.
Ukraine, for example, show remarkable cranial deformation, with the
head elongated backward. We know from historical records that this
was the result of binding the head from infancy onward. It could also,
of course, have had a genetic component: in a society where long-

headedness was deemed attractive, sexual selection could ha\'e begun
to fix such a quality. But it seems much more likely that the bindmg
was carried out to create a physical identity for an elite section ol so-
whose membership was elective and volatile and widely distrib-

ciety,
uted and who would otherwise have had no shared physical

characteristics to mark themselves as distinct. That is, the artificial

deformation may have been used to hide natural variety rather than
to enhance a stable racial trend.
In some places the actual reproductive choices that people made

within particular communities are beginning to come into sharper fo-
cus, thanks to new techniques for extracting and analyzing ancient

DNA from bone. Scott Woodward and Wilfred Griggs are currently
excavating a cemetery of upward of one million individuals, around
the Faynm oasis in Egypt. Over the years, as ever siltier mud is de-
posited there, the ground surface has thickened, so that the oldest
burials are no^v deepest while the later. Christian burials are nearest
the top. DNA analysis seems to demonstrate that the earlier burials
are of people ^vho were genetically all very similar to one another,
w^hile those buried later were genetically more diverse.
The preliminary results support the idea that the early
Egyptians attempted to keep property in the family and, perhaps, to
keep their racial identity "pure," through brother-sister marriage.

Such practices were previously known only for the historically
recorded ruling dynasticlines, in whom some scholars connect
brother-sister marriage to an apparent increase in congenital illness.

No one really knows v^hat effect brother-sister marriage has on a
human population en mcuue, but as with dogs, prolonged inbreeding
can probably lead to reduced fitness in humans. The diversity of the
later Fayum skeletons cannot be solely explained in terms of the sig-
nificant immigration at the start of the Christian period; the
Christian definition of brother-sister marriage as incestuous proba-
bly had as great an effect.
Intelligence or Knowledge?
Despite all the evidence for complex patterns of interbreeding,

stretching back into deep prehistory, the idea of "pure races" has per-
sisted. A white superiority myth still endures, maintained by a
strange group of people who believe that the subtlety and beauty of
human intelligence, manifested in the myriad cultures of the world,
can best be expressed by a simple two- or three-figure number. I'în-

stein was "148." This "inteUigence quotient," or lO, is the resuh of
tests that their designers think measure innate intelHgence — as a sin-

gle straightforward and additive quality. Despite several decades of
often deeply flawed statistics, some testers believe that they acJe-
quately demonstrate that men are genetically more intelhgent than
women, whites than blacks, rich than poor. In 1969 A. R. Jensen pre-
sented evidence that "Negroes" tested 15 lO points lower than whites
and drew the conclusion that "genetic factors" were "strongly impli-
cated"; in 1994 Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray presented
similar evidence in The Beit Curiae.
The lO brigade display little understanding of the subtleties of
personal motivation and cultural learning. As Philip Tobias has
demonstrated, many of the original lO tests conducted in South
Africa were biased toward well-educated whites. The early, strongly
culture-biased tests, with their divisive results, fostered resentment

and suspicion and demotivated black people who were subjected to
subsequent "intelligence" tests that were of a more abstract nature

and that lO testers promoted as fairer. Once a particular group real-
izes that tests "prove" them to be inferior, their respect for such tests
goes do^vn. If motivational issues could be compensated for (which is
unlikely) and if it were possible to create tests unaffected by differ-
ences in cultural learning (which is unproven and also unlikely), then
any gross differences that remained in the test results of different eth-
nic groups \vould still not prove the existence of a race-based genetic
factor. This is because environment plays a much deeper role in the
development of mental abilities than is usually appreciated.

Key experiments by Simon Biesheuvel and co-workers ha\'e
shown that rats reared on protein-deficient diets score badK' in rat
intelligence tests, and that the effect is passed to their oflspring,

even when these have a proper diet. The detrimental etlect is e\en
passed on to the grandchildren. Both nutritional and emotional
stress can interfere with animals' capacity for rational problem soU -
ing, and related effects may well be produced in humans in similar
circumstances. The complex social histories of modern racial groups

who, within three generations, may have jointly experienced war.
starvation, malnutrition, pogroms, and migrations, may well

adversely affect the results of lO tests that people in po^ver devise
for them.
Most damningly lO believers cannot yet explain the most glar-
ing anomaly in their o^vn data — the Flynn effect. Scores on virtually
every kind of lO test, surveyed over twenty countries, sho^v a contin-
uous rise from 1920 onward, ranging from 10 points per generation
in S^veden and Denmark to 20 points per generation in Israel and
Belgium. Back-projecting the tests at the same rate would clearly
drop Newton and Galileo off the bottom. Jensen believes that the ef-
fect is probably environmental, having to do with better nutrition.

(People are also becoming taller.) But the effect's discoverer, James
R. Flynn, thinks that it is ludicrous to imagine that each generation is
cleverer than the last, and he remains "baffled."
I believe that lO tests do not directly measure genetically innate

intelligence at all. Hoav could they, when so much about the ^vay we
think comes from our spoken language and our visual symbol sys-
tems, to ^vhich the developing brain molds itseXi after birth? IQ tests
are as much a part of our cultural environment as any other symbol

system. They thus test knowledge, not InteUigence.
My younger daughter has a "Post the Shapes" box, a toy based

on the same so-called abstract principles as many IQ shape tests. She
may insert the differently shaped blocks through the matching holes;
or she may deliberately try to force them through nonmatching holes

to see if they will fit (some wîll); or she may slide the lid back and fill
the box with shapes directly, avoiding the tedious holes; or she may
ignore the box altogether and observe the behavior of her sister.
What she "should" do with the box is a matter of cultural knowledge

and choice, not innate intelligence. On the basis of their performance
Avith "Post the Shapes," chimpanzees have been rated by humans as
more intelligent than orangutans. Wild orangutans are capable of ex-
traordinary feats of self-motivated learning, but they generally refuse
to post shapes in the laboratory. This, it strikes me, is not because
they are genetically stupid but because they are unwilling to slavishly
copy their abductors.
The "Post the Shapes" box does, nevertheless, change the
worldview of every child who sees it. Whether or not I teach my

daughter the "right" answer, playing with a shape-fitting lO test will
give her a cultural advantage over, say, a girl in a rural African com-
munity who has never seen such a box. My daughter's experience of
digital clocks, car speedometers, and itemized cash register receipts
will give her similar advantages in the mathematics lO test. The
rural African girl may be multilingual, proficient from the time she
can talk in three or more languages; she may be able to classify hun-
dreds of species of plant and animal and know what each is good
for; and so on. But none of her cultural knowledge, born of natural
human intelligence, will give her any advantage when she is present-
ed in missionary school with a piece of paper printed with a
sequence of apparently random numbers and the instruction, "Circle
the odd one out."
I am not arguing intelligence has no genetic basis. I argued in
Chapter 1 that our larger brains may be a direct result of sexual

selection over the last four million years. But the process that led to
the intelligence of anatomically modern humans involved the selec-

tion of very large numbers of genes for the many different areas of
the brain and nervous system. By contrast, the subsequent creation
of people of different appearances, as Homo Japienj spread around

the ^vorld, is the result of the selection of a small number of highly
visible genes, such as those for eye color, skin pigmentation, and
various sizes of genitalia, selection that will not interfere with the
body's higher functions and that can be easily fixed among local
communities.
The prehistory of race indicates that gross innate differences in
mental qualities among regionally distinctive populations (as between
the sexes) are likely to be trivial. But in any case they can ne\'er be
directly measured; humans do not exist biologically outside culture —

nor do races. Race is a cultural creation that uses biological materials.
But although breeding may enhance certain features and brin^
change quite quickly, fashion often demands still more rapid changes,
as in the case of the Huns' long heads. Communities often enhance
physical conformity before biology does. Skin can be stained or

bleached. Soft-tissue areas like the genitalia can be cut and stretched,
to a point v^here it is difficult to know Avhich features are genetic and

Avhich are artificial. Genetic changes may typically follow artificial
changes: Paraguayan men of Darwin's time did not need to shave, as
they were beardless — a feature that presumably women of previous
generations had consistently selected as attractive — but they did need
to pluck their eyebrows and eyelashes. Those ^vith the heaviest eye-
bro^vs would have needed more time to pluck them, time that they
could have spent courting; or they could have been less than diligent
and subsequently less lucky in love. Whatever the mechanism, it is
clear that cultural fashion can influence opportunities for sexual con-
tacts and thus foreshadow genetic change.

Racial prejudice, which is cultural, is one of the race-creating
mechanisms. Regardless of whether a particular quality, such as
"Nordicness," has any objective basis in genetics, it can still be
used as a criterion for sexual selection, as stud farms and concen-
tration camps illustrate. lO test results are already being used as a
criterion in sexual selection. Some British and American people
meet their partners at Mensa, a club in Avhich membership requires
an lO of at least 120, while in the United States it is possible to pay
for artificial insemination with the sperm of a "high-IO" donor.
Whatever underlying genetic feature the lO tests might actually
test, it may become commoner in some communities in the future.
We have the ability to choose, but the results may not always meet
our expectations.
The Austrian women who apparently want to be inseminated
v^îth five-thousand-year- old Iceman sperm should perhaps be aware
that according to the Flynn effect and Giinther s racial assessment of
Alpinids, the child of such an insemination should tend toward an lO
well into minus figures and a career characterized by "sneak thiev-
ery" and "sexual perversion." The child of the lO fanatic may be ge-
netically predisposed to behave more like a chimp in a laboratory
than an orangutan in a rainforest. We simply do not know — but that

their parents' culture ^vill foster such behavior is certain.
Prehistoric fertility control and knov^ledge of plant-based con-

traception, outlined in Chapter 3, underscores everything that has
been said here. Sex —êven of the heterosexual intromissive variety —
need not lead to babies. In most cultures, people plan their offspring
with greater care than their sexual liaisons.
Fascination with identity does not stop at appearance; it in-
cludes sexual behavior. In a global village that increasingly sub-

scribes to an ideal of romantic love, of finding Plato's "perfect other
half, "
sexual orientation produces labels similar to racial ones, involv-
ing the same sorts of cant and make-believe. Thus "homosexuals and "
"heterosexuals," "lesbians" and "transvestites," are socially defined

with all the finality of distinct species. Everyone is involved with such
labeling, despite all the evidence that our shared underlying poten-
tials are very malleable.
Conclusion
JDeyond Vûlture
'^Society i^ indeed a contract it becomes a . . ,
partnership not only between those who are Living,

but between those who are Living, those who are
"
dead, and those who are to be born.
Edmund Burke
W. e cannot revisit prehistory,
given the limits of the surviving evidence.

nor even gain a
Much
full knowledge of
of the fine-grained
it,
detail of people's everyday lives and loves has been lost fore\'er.
Whole categories of sexual behavior, such as lesbianism— which is as
common among our primate relatives as among modern humans —

have left no discernible trace in the archaeological record. But there
is much that we do know that I have had neither the space nor the
special know^ledge to do justice to, such as the sexual cultures ot the
prehistoric Americas and ancient India. I have said virtualK' nothino
about China or Australia. Future research, such as the wider apphca-

tion of DNA sex-testing on skeletal remains, and the development ot
the theory of gender, will certainly shed more light on the sexual cul-
ture of the prehistoric communities described in this book.

Biology and culture are more closely entwined than we would

like to believe. Codes of sexual morality that make appeals
to some
simple, universal "human nature" should be vicAved with some skepti-

cism: on the face of it, if what they advocate is truly natural, then en-
forcement should be unnecessary. But some people (such as the
so-called "moral majority" in contemporary America) argue that, al-
though there is a natural pattern of sexual morality, it needs addi-

tional support in order to survive in the face of increasing decadence;
immorality is seen as a function of "bad" culture.

In biological versions of this argument, sexual immorality is im-
puted to other races. A Canadian psychologist has recently argued
that "Negroids" are biologically prone to "low marital stability," de-
spite the fact that one of the most eminent social anthropologists of
the century, Edmund Leach, doubted that the English-language term
"marriage" could be effectively used as a universal classification, so
varied ^vere the human institutions that it could in some sense be ap-
plied to. The idea that such variation arises from racial difference is
idiotic, as marriage patterns are knoAvn to show marked historical

change Avithin the same communities (as has happened with the
spread of Islam in Africa, for example).
Whose norms get accepted is a more complex issue now than it
was when missionaries first went to Samoa to persuade the locals to
do sex differently. Appreciation of cultural difference has grown, so
that we feel less easy about branding others as Avrong, yet the prob-
lem of sexual morality remains in many respects unresolved. Erotica
that is thought in Britain to have the power to "deprave and corrupt"
(to use the legal formulation) is freely available in continental Eu-
rope. Perhaps the British constitution is peculiarly vulnerable to de-
pravity and corruption. As information technology develops, the
battle to enforce particular versions of human sexuality as the global
cultural norm w411 heat up, but networking will probably contribute
to an ever greater cultural (or "subcultural") richness and variety.
While it is true that there are some beliefs about sexuality that
can be found in nearly every human community around the world, by
far the majority remain culturally specific. Sex between adults and
children, incest (hoAvever defined), sex with the dead, and — perhaps
.
Beyond Culture 263
(Fig. 10.1) Trash— a New York drag king. Although
Trash may look strange and "unnatural" to many people,
the ambiguous appearance has a long prehistoric
pedigree. Naked skin evolved alongside leather
clothing, body paint, and material accessories.
Photograph: Doris Kloster.
to a lesser extent — sex Avith animals all attract social and moral disap-
proval in widely separate communities worldwide. This may be part
of a common, species inheritance, although one not necessarily
shared with other primates (see Chapter 3). On the other hand, atti-
tudes to some other types of behavior, such as male homosexuality,

lesbianism, masturbation, group sex, oral sex, sex during menstrua-
tion, heterosexual anal sex, sexual displays, nudity, cross-dressing,
and so on, are so different around the globe that no real norm exists
(except that, approved or not, most of these things go on in most

communities)
As I argued in Chapter 1, our nakedness is in itself not a purely
natural condition, but came about bio-culturally through the exercise

of choice in sexual selection, and evolved in tandem with the de\'elop-
ment of clothing. Thus to discard clothing, as nudists (or "naturists")
do, is actually no more natural than to wear it. Wearing rubber.
leather, silk, or anj^hing else during sex is no more a cuhural kmk
than wearing nothing at all. From a bio-cultural point ot Mew.
fetishists, nudists, and unassuming monogamous heterosexual tolk
(husband in striped pajamas, wife in pink nylon nightdress) are all
equally normal. It is also bio-culturally normal for each ot these three

types to feel that the others are ^veird, and that only they themselves
are doing the right thing. Defining one's own culture runs deep, and
seems to have provided the necessary social cohesion by which hu-
man groups were able to colonize every global environment.
I started this book by going "beyond nature because ' I wanted
to challenge the sociobiologists. The variety of human sexual culture
that I described cannot be explained by reference to a simple genetic
imperative. Human cultures co-opt biology for their own immediate
and short-term aims. But I end now by going "beyond culture," to
stress the longer term biological backlash. We have no straightfor-

ward choice between "biology as destiny" and "culture as freedom."
Boyd Eaton, of Emory University in Atlanta, is one of a small but
grooving number of doctors who promote "Darwinian medicine,"
based on the idea that our cultural solutions to disease and well-being
must take into account the long-term legacy of biological evolution.
As Roger Le^vin reports, Eaton
argues, for instance, that changes in reproductive patterns

in western women mean that they have up to a hundred
times increased risk of breast cancer and increased risk of
endometrial and ovarian cancers compared with women
who still have a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. The increased
risk is a consequence of a combination of earlier menarche,
later first birth, fewer births, and later menopause; in addi-
tion, modern women breast-feed for much shorter times.

One consequence of these differences is that during their
lifetime, hunter- gatherer women ovulate on average 158
times, while the average for modern affluent women is 451
times.
But this is just one of the implications of our current cultural organi-
zation.
Inventions such as the baby carriage appear to provide a benign

and easier way of transporting children, but they have produced bio-
Beyond Culture 265
logical effects of dubious value. The sling, which our prehistoric an-
cestresses invented when nakedness and bipedahsm made the "grip-
on" method of infant transportation impossible, rapidly organizes the
child's sense of balance, just as it would be organized in a clinging
chimp, and thus assists in the child's physical, emotional, and social
development. The recent sharp rise in osteoporosis — brittle bone dis-
ease—among Western women (and men) seems, at least in part, to be
related to their reduced load bearing, coupled with alterations in the
calcium balance of the body caused by the typically low level of
breast-feeding in those modern communities that also typically use

baby carriages.
These interactions between biology and culture present us with

dilemmas. We cannot simply go back to hunting and gathering. But
we could, for example, organize work and society in such a way that
enabled women to breast-feed as long as they wished, rather than ge-
netically engineer coavs to produce milk that is "virtually human," as
the Genpharm Company is currently attempting to do. The project,
in any case, is doomed to failure, because even if the lactoferrin levels
in engineered milk can be boosted to increase its nutritiousness, it
will carry none of the profound immunological benefits that have re-
cently prompted the World Health Organization and UNICEF to

recommend breast-feeding to "two years and beyond." The attempt
to produce artificial breast milk from dairy herds can be seen as a
long-term extension of the controlling patriarchal value system of the
Neolithic farmers.
The biological backlash affects men as well. The Scythians
whose testicles, according to Hippocrates, were seriously functional-
ly impaired by wearing pants and riding horses, may have a message
for us today. Pants were invented by pastoralists and others who
lived in cold climates, and they were shunned by people such as the
Greeks and Romans who inhabited warmer climes. But the\ are
now a global norm. Western men, who spend ever more time sitting
in cars, have seen their sperm count drop off alarmingK' in the last
few decades, leading inevitably to an increase in fertility' problems.
(Estrogenic residues found in tap water and in agrochemically

farmed vegetables are also implicated.) Part of the Danvinian solu-
266 The P reh id to ry of Sex
tion might be found in the French fashion designer Jean-Paul

Gauhier's attempt to revive the kilt.
Over the last hundred years scientists have made a concerted ef-
fort to explain some of the mysteries of sex by uncovering its genetic

and behavioral bases. The most rigorous synthesis of the results is
currently being produced by biologists, but it is not complete. The bi-

ological synthesis omits the Avild card — culture. Cultural intervention
(through contraception, abortion, IVF treatment and the use of
sperm banks) plays havoc with the rules of selection and evolution
that apply to the rest of the natural world.
Sociologist Anthony Giddens, in his book The Tratuformation of
Intimacy^ has argued that in the modern period sex is characterized by

the emergence of "plastic sexuality." This phrase refers not to the
plethora of "wêll-made Japanese substitutes" now available, but to
what he claims is the almost complete detachment of sexual life from

any reproductive or biological imperative. The corollary of sex vvîth-
out reproduction is reproduction without sex. Richard Posner, too,

has dra^vn attention to some of the social and legal implications of the
nevv^ medical technology that enables reproduction "^vithout sex,"
through IVF. Posner's viev^s are based on a highly intercourse-
focused view of human sexuality: the semen for in vitro fertilization
has to come from somewhere — as far as I kno^v, it is the result of a

man masturbating, which is nothing if not a sexual act (although no
erotic activity is required on the woman's part).
Although IVF is nev\^, artificial insemination as such is suffi-
ciently low-tech (it can be done with a spoon) that it must have been
well ^vithin the reach of our prehistoric ancestors. Giddens's
thoughts, on the other hand, while provocative and well-considered,
are based on the idea that successful reproductive controls are a re-
cent invention. (See Chapter 3.) Humans have lost control of their
fertility only Avhen particular cultural circumstances have conspired

against good management.
Culture, in fact, can erode our basic physical capacities. For
most of human prehistory, as for many small-scale societies today,
the typical resting posture is the squat, a position that keeps the
pelvic floor muscles trim. The Celts were described as people who
Beyond Culture 267
squatted, and the powerful sexual aspects of related but more physi-
cally demanding poses were not lost on the steppe shamans and
Indian practitioners of Tantra. But the women depicted on the
bronze described in Chapter 8 had sex on beds and chairs.
ditula art
These were high-status novelties in Europe at the time, but they

became increasingly common during the Roman Empire and after-
ward. Today, sitting on chairs is becoming global. Because it
requires little effort, it allows the pelvic floor muscles to become
slack. And when this happens, sexual enjoyment is reduced — which
led the sexologist Dr. Kegel to devise the therapeutic regime of
pelvic muscle exercise that bears his name.
Doing "Kegels" may not only enhance (or normalize) sexual en-
joyment, it may afford positive reproductive control. The powerful
expulsion of semen by women who did not want to become pregnant,
described by Hippocrates and the Trobriand Islands magistrate of
Malinowski's time, could not have been achieved with slack muscula-
ture. Male practitioners of Tantra can also separate orgasm from
ejaculation. (Some claim to be able to divert semen internally, so that
it is ejaculated into the bladder rather than out the urethral opening.)
The natural body know^ledge that has made us so successful at
optimally timing reproduction and at intensively rearing small num-
bers of young has allo^ved for prolonged learning and the develop-
ment of complex culture. But our culture has now developed to such
a point that we are in danger of losing touch with our biology. We ex-
ert massive effort and resources to find cultural solutions for prob-
lems that need not exist in the first place.
The oral contraceptive pill, for example, has been a profound

failure in most of the world. According to Gabrielle Palmer, in her
classic The Pollticj of Bread tfceding, the Pill has actually been the single
most important factor in recent global population Increased. Because
breast-feeding is incompatible with the combined Pill, it undermines
natural lactational fertility control. Lured away from traditional \\ a\s
and ancient herbal wisdom by the glamorous mirage of Western sci-

ence, people switch to the Pill when it is promoted freely but subse-
quently cannot afford it regularly enough for it to work. (On the
other hand, the Pill has been supremely successful in making some
pharmaceutical companies very rich, along with the manufacturers of

formula milk and the medicines that are standardly required in the
Pill's wake.) This failure is a double whammy, in that it is felt most
markedly in the tropical regions of the Avorld. There a rapidly ex-
panding population is involved in destroying the very natural phar-
macopeia — the rainforest — that their ancestors used to keep their
numbers in balance.
Looking back at the past four million years should make us

humble in the face of the next four million. There is every possibility
that our species ^vill still be here at the end of that time, but whose
great-great-grandchildren will be represented is anybody's guess. In
the West, personal biological reproduction is no longer a cultural im-
perative. To maintain a sexual morality that is based on reproduction
is nonsense and, at present world population levels, dangerous non-
sense. The development and transmission of cultural kno^vledge of-
fers our brightest hope for the future. It v\îll be best served by a
diverse array of minds, ^vith heterodox experiences of the human
condition. If we ignore our inherited flexibility, we may end up like
the robust australopithecines sooner than we think.

But sooner or later, some end must come. When it does, a
species as interesting as ours vvîll deserve an epitaph. These words of
Goethe should do:
What they did, what they tried,

No person knows! That they loved,
That we know . . .
Not es
This section stands between the main text and the bibliography and
provides a guide to the sources I used, arranged by chapter and sub-
theme. To avoid tedious repetition, the references here are abbrevi-
ated according to the "Harvard system" (an author's name, followed
by a date and sometimes a page number; 'T." after a page number
means that page and those immediately following). The Harvard ref-
erences relate to the full references in the alphabetical bibliography.

Many things are not amplified in these notes, indicating that the
reference for what was said in the text can be found directly in the
bibliography. For example, ^vhen I say in Chapter 1 that "Richard
Leakey and Alan Walker have dated the Nariokotome skeleton to
1.6 million years ago," one should (after drawing an, I hope, only
slightly irritating blank under "Leakey and Walker" in the bibliogra-
phy) be able to unambiguously identify "Walker, A. and R. Leake\',

eds. 1994. The Nariokotome Homo Erectiu Skeleton. Berlin: Springer-
Verlag," as the work that contains the details of the dating (mostly
I've tried to get the author order right in the text, but this one caught
me out).
Although I have tried to put in as much as possible of what is
relevant, it is a wide field, and I know that I have missed much. The
works cited have their own bibliographies that can provide further
information for the curious or the skeptical.
Introduction
Beyond Nature
The opening quotation is from an English subtitle to words spoken

by the actor Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Luc Godard's film Pwrrot-
Le-Fou, released in 1965.

The Iceman.
The principal information about the Iceman came from Spindler's

Enghsh-language book (Spindler 1994), from w^hich the main quota-
tions also came, including the reported views of Torstein SJ0vold; I
also consulted Barfield 1994 and Egg et al. 1993. There is still some
dispute over the precise date of the Iceman, as the carbon- 14 analyses
enough agreement: 3300 B.C. is possible, but so is 200
are not in tight
years The Lambda Nachrichten quotation and some other ele-
later.
ments of the "gay rumor" were reported and spread more widely in
Wockner & Frings 1992. The report that Austrian ^vomen wanted to
be inseminated \vith Otzi's sperm was broadcast on the British news
comedy quiz "Have I Got News for You"; the European paper from
which the story purported to come was not identified, but I suppose
it to have some degree of truth behind it. I expended many fascinat-
ing days tracking Otzi rumors, usually dra^ving a blank; rumors, by

their very nature, may have no identifiable source of truth or false-
hood — in this case their existence is the interesting thing.
Darwin.
Darwin's evolutionary ideas Avere first presented in On the Origin, of
Specie.) (Darwin 1859); he developed the idea of sexual selection and

his theories of human evolution and the creation of racial diversity in
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex in 1871; my source
was the second edition (Darwin 1874).
Sociobiology.
There is a broad literature on sociobiology, supported by journals

such as Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology; I cite specific sources in var-
ious chapters, but a good overview^ from a sympathetic perspective
can be found in Ridley 1993 (with a useful bibliography); see also
Rasaetal. 1989.
Notes 27]
Freud and matriarchy.
Freud's strange claim that "anatomy is destiny" can be founfl in

Freud 1924-34, vol 5, p. 210; his yet stranger belle! that J 930s
America was a matriarchy is recorded in Steinem 1994, p. 37, foot-
note 1. His prejudice against clitorises (motivated by envy perhaps)
comes over best in German (Freud 1987: 165 — "Der Minderwer-
der Klitoris"). Matriarchy was most influentially postulated by
tigkeit
Bachofen in the early nineteenth century (see Bachofen 1973). I owe

the insight that Victorian ethnographers probably viewed egahty as
matriarchy to my friend and colleague Yuri Lesman of the Hermitage
Museum, St. Petersburg. Gimbutas's version of matriarchy, or ma-
triliny as she often later termed it, can be found in a series of works,
including Gimbutas 1981, 1982, 1989, and 1991. See Moore 1988 for
an overview of gender issues in anthropology.
Culture.
The general formulation of "culture" that I have used comes from

Ernest Gellner (Gellner 1989). Lamarck's idea that characteristics
acquired during life would be passed on was replaced, for biology, by
Darwinism and the development of genetics (Fisher 1930; Dobzhan-
sky 1937), but remains a metaphor for cultural inheritance.
Various biologists have attempted to theorize culture: Lumsden
& Wilson 1981 proposed the term culturgenj to mean individual cul-
tural traits or units ^vith some genetic correspondence. Dawkms
(1989: 192-201) has attempted to formulate a cultural counterpart
to genes — memes; this idea has recently been popularized hy
Dennett 1995 among others. Neither sociocultural anthropologists
nor archaeologists have found culturgens or memes particularK use-
ful ideas. One reason is that the artifacts that constitute the principal
evidence for early culture cannot really be dealt with like biological
taxa; they are not "replicated" as genes are, and their classification is
radically polj^hetic (see Clarke 1972 and Hodder 1986 for an appre-
ciation of the symbolic dimension). More satisfactory- formulations
of the problem of initial cultural emergence can be found in Gibson

& Ingold 1993.
Archaeology.
There are many good surveys of human cultural development as es-
tablished by archaeology: Scarre 1988 and Fagan 1989 are both at-
tractive and accessible. The ecofactual nature of the modern Greek

landscape is described by Runnels 1995. How archaeology arrives at
conclusions is well explained in Renfrew & Bahn 1991. For Rathje's
"garbage project," see Rathje 1984 and a useful summary in D. H.
Thomas 1989.
Anthropology and sex.
Anthropological approaches to sex were greatly influenced by the

theories of Malinowski (1927, 1929). Foucsiult's Hijton/ of Sexuality
(1981) is accessibly introduced and discussed by Giddens (1992, es-
pecially Chapter 2); see also Halperin et al. 1990. For the European-
inspired suppression of "alternative" sexuality among Native
Americans, see Walter Williams's groundbreaking book 1986.
Chapter 1
Making the Bea^t with Two Backs:

The Evolution of Human Sexual Culture
The ^vords from Shakespeare's Othello are spoken in Act 1, Scene 1.
Evolution.
The estimate that we share 98 percent of our genetic code with chim-
panzees has, for me, almost the same epistemological status as an ur-
ban myth; the estimate clearly turns on how a gene is defined (no
.
Notes 273
easy matter); Jared Diamond says 98.4 percent (reported in C^hazi

1993), while Daniel Dennett (1995: 112, footnote 7) says thai human
and chimpanzee DNA
"over 90 percent the same at every locus."
is
The two evolutionary sequence pictures discussed at the start of

the chapter come from Wendt 1971 and Wood 1976, respectively
One of the best general introductions to human evolution, cover-
ing both the historical development of thought and modern orthodox-
ies and controversies, is Jurmain & Nelson 1994. This well-illustrated
book provides basic essential summaries of the major fmdspots, such
as Laetoli and Olduvai, and individual fossil finds. Richards 1987 pro-
vides a very evenhanded treatment of rival arguments. The formal
aspects of the fossil material are well presented in Aiello and Dean
1990, while a good recent summary of the taxonomic position has been
provided by Wood 1992. Important issues of sexual dimorphism are
covered by Zihlman 1993.
For molecular clock approaches to primate speciation events (i.e.,
the calculation of an eight-million-year separation of human and chim-

panzee evolutionary lines), see Marks 1995; Rouhani 1989; for the Rift
Valley topographic and climatic separation theory, see Coppens 1994.
Although literature in the field of human evolution goes out ot
date with startling rapidity, there are several popular accounts that
capture the excitement of research and still contain much of value.
Leakey & Lewin 1977 is a thoughtful overview; Leakey 1981 is wide-
ranging and Avell illustrated; "Lucy" and related discoveries can be
read about in Johanson & Edey 1981 and Johanson & Shreeve 1991.
The Nariokotome skeleton is described and set in its place within
current thinking in Walker & Leakey 1994, including Walker 199h
(they call it Homo erecUUy in common with most scholars in the field,
whereas I have followed Wood in calling it Homo ergcuter; this has no
implications for the points I am making)
Hunting and swimming.
Man-the-hunter theory can be found in Ardrey 1976 and Morris 19b7;

Hurcombe s quotation comes from her recent discussion ol it (1995).
I
The aquatic theory was first postulated by Hardy 1960, and de-
veloped by Morgan 1982, 1984, 1985. Recently it has been supported
by Morris 1994, ^vhile Richards gives it fair-minded, although to my
mind overgenerous, treatment (1987: 193-204).
Walking, nakedness, and breasts.
Various debates concerning the development of human breasts are

outlined in Gallup 1982 and N. W. Smith 1986.
On the general evolution of nakedness see Lunde 1984; Lunde
& Gr0ttum 1984; Montagna 1983; Ebling 1985; the thermal argu-
ment that connects upright ^valking and nakedness has been Avell de-
veloped by Wheeler (1985, 1992), ^vhile quotations from Pete
Wheeler and Russell Tuttle were taken verbatim from a television
program ("Some Liked It Hot," Horizon, BBC2, 1994); the program

also presented Dean Falk's "radiator" theory in some detail. Upright
Avalking is also discussed by Lovejoy 1988. The throwing hypothesis
is reviewed and supported by Kniisel 1992; for the Laetoli footprints,
see Leakey and Harris 1987.
Sexual implications of upright walking are the subject of a stim-
ulating discussion by Sheets- Johnstone 1990.
Sexual selection.
Darwin's idea of sexual selection is not universally popular; Darwin

quotations are as follows: on page 26 from 1874: 857; page '54 on
nakedness from 1874: 916; page 35 defining sexual selection, from
1874: 939. An edited volume to mark the centenary of the idea was
produced by Bernard Campbell (1972); his introduction is of special
interest, as are the chapters by Caspari, Crook, Fox, and Mayr. Nev-
ertheless, ^vriting in the nineties, Dennett, a strong defender of Dar-
winism, finds space only for a single reference to sexual selection
(1995: 352). See also Ghiselin 1974; Low 1979. Marion Petrie's work
(reported in Ferry 1994) shows that the peacock example may not be
as clear-cut as Darwin thought (cf. Dawkins 1995).
Notes 275
For the argument that human brains were sex-selected, see

Wills 1993. Despite a close relationship with his wife, Darwin seems
not to have considered motivational factors in his slight lifetime pre-
ponderance of backgammon wins over her (see Desmond & Moore
1991: 562, etc., for a description of the games, which sometimes
drew spectators). The assumption of female inferiority in subse-
quent accounts of human evolution is reviewed by Erskine 1995;
Hrdy 1981 represents a systematic challenge to the idea. See also
Fedigan 1986; Lancaster 1991; Tanner & Zihlman 1976. The
Mate Recognition System (SMRS) has been advanced by
Specific
Patterson (1985).
Sperm competition.
Sperm competition in animals is the subject of a useful edited volume

by R. L. Smith (1984a), whose own paper (Smith 1984b) focuses on
hominids. For modern humans, the recent work by Baker and Bellis
is of great interest (Baker & Bellis 1993, 1995; Baker 1996). For pri-
mate penises, see Dixson 1987; Margulis & Sagan (1991) present
some theories of their own.
Lucy's pelvis.
The controversy over the reconstruction of the obstetric pelvis of
"Lucy" is difficult for a nonspecialist like me to follow. The initial for-
mulation was Tague & Lovejoy 1986; I was swayed by arguments

against Lucy being female, presented by Hausler & Schmid (1995),
not having seen Ruff's clearly articulated objections until just before
this book went to press (Ruff 1995). Overall, it is not possible to be
certain about whether Lucy was female or male, but more specialists
support the former. Karen Rosenberg's research on "the origins of the
midwife" was summarized by Bunney (1993); her view, shared hy
Ruff, that the heads of australopithecine fetuses passed trans\-ersely
through the pelvis seems, on balance, most likely.
Those interested in birth among Neanderthals, which 1 did not

.
discuss in the book, should consult Trinkaus 1984; Rak & Arensburg
1987; Tompkins & Trinkaus 1987; Tague 1992. There is a suggestion
that Neanderthals may have had a twelve-month gestation period,
but how this could fit into a model of seasonally fluctuating food is
unclear to say the least (for example, both the nine-month gestation
in humans and the twenty-one-month gestation in elephants allows
for pregnancy at the end of a three-month season of plenty, v^hen nu-
trients are most easily available and body-fat reserves have been
topped up, and birth at the beginning of another such season).
Biology, culture, and language.
For the interplay between biology and culture in human evolution, see
Irons 1979; Ingold 1993a, 1993b; Wynn 1993. My idea of a flexible,
gendered division of labor, rather than a rigid sexual one, among early
hominids is in sympathy with Zihlman's view that "the overall behav-
ioral flexibility of both sexes [Avas] a major contributing factor to early
hominid survival" (1993: "54). One or two researchers have previously
draAvn attention to the potential importance of baby-carrying slings
(see BoJen 1992: SA, with references to Zihlman and others), but the
problem of lack of direct evidence may remain insuperable.
The debate about the emergence of human language, singing,
and speech is complex and currently unresolvable (Falk 1987, 1989;
Isaac 1989; Arensburg, Schepartz, et al. 1990). On the one hand,
chimpanzees seem to be able to master some elements of language us-
ing signs (Gardner et al. 1989); on the other hand, some scholars
doubt whether even Neanderthals could produce and understand
rapidly spoken language (Noble and Davidson 1991; Milo & Ouiatt
1993, Avith a useful collection of responses — both strongly critical and
supportive — from other researchers). For the possibilities of speech
at 1.6 million years ago, see MacLarnon 1994 and Walker 1994 (a
thumbs-dow^n)
Behind the technical debates I sense a problem with conceptual-
izing one or two million years of hominids with language but no
progress"; we find it hard to envisage our remote ancestors talking
Notes 277
but not planning to build something. The conservatism oFthe surviv-

ing material cultural record — hundreds of thousands of years with
the same sort of basic stone tools — is viewed as a result of lack of in-
telligence. I believe language started to emerge very early, and devel-
oped very slowly. wonder whether bipedalism itself, emerging from
I
four million years ago onward, was not an integral, bio-cultural ele-
ment in the process that freed the abdominal cavity for ever more
complex vocalization. That is, rather than seeing upright v/alking as a
prerequisite (or "exaptation" in Gould & Vrba's 1981 terminology)
for speech, the two features emerged in positive feedback. Both
singing (Richman 1993) and "vocal grooming" (Aiello and Dunbar
1993) would have been good candidates for sexual selection. By "full
language" (page 50), I mean a grammatical system that can be con-
tinuously extended.
If language and faking orgasm were connected, the process
vôuld not necessarily have been sex-selected; She magazine (Nov.
1995: 103) reports that in a survey of 2,000 men virtually all admitted
to faking orgasm sometimes.
Chapter 2
Skull Sex and Brain Sex
The Greer quotations come from The Female Eunuch, first published m
1970 (1993: 35). The Sworn Virgins of Albania, who still exist, are
best described by Exlith Durham 1985 (original 1909).
Skeletal sex.
The sexing of human skeletons and genetic sexing is described in gen-

eral terms in Jurmain and Nelson 1994; for sexual dimorphism
see
Richards 1987: 157; Crook 1972; Joan Silk in Miller, ed.. 1995: 216 ff.
Tim Ingold's observations on walking styles and skeletal development
were made in a TAG (Theoretical Archaeology^ Group) conference

278 .
The P re h it) to ry of Sex
session at the University of Durham in 1993. I o^ve most of my under-

standing of pelvic growth to Charlotte Roberts and Chris Kniisel.
Orgasm and spandrels.
Gould's view of the clitoris is in Gould 1995. The view^s of Sigmund

Freud, Alfred Kinsey and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy on vaginal versus cli-
toral orgasm are reprised in Gould 1995. The spandrel idea and the
concept of exaptation (developed by Gould with Lewontin and Vrba,
respectively) have recently been the subject of serious criticism by
Dennett. Dennett says that "there will aWays be plenty of unde-
signed features in a system that is maximally wêll designed " (1995:
276); Gould argues that such features may be a later focus of evolu-
tion; starting as unselected "exaptive" by-products, they can become

adapted. But Dennett does not agree, providing the follovîng exam-
ple (p. 280): "The Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp . . . wôuld not
have been exapting a jpandrel w^hen he appropriated a urinal as his ob-
jet trouve and called it a sculpture, since the urinal had a function in its
earlier life. "

Nevertheless, to me this example — under a different in-
terpretation — seems to prove Gould's point. Duchamp did not take a
urinal and call it art simply by signing it "R. Mutt "; he exhibited it in
an art gallery in a new orientation, so that the part normally mounted

flush to the wâll projected at right angles and formed a suspended
base, and enabling the triangular array of urine drainage holes to be
seen as part of the features of a face, w^hile the pearlike curves of the
^vhole suggested a female form, not unlike that of many prehistoric
Venus figurines. Symbolically, Duchamp turned a receptacle for male
fluid (urine) towârd w^hich a penis wâs pointed into a female form
that might accept a penis and a different male fluid (semen).
Duchamp thus developed latent associations and provided new^ visual
"functions" for forms that had been produced for a different purpose
(the original urinal being the product of necessary design decisions
and their various subordinate formal implications — spandrels). My

understanding of Gould and Vrba's idea of "exaptation" is broadly
Notes 279
this.For a good bio-cultural example of exaptation, see notes to

Chapter 8 on intersex individuals.
For lemur clitorises see Russell 1993; for hyena clitorises, and a
good overview of recent advances in understanding animal sex, see
Crews 1994.
Hippocratic gynecology.
Hippocratic gynecology was unfavorably reviewed by King 1988; the

best introduction to the corpus, from which my quotations come, is
Lloyd 1978. Modern data on female ejaculation, described in the
Hippocratic corpus, comes from experiments by Perry & Whipple,

reported in Hooper 1994: 76. My description of endometriosis comes
from the Endometriosis Society's entry in Phillips and Rakusen 1989:
515—18; as far as I know, my interpretation of Hippocrates s "wan-
dering womb " is novel.
Brain sex.
Matt Ridley (1993: 248) speculates that it "would be easy to engineer
a society with no sex difference in attitude between men and women.

Inject all pregnant women with the right dose of hormones and the
result would be men and women with normal bodies, but identical
feminine brains." In such a world, according to Ridley, "War, rape,

boxing, motor racing, pornography, beer and hamburgers would
soon be distant memories. A feminist paradise would have arri\ed.
Aside from the fact that this ignores some level of documented in-
volvement by women in everything on the hst, this is a grotesque
overstatement of brain differences.
For neuropsychological theories, see Newcombe ^' Ratclitt
1978, McGlone 1980, Edelman 1990, Kimura 1992, Short c^' Balaban
for the
1994; for the cultural creation of sex roles, see O'Brien 1992:
For
prospect of fuller bio-cultural explanations, see Begley 1995.
transsexual brains, see Tully 1992 for an overview (also Radford

1995); for a skeptical vievv^, see Raymond 1979.
Genetic sex.
Maria Martinez Patino s reinstatement as a female competitor in

international athletics is presumably a matter of record, but my
information is informal insofar as I gleaned it from news reports on
television for which I have no details. For Klinefelter's syndrome
(XXY, but also XXXY and XXYY), mosaics, and other chromoso-
mal abnormalities, see Warne et al. 1993, and Harry Brierley in
Howells, ed., 1984: 75ff.; of Klinefelter's, Brierley says, "it is not
clear why these cases are regarded as male with an extra X chromo-
some rather than female ^vith a Y. . . . The Klinefelter has been quot-
ed in older textbooks as sometimes transvestite, fetishistic and
sometimes homosexual. Of course such sexual behaviours are likely
to be sought out in the examination of individuals seen at the outset
as having sexual problems and they merit no wide generalization."

The transvestite and homosexual labels can be rendered meaningless
according to how biological sex is described, but make sense if the

gender choice of the genetic-sex-ambivalent individual is accorded
priority. Actually XXY individuals can be functionally female: the
female bodybuilder Bev Francis is on record "A Bulgarian
as saying,
vôman was forced to retire because she had XXY — so she went
home and had a baby. Who decides Avhat a woman is?" (reported in
Steinem 1994: 113f.).
Warne et al. 1993 describe a strongly hostile response to the

prospect of medical treatment for an intersex condition in an Aus-
tralian aboriginal community. The Mesopotamian jag-ur-dag are de-,
scribed in Leick 1994.

The one-per-thousand figure for clinically recognized intersex
individuals is given by Glatzl (1987), w^ho provides a useful overview^
of the various conditions. The relative prevalence of intersex individ-
uals in any given community will depend on many factors. We should

probably not assume that there is a standard congenital rate. It may
Notes 281
be that intersex individuals are less prevalent under conditions ol en-

vironmental stress, where the female body is less likely to "lake a
chance" on producing a child with a genetic coding defect: in one

study of pregnancy and reproduction among 268 prisoners in the
United States, 136 spontaneous abortions and stillbirths were
recorded, against 373 live births with a zero incidence of birth de-
fects, whereas, among the general population, an average of 27 birth
defects would be expected (and correspondingly fewer abortions and
stillbirths).
Childbirth and motherhood.
For Beit Shamesh, see Zias et al. 1993; for Worthy Park and other
obstetric hazards documented through archaeology, see Wells 1975
and 1978. For childbirth as a critical component of gender systems, see
Callaway 1978. For the Hua, see Peoples and Bailey 1994: 359-61.
Th e gay gene.
Dick Swaab's research was reported in Radford 1994. The "gay

gene" was postulated by teams led by LeVay and Hamer (LeVay and
Hamer 1994); see response by Byne 1994. For Athenian sexuality,
see Halperin et al. 1990. For male gender, see Gilmore 1990.
Chapter 3
Mysteries of the Organism
The Dawkins quotation is a compaction (representatixe, 1 hope) ot
three sentences in The Seijuh Gene (second edition 1989: 201):

"We.
alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of selfish replicators

and the footnote to it (p. 331): "We, that is our brains, are separate
and independent enough from our genes to rebel against them. As al-
ready noted, we do so in a small way every time we use contracep-

tion." My heuristic postulation of a "free ^viH" gene (p. 85) can be
seen to relate to Dawkins's belief (1982: 11) that "human nervous
systems are so complex that in practice we can forget about deter-
minism and behave as if we had free will."
The ground rules of British censorship of erotic imagery are un-
known in a positive sense and can only be deduced from the recorded
instances of past prosecution. The goalposts seem to shift from year
to year; photographs of erect penises, and soft-focus, distance images
of penetration, have recently avoided prosecution when presented
within an explicitly sex-educational context.
The Soviet "glass of water" idea is well known to my Russian
colleagues; it smacks of Lenin, but I'm not sure if it is his phrase.
Definitions of sex.
The ultrasound image of in utero masturbation was made in the River-

side Perinatal Clinic, \^rginia; the estimate of the average age for the
onset of masturbation in children (made defining masturbation

broadly as digital genital manipulation, rather than necessary or-
gasm) was made by Gene Abel of the Behavioral Medicine Institute
of Atlanta; my source for both was the Channel 4 television program.

Equinox, "Beyond Love," (1995). From a bio-cultural perspective, I
presume that the ^videspread use of diapers in the modern Western

^vorld must impact on emergent sexuality, as it insulates the genitals
from such manipulation for much of infancy. This again suggests, as I
have argued throughout, that there L) no easy objective measure of

"natural" human sexual response — culture plays a part from the very
outset (see Ortner and Whitehead 1981).
Hewitt (1983: 151) quotes a description of the perfected yogin
in the following terms: "for them an erotic relationship with the
external wôrld operates between that world and every single nerve
ending. Their whole organism — physical, psychological and spiri-
tual — is an erogenous zone. Their flow of love is not channelled as
exclusively in the genital system as is most other people's." This
Notes 283
finds some resonance in the West in some of the ideas of Reich

(Rycroft 1971; Giddens 1992).
The Posner quotations come from Posner (1992: 91). For the
history of sex studies in general, see also M. Diamond 1984, Mall
1994, Rusbridger 1986, Bullough 1995. Masters and Johnson 1966 is
a milestone; Fricker 1994 has a useful update of facts and statistics.
The field is a vast one and there is no space to provide a comprehen-

sive guide to it here even ^vere I competent.
Primate sexuality.
For the electric toothbrush experiment, see Burton 1971. The zoolog-
ical statement on animal bisexual potential comes from page 24 OE of
my 1948 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannlca, volume 20, "Sexual Be-
haviour," by Frank A. Beach, then Chairman and Curator of the De-

partment of Animal Behavior at the American Museum of Natural
History.
The Jolly quotation came from Wavell 1995. Other bonobo data
came from de Waal (1995) and "Monkey in the Mirror," The Natural
World, BBC2 (1995). The most up-to-date summary of homosexual
behavior in primates is Vasey 1995. See also Susman 1987.
Human sexuality.
I am grateful to Professor Bruce Trigger of McGill University for
discussion of sexual license among North American Indian groups

and underrepresentation in ethnographic accounts. See also
its
Williams 1986. The Liedloff quotation is as cited in Jackson 1989.

Robin Baker's figures for the lifetime tally of sexual partners
for "most readers" is problematic. He cites a skewed male:temale

lifetime sexual partner ratio of 12:8 (Baker 1995: 275). This is
clearly impossible as a mean average in a society with broadU- equal
numbers of men and women. On an imaginar\^ island inhabited {ov

fifty years by just twelve men and twelve women, each man would
eventually have to have sex with every woman, but each woman
would somehow have to have sex ^vith only eight of the men Baker !
suggests that modal differences — variations in the pattern — explain

the figures. In my island example eleven of the men could total two
sexual relationships each while eleven of the ^vomen could be
monogamous; the remaining woman could eventually have sex with
all twelve men, including the twelfth man, Avho would be monoga-
mous with her; the mean average for men and women ^vould even
out, as it must (in this case to 1.9167 sexual partners each), but it
would be true to say that most men had twô partners ^vhile most
Avomen had one. Such considerations could technically explain
Baker's figures if his sample was statistically biased such that, for
example, each of his men had had four of their twelve sexual con-
tacts Avith prostitutes and none of his female sample Avere themselves
prostitutes. But I feel that reporting biases are far more likely to be
at the root of most of the discrepancy, as I suggest.
Rape and its apologists.
The Baker quotation is 1996: 318.
Contraception.
Sir James Biment, an eminent British entomologist, made his re-

marks on a televised version of "Notes and Queries, hosted by Clive
"
Anderson; I took dow^n his words verbatim but do not have a record
of the transmission date. The Pitt- Rivers quotation came from Himes
1970. Malthus's views about hunting groups Avere recorded in Gam-
ble 1994. For Hippocrates, see Lloyd 1978. A good survey for more
recent history is McLaren 1990. For ancient recipes and the reports
of Skarzynski, Butenandt, and Jacobi, see Riddle 1992, Riddle et al.
1994. I relied heavily on these sources for the contraceptive plant de-
tail. For the Melanesian magistrate's statement, see Himes 1970: 31.
Notes 285
Dastur 1962 lists contraceptives used in Ayurvedic medicine. My in-

formation on the Deni Indians and the Saami was from Gordon Hill-
man, a paleobotanist at the Institute of Archaeology, London. l"or
estrogenic effects of hops, see Mabey 1989. I am very grateful to Paul
Vasey for agreeing to go on record vîth his tentative hypoth esis
about the possibility of herbal abortifacient use among orangutan s.
Infanticide is discussed by Riddle, and by Hausfater and Hrdy
(1984). See also Bernds and Barash 1979.
Chapter 4
Meet the Real Flintstones
The Nancy Friday quotation is from Women on Top (1991: 14).
Earliest art.
There has been some debate over whether the Berekhat Ram object
(Goren-Inbar 1986) has been artistically wôrked; pending full publi-
cation of the site, Alex Marshack, who has examined the piece, is
convinced that it has been (personal communication, Marshack

1990). Makapansgat is well illustrated in Morris 1994. For early
ocher, see Knight, Power, and Watts 1995.
Menstruation and ovulation.
The detail of the sex strike theory is developed in Knight 1991,

1994a, 1994b, Knight and Maisels 1994 (from which I quote). Knight
and Power 1994, Knight, Power, and Watts 1995, Power 199-^. L:)un-
bar's summary of Knight 1991 is in Dunbar 1992, from which the

quotation is taken. Studies of menstrual synchrony and marginal fer-
tility are reviewed in Shuttle and Redgrove 1994: 149f. and 185F. Fer-
286 ,
The Prehistory of Sex
tility awareness — ovulation pain, mucus, etc. — is outlined by

fertile
Fiona McCloskey in Phillips and Rakusen 1989: 37. Frolov's pro-

posed lunar calendar is outlined in Renfre^v and Bahn 1991: "546. See
also Manson 1986.
It may appear inconsistent that I have recorded Hrdy's observa-
tion that concealed ovulation is not unique to humans Avhen I claim
not to believe in concealed ovulation in humans. The problem is vvîth
the terminology; it seems better to talk of a group of primates, includ-
ing humans, in whom ovulation is not primarily visually signaled, but
among whom it is nonetheless signaled through changed behavior
and smell (for smell, see Stoddart 1990).
Shanidar, Doura, Skhul.
Solecki's and subsequent work at Shanidar, and ^vork at Skhul, is
usefully summarized in Trinkaus 1983. I am grateful to Gordon Hill-
man for information on borage processing at Doura. For the con-

stituents of breast milk, see Palmer 1988 and Newman 1995.
Ice Age Eurasia.
Good summaries of the climatic and cultural background can be

found in Champion et al. 1984, Chapter 2, and Mellars 1994. I am
grateful to Chris Kniisel for the report of David Frayer's assessment
of the hip condition of the central figure in the Dolni Vestonice
triple burial.
Chapter 5
Venus in Furs
The Joan Bamberger quotation comes from her article "The Myth of
Matriarchy" (1974).
Notes 287
Ice Age art in Eurasia.
The best general introductions are Marshack 1972 and Balm anrl
Vertut 1988. The Venus figurines are given the fullest treatment in
Delporte 1993. See also articles by Marshack; Gvozdover 1995 lor
eastern Venuses; and Neugebauer-Maresch 1993 for the context of
Willendorf. For their distribution, see Mellars 1994: 72. I have only
read one of Jean Auel's Ice Age novels (Auel 1990)— it is a ripping
yarn despite Ayla's physique.
Opinions.
The views of Absolon (1949) are discussed in Delporte 1993; the

quotations from Leroi-Gourhan and Guthrie, along with the reported
views of Gobert, Jude, and Piette, can all be found in Delporte 1993
(in French; retranslating Guthrie has probably altered his phraseol-
ogy some^vhat, but his drift seems clear enough). Singh's work was
reported in Horgan 1995: 150. See Grayson 1993 for the Donner
Party disaster. Leroi-Gourhan s theories are well presented in Bahn
and Vertut 1988. The Bahn quotation is from Bahn 1986; for the
vulva debate, see Bahn 1986 and Lee 1986. Bahn warns me that
there is a rumor to the effect that the Gorge d'Enfer double baton
(Fig. 5.9) was a specially commissioned fake, and that there is also
doubt about the antiquity of the red painting around the cave fissure
at Niaux (p. 133); for Gorge d'Enfer at least, my view is that there
has been so little made of the phallic nature of the batons that such a
rumor is quite likely to stem from a prudish "protection" ol Pale-
olithic reputations and concomitant unwillingness to discuss prehis-
toric sexuality openly. This is not to say that the possible sexual
aspects of Ice Age art have not been discussed before, just that hex- i
have either been discussed in an extremely conventional manner

(viewing the art essentially as pinups for male consumption) or as ab-
stract and symbolic (Leroi-Gourhan 's structural approach): temmist-
inspired approaches have reacted against sexist naivete b\ attomptina

1
to remove much of the art from a sexual realm, rather than postulat-
ing active female involvement in Ice Age sexual culture. The quota-
tion from Clive Gamble came from McKie 1995.
Chapter 6
The Milk of the Vulture Goddess
The Winston Churchill quotation came from a radio broadcast of 2

March 1943, recorded in Complete Speeches (1974), volume 7, and ab-
stracted in T/pe Concue Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (expanded edi-
tion of 1993), page 99, number 21.
Scene setting.
For modern human global expansion, see Fagan 1989. For the European
Mesolithic, see Alithen 1994, \vith details of the Skateholm burial and
Lepenski Vir; Mithen is informative on health differences among various
Mesolichic populations. See also Meiklejohn and Zvelebil 1991.
Neolithic economy.
The came from Pearce (1994: 30) and is typical

"squirrel" quotation
of many along the same lines. "Amazon-style felling" was the headline
to an article by Keys 1989. General perspectives on Neolithic Europe
are provided by Whittle 1994, Hodder 1990, and Gebauer and Price
1992. For a gradualist vie^v of forest clearance and subsistence
change in Britain, see J. Thomas 1991. The Gimbutas quotation
(p. 148) comes from 1982: 11; her assertion that Neolithic cosmology
was an extension of Paleolithic cosmology is developed more fully in
1989: XV—xxiii. The Meaden quotation is from Meaden 1991: 214.
Childe's views and the site of Jericho are outlined in Fagan 1989.
Notes 289
Gender relations.
Data on Caddoan Mounds and Mississippi valley cultures' nutri-

tional status can be found in Cohen 1993 (see Cohen 1989 for a clas-
sic overview of developing health problems among humans). For
basic demographic issues, see Hassan 1981; see also Wailes 1984,
R. B. Lee 1972. Lactational birth control is described in Palmer
1988; see also La Leche League International 1981: 316F. F'or
wômen's role in early plant domestication, see articles in Gero and
Conkey 1991.
The Mother Goddess theory.
The Gimbutas quotation relating to Qatal Hiiyiik (p. 156) is 1989:

107, caption to figure 177); that relating to Hagar Qim (p. 159) is
1989: 106, caption to figure 167. 1 made the suggestion that each fe-
male figurine might contain a seed because it might — as far as I
know, no one has ever looked.

For variability in, and ways of calculating, the duration of full-
term pregnancy in humans, see B. van der Kooy 1994.
Neolithic cultures in Europe.
In general see Whittle 1994.The Spanish evidence for violent death

can be found in Campillo et al. 1993. Mithen (1994) summarized
compatible evidence for the preceding Mesolithic period. The idea
that permanent longhouses might have provided privacy was put to
me during a seminar I gave on this chapter at the Department of Ar-
chaeology, University of Southampton; I believe it was attributed.
but to whom do not know. At the same seminar Michael R\ der
I
kindly informed me of the rules of open-air sexual decorum amoui:

pastoral nomads. An isolated Inuit lovers' camp is described b\ Bin-
ford 1983.
Chapter 7
The Grave of the Golden Penis
The opening Mikon quotation is from Faradue Regained, Book 4: 220.

My opening words may appear to be an attempt to shoot myself in
the foot after my disavowal of biological determinism and support

for a fluid anthropological concept of gender in earlier chapters. I
hope the meaning becomes clear: it is a gender distinction based on

the cultural exploitation of biology in terms of an unprecedented
reduction in birth spacing achieved by
strict weaning regimes, pro-
ducing demographic and emotional effects conducive to the

strengthening of the martial element in society. Within such a sys-
tem Stonehenge could, of course, have been ordered by a ^voman —
one like Margaret Thatcher.
Secondary products.
For Talheim, see Spindler 1994: 25 If. For secondary products, see
Sherr^,tt 1994; Peter Bogucki has argued that the use of bovine
milk may have begun with the initial LBK cultures (Bogucki
1986). The ability to digest milk is not shared by all adult human
populations; the development of dairy farming is connected to
selection for lactose tolerance among early farming groups (see
Jurmain and Nelson 1994: 153f.). Archaeological and osteological
evidence for weaning was reviewed by Sholl (1995); see also
Moogi-Cecchi et al. 1994, Fildes 1988, Stuart MacAdam and
Dettwyler, forthcoming.
Rock art.
For the Val Camonica rock art, see Anati 1965. For Siberia, see Mar-
tynov 1991. The homosexual interpretation of one of the Bohuslan
Notes 291
scenes was made by Tim Yates. For the historical development of the
social aspects of human-animal relationships, see K. Thomas 1983.
Varna.
The most accessible source is Katincarov, Mohen et al. 1989. The

skull photograph from Grave 45 has a very protuberant chin that
may be pathological; while the general stature and robusticity of the
skeleton would normally indicate male sex, the ascription must re-
main uncertain. The possibility that the original burial was prone
(facedov\^n) is based on a published photograph (Georgiev 1979: 78);
I am grateful to Chris Kniisel for sharing his thoughts on this with

me. The Hazda myth of the woman with the zebra's penis was
recorded by James Woodburn and recently discussed in Knight and
Power 1994.
Divine masturbation.
Pyramid Utterance 527 is translated in Rundle Clark 1959. Addi-

tional information on Egypt came from Bruce Trigger. For
Mesopotamia, see Leick 1994. The Zuni "spring riding" is described
in Fulton and Anderson 1992. The Larisa figurine is in Gimbutas

1989: 181, figure 281.
Megaliths.
For plow marks under British barrows, see Fowler and E\'ans 1967;
compare Patzold 1960. The Sharp quotation is in Sharp 1989: 76.
Newgrange solstice is described in Patrick 1974. For Kintraw. see
Sharp 1989: lOlf. John Barber's paper "Infanticide in prehistory"
was presented at the autumn 1993 meeting of the Neolithic Studies
Group at the British Museum on the theme "Women and Children in
the Neolithic"; the Ian Kinnes quotation came from Beaumont 199o.
Learned helplessness.
"Learned helplessness "

(Seligman 1975; Peterson, Maier, and Selig-
man 1993) is a very specific theory that I have probably misrepre-
sented here, firstly by being too brief in describing it and secondly in
trying to impute it to a prehistoric situation where it cannot be tested

(although the theory has been applied, Avith the approbation of its pi-
oneers, to the personality of Saint Paul as deduced from his Nev^ Tes-
tament writings (Peterson, Maier, and Seligman 1993: 248-49). My
"for instance" about weaning is not an example Seligman et al. use;
rigid routine is not their prescription for curing learned helplessness,

but figures as a potential ameliorating factor or strategy in some of
the cases and results they describe. The Alison Sheridan quotation
comes from Beaumont 1993.
Food, gender, and sex.
The connection between food and sexuality is investigated by Fiddes

(1991) in a chapter on sex and meat; gender issues in contemporary
food production are analyzed by Ferguson 1994.
Chapter 8
Shamans and Amazons
The RuPaul quotation is a catchphrase of his; my source ^vas an in-
tervie^v in Phcue magazine, issue 2, April 1994: 32.
Gender and metal.
For Lanhill, see J. Thomas 1991: 120 (all the caveats about sexing
uncertainties must apply); Harrison 1980 and Sherratt 1994 outline
the Beaker period. I am grateful to Bruce Albert at Durham for dis-
Notes 293
cussion of putative biological female Beaker graves with daggers. As-

sumptions about gender and metal in this period are discussed by
Budd and Taylor (1995). The Reid and MacLean quotation is 1995:
149. For the development of metals in the East and the formation ol a
Eurasian cultural zone, see Chernykh 1992 and Taylor 1994.
Iron Age evidence.
For Pazyryk and Letnitsa, and an overview of Thracians, Scythians,

etc., see Taylor 1994. This also deals with Amazons, for whom also
see David 1976a and 1976b, Lloyd 1978, Rolle 1989 (with descrip-
tions of Aul Stepan Zminda and Chertomlyk), Rolle et al. 1991, Wei-
degger 1986, Williams 1986 (for the naming of Amazonia). While

some Soviet and former Soviet scholars have discussed shamanic
transvestism among extant peoples of the Soviet/Russian empire
(e.g., Basilov 1978), general sexual repression meant that sexual as-
pects of prehistory could not be easily theorized (one of the foremost
Leningrad/St. Petersburg archaeologists has spent time in prison
camp on a homosexuality charge: see Taylor 1993).
I am indebted to Alex Bursche for discussion of his work in
progress on Roman brothel tokens. For dituLi art, see Kastelic 1965,
Boardman 1971, Bonfante 1981 and 1985. For the background to

Hochdorf, see Cunliffe 1994. For Greek and Roman erotica, see Johns
1982. For the origins and spread of sj^philis, see Dutour et al. 1994.
Enarees.
For ethnographic descriptions of berdaches, see Fulton and Antic r-

erms
son 1992; Williams 1986. In narrow, biological evolutionar\ ten
those intersex individuals who cannot (or otherwise do not) ph\ si-
cally breed cannot be seen as adaptive. When given special cultural
status, however, they can be considered exapted spandrels (see notes

to Chapter 2). The interpretation of lines in Ovid's poetr\- was sug-
gested by one of my students, Rhian Evans, herself a postoperatn e
male-to-female transsexual; I had read Ovid before, but had made

nothing of the hnes that now seem so significant. The quotations are
from Grene's translation. For the Sokolova "priestess, "
see Kovpa-
nenko 1991. For the Gundestrup cauldron, see Klindt- Jensen 1979,
Kaul 1991, Bergquist and Taylor 1987, Taylor 1992. For Cernunnos,
also see Bober 1951.
Sex and death.
For Harald Bluetooth, and the possible rape victim at Worthy Park,
see Hawkes and Wells 1975, from which the quotations from Tacitus
(p. 219) and Wulfstan come. My colleague Charlotte Roberts, Avho
now heads the Calvin Wells Laboratory at Bradford, believes that
Ha^vkes and Wells were too firm in their diagnosis of rape, and sug-
gests that many other events could have caused similar trauma. Yet
the historical evidence and the lack of grave goods suggest to me that
the Hawkes and Wells interpretation remains the most likely. For
bog bodies in general, see Glob 1969, Brothvvêll 1986.
Don Brothwell informs me that a forensic test for semen has

never been part of the analytical procedure with ancient preserved
bodies; Avhen mummified or freeze-dried, semen preserves very
well (A. Gallop in Radford 1994), yet freeze-dried bodies have not
been tested (e.g., Harthansen et al. 1991). For those that remain
skeptical that sex and death may be culturally conjoined in later
prehistoric and early medieval Europe, Sass (1995) provides a use-

ful translation of the tenth-century A.D. Arab diplomat Ibn
Fadlan's account of chiefly burial among the Rus, in \vhich a ser-
vant girl is required to have sexual intercourse ^vith seven men
before being ritually killed.
Rituals and clothing.
For Germanic religious transvestism, see Kniisel and Ripley (forth-
coming). I am indebted to the Rev. Dr. Anders Bergquist for infor-

Notes 295
mation on later medieval baptism ceremonies. My informalion on

Cerne Abbas came from Cooper 1994. The cross-dressecJ fcross-
wrapped?) Egyptian mummy is British Museum Cat. No. PjM6704.
and is illustrated in Putnam 1993: 49. Scyles's Greek dress is de-
scribed by Herodotus Herodotus 1987: 4.78-80). The Vlx
(see burial
and controversy is outlined in Arnold 1991.
Chapter 9
The Return of the Beast vîth Two Backs:

Sex and the Prehistory of Race
The Baker quotation is in Baker 1974: 96.
The history of race.
Baker's typological view of race was already becoming outmoded in
book contains a wealth of historical detail; see also

1974, but his
Coon 1962 and Cole 1965. The last gasp of this way of thinking is,
according to Moore (1995), epitomized in Cavalli-Sforza and Cavalli-
Sforza 1995. For a different perspective, see Dobzhansky 1972 and
most recently Brace 1995. Darwin's information on human-subt\'pe-
specific lice came from the surgeon of a Avhaling ship (Desmond and
Moore 1991: 155). Information on the last of the Tasmanians can also
be found in Baker.
Bruce Trigger (1989) provides a thorough introduction to issues
of race in archaeology that used as a source for Peyrere, Rousseau,

1
"psychic unity," etc. For Gobineau, Pouchet, and Vogt, see Baker
1974. The Timed report on Romanes was cited in Desmond ant!
Moore 1991:633.
For the history of research on Neanderthals, see Richards 1*^)8/ .
Jurmain and Nelson 1994, Shreeve 1995. Wills (1993: 56) considers
the possibility of a frozen Neanderthal "Otzi" being tound and re-
solving the species debate by yielding analyzable mitochondrial
DNA. For Piltdo^vn, see Gould 1981. The Orce conference is not yet
published: see Denison 1995a for a report.
Ch osen ones.
The Vogt quotation (p. 234) is given in Baker 1974. The Darwin
and Galton quotations (p. 236) come from Desmond and Moore
(1991: 521 and E>67) along with the account of Galton's lagomorph-
blood transfusion experiments. All Giinther quotations can be
found in Giinther 1927. Trigger 1989 provides a good outline of
Kossinna's career and references to Eliot Smith. Tom of Finland
vâs a noted homoerotic artist; the Tom of Finland Foundation is in
Los Angeles; an example of his ^vork is reproduced in Muthesius et
al. 1993: 27. Himmler's interpretation of Ice Age Venuses ^vas dis-
cussed by Pete Stone in an article in the World Archaeology CongredJ
newsletter/magazine around 1988. My reference for the
Hobsbawm quotation is even worse, as I cannot remember where I
read it, but my notes are verbatim, so if the source was correct
then the quotation is. On eugenics today, see Horgan 1993.
Race, Fonnenkreu, species.
Kant's thoughts on species and the herring gull example come from
Baker 1974. Carrie Allen Mc Cray's poem ^vas reproduced in Steinem
1994: 277. John Frere's words are recorded in Daniel 1967. For
Bodo, see Jurmain and Nelson 1994: 437f.; for overviews, see
W. Howells 1976 and Foley 1989.
For Rebecca Cann's work, see Stoneking and Cann 1989. For a
lucid discussion of skin pigmentation and the problem with adapta-
tionist arguments for human racial diversity, see Kingdon 1993. The
most detailed modern study of skull shape is W. Howells 1989.
I am grateful to Clive Gamble for information on the date of the
latest Neanderthals in Spain.
The Dawkins quotation is 1995: 6E).

Notes 297
Inflatable sheep and pigs are obtainable from Hollywoofl Inter-

national in Torquay.
Marriage patterns.
I am grateful to Richard Harrison for sight of an English-language

version of his paper (1994) dealing in part with marriage patterns
among the Beaker complex cultures on the basis of physical anthro-
pology. For the Magdalenenberg, see Spindler et al. 1976. For diplo-
matic marriages among barbarian tribes in western Europe on the
eve of the Roman conquest, see Fitzpatrick 1989. For cranial defor-
mation among Huns, see Rolle et al. 1991: 431. Scott Woodwards
DNA studies at Fayum were reported on television ("Secrets of the
Fhsirsiohs," Encounte/v, Channel 4, 1995).
Intelligence or knowledge.
The quotations from Jensen 1969 were taken from Tobias 1972, who
also reports Biesheuvel's Avork; the rat experiment was published in
Co^vley and Griesel 1966. The Flynn effect was described by John
Horgan in the editorial section o( Scientific American, "Science and the
Citizen" (1995, vol. 273(5): 10-11), from which the "baffled" state-
ment came. Recent and complementary criticisms of lO theories are
presented in Goleman 1995. See Wills 1993: 184-85 on lack of suc-

cess of eugenic sperm banks. For orangutan intelligence, see
Schwartz 1987; for chimpanzee language, see Gardner et al. 1989.
Conclusion
Beyond Culture
The Burke quotation came from T/pe Concije 0.\for() Dictionary ot Qtiota-
tionj (1993 edition, p. 80, no. 17) and is referenced as from Rcflcduvh'
on the Revolution in France, 1790: 234.
Issues of sexual morality.
The Canadian psychologist is J. Phillippe Rushton and the terms are

taken from Rushton 1990. Edmund Leach's questioning of "mar-
riage" as an unproblematic cross-cultural term was something I was
made aware of as an undergraduate student by the anthropologist
Gilbert Lewis; I could not find the reference Avhen completing these
notes, but the issues are accessibly summarized in Ferraro et al. 1994:
376f.; they cite the famous example of Nayar "marriage" in southern

India, characterized by a ceremony that results in no necessary sub-
sequent sexual activity or fidelity, cohabitation, or expectation of per-
manency— indeed the bride may never see her groom again
afterward (but, as there is no divorce in such a system, "marital sta-
bility" would have to be rated "high").
Doris Kloster (1995: 11) prefaces her recent photograph album

^vith a thought about the natural selective advantages of sexual dress-
ing: "At a time when exchange of body fluids is perilous, donning in-
sulating apparel such as rubber clothing and gas masks for sex may
not be that excessive."
Osteoporosis and milk.
The causes of osteoporosis are not yet fully understood, but the con-
nection to decreased load-bearing seems strong according to
Professor Don Ortner of the Smithsonian Institution who took the
time to discuss it with me. I gleaned the information about
Genpharm from a television report. The UNICEF recommendation
on breast-feeding is cited in Newman 1995. I am emphatically not
advocating a return to the values of "women at home, men at work";
the current problem, as I see it, is with Western men's and women's
^vork culture, not ^vith breast-feeding itself (see Shuttleworth 1994
and Small 1995).
Notes 299
Plastic sexuality and Kegels.
The oblique reference to prosthetic devices comes from a line in the

song "Dicks Don't Grow on Trees" (written by a Canadian lesbian
chanteuse of the mid-eighties called Robin whose second name es-
capes me): "Well I know that we could root-toot-toot with a well-
made Japanese substitute" — Giddens's idea of "plastic sexualit\ "
always reminds me of this song.

Kegels are also commonly known as pelvic floor exercises and
two lemtor ani muscles (Balaskas and Gordon
involve flexing of the
1987: 40; Phillips and Rakusen 1989: 347-both descriptions of
women) and related muscles such as the buLbo-dpongiodLU in women and
the tratuverdLU pevinei in men (Hewitt 1983: 148f.). Before Kegel, the
idea was already well developed in sexual yoga: Hewitt (1969, 1983)
describes yogic and Tantric abdominal and pelvic flexes (nuu)ra.O and
muscle locks (bandhad) that can enhance sexual pleasure.
Sex and population growth.
A sexual morality based on reproduction is most familiar in the Wêst
in the Catholic Church's interdictions on abortion, contraception, and

homosexuality, but it is equally strongly present in scientific thinking.
Darwin, for example, wrote (1874: 945) that "our natural rate oF in-
crease, though leading to many and obvious evils, must not be greatK'
diminished by any means . . . the most able should not be prevented
by laws or customs from succeeding best and rearing the largest
number of offspring. " This carries the implication that those of "lesser
(however they might be defined) should perhaps be so pre-
ability"
vented (an idea Darwin was not averse to); Galton's and Stopes s
views follow from this, even though their belief that poor, unetlu-
cated, feckless people should not be allowed to swamp the "best b\
weight of numbers ignores the fact that those w^ho breed most arc b\
definition the fittest and the best on the strict interpretation of Oar-
win's scheme. This point seems also to have escaped Herrnstein and
Murray in their polemic, The Bell Curve (1994).
The words of Goethe at the end come from a poem called "Noch
ein Paar" ("Another Couple") in the "Uschk Nameh — Buch der
Liebe" section of Wedt odtlicher Diiân, composed between 1814 and
1819. The German reads: "Was sie getan, Avas sie geiibt, / Das weifi
kein Mensch! DaE sie geliebt, / Das vîssen wir ..." I ended Avith this
not just because it is about humanity's finest capacity, love, but also
because of its admission and acceptance of ignorance beyond a cer-
tain point.
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1 1
I nd ex
cave art, 1 3 1 -56

Abortifacients, 87, 88-89, 90 Ice Age, 12, 115-41
Absolon, Karel 120, 122, 128 jUii/a. 207-10,266
Abu Hureyra (Syria), 151 Upper Paleolithic, 111, 115-^1
Addaura, Sicily, 145 Artifacts
Adreno-genital syndrome, 65-64, 180, as archaeological evidence, 10
203 earliest, 6
Adultery, 77-79, 219 grave goods interpretations, 67-71
"African Eve," 247 phallic batons, 127-29
Agriculture. See Farming -weapons of war, 245-46
AGS. See Adreno-genital syndrome See aljo Venus figurines
Aiello, Leslie, 49 Artificial insemination
Alexander, Richard, 102 Iceman sperm, 3, 14
Alexander the Great, 253 prehistoric practice, 265
Alpine race, 237, 238 Aryan race, 237
Amazonia, 137-38, 139 Auel Jean, 117
Amazons, 194, 200-205 Australopithecines, 31, 32-34, 229
Americas, Neolithic farming, 154 brain size, 48
Amorej (Ovid), 213 childbirth, 46^8
Anal fistulae, 210-11 diet, 39
"Anatomy is destiny, " 7, 8-9 physical characteristics, 38, A7
Anderson, Ekl"ward, 88 See abo Paranthropines
Anglo-Saxon society, 220 Aiuitralopitheciu afareiuu, 32, 5A
Animals 243
Aiuitratopitheciu afrlcaiuu,
archaeological evidence role, 1 Ayurvedic medicine, 88—89

association between men and, 172-75
human nursing by, 169-71 B
plant use, 95 Baby-sling
sexual behavior, 79 role of invention of 20, AA — 19, 26-^
Aphrodisiacs, 89, 109 sexual culture role, 50-5

Aquatic theory, 28—30 Bachofen, Johann Jacob, 19^
Archaeology- Bahn, Paul, 125, 127, 135
evidence gathering, 12—13 Baker, John, 227, 229, 2AA
gender and prehistoric, 52-71, Baker, Robin, 61, 77-7%, %A-^h
112-13,260 Bamberger, Joan, 115, 136-57. l.^v"^.
grave goods interpretations, 67-71 139

types of evidence, 10-11 Baptism, 221
Arderne, John, 210 Barber, John, 189
Aristophanes, 231 Barrows, 18h—8,
Art Batons, as phallic symbols. 127-2^)
bipedalism depictions, 21-23 Beaker people, 195. 252
body, 97-114, 196-97 Bede. 221
1
344 Index
Behavior, cultural vs. biological as fertility control, 86, 153

determination, 70 health issues, 264
Bell Cun>e, The (Murray and Herrnstein), Neolithic era, 153
255 ^veaning evidence, 153, 171—72
Bellis, Mark, 61, 77-78 Breasts, 5, 23
Berdache, 211-12 aquatic theory of, 29
Berekhat Ram (Israel), 98-99, 111 as buttocks mimic, 36—37, 38
Bergen, David, AA male nipples, 57
Bestiality, 173, 174, 248-49 Breuil, Abbe, 121
Biesheuvel, Simon, 255 Bridges, E. Lucas, 137
Biment, James, 91 Brittany (France), Neolithic tombs,
Binford, Lewis, 144 185
Biology Bronze Age
culture entwined -with, 4, 70, 260—67 contraception, 95
See abo Sociobiology mating patterns, 252
Bipedalism Brothel tokens, 17,205-7
artists' depictions, 21-23 Brown, Penelope, G7
brain size linked with, 30, 39 Budini (people), 232
communication effects of, 6 Burials
evolution of, A—b, 5—6 coffin birth, GG
nakedness linked with, 36, 38 female sacrificial, 189
necessity for, 32 gendered grave goods, 52-71, 180-81,
pelvic size, 33—34, AG 194, 195-99, 223-26
thro^ving linked \vith, 4 grave mounds, 184-87
Birth. See Childbirth grave types, 1 79
Birth control. See Contraception Ice Age, 112-14

Bodmer, Walter K, 242 mating patterns evidence, 252
Bodo skull, 246 as rite of passage, 109-10, 111-12
Body art, 97-1 14, 196-97 Sokolova priestess, 214
Body decoration, 97-1 14 warrior women, 201-2
Body fat, 38 See abo Skeletons; jpeclfic burial grounds
Body hair loss. See Nakedness Burke, Edmund, 260
Body size, 24 Burley, Nancy, 103, 104
Bogucki, Peter, 170 Bursche, Aleksander, 206-7
Bonobos, 4, 25, 43, 7A, 80-81, 82 Butenandt, Adolf, 87
Borage, processing, 108—9 Buttocks, 23, 36-38
Boudicca, 197
Brain
sex differences, Al-AA, 50, 61-62, 69 Caddoan Mound Builders, 151
lateralization, 42 Campbell, Joseph, 132—33
Brain size Cann, Rebecca, 247
baby-sling invention linked wîth, 212
Castrati,
46-49 Qatal Hiiyiik (Turkey), 155-58
bipedalism linked wîth. 30, 39 Cavalli-Sforza, Luca, 242
Homo genus, 33, 48 Cave 131—36
art,
increase in, 4, 6 Celts, 2Gb-GG

pelvis size linked wîth, 33—34, 46^8 Cerne Abbas Giant, 223
sexual selection and, 49 Charles, RuPaul Andre, 193
Brauer, Giinther, 247 Chertomlyk, 205
Breast-feeding Childbirth
aquatic theory on, 29 australopithecines, 46^8
1
NDIiX 345
gestation period, 106, 159-60 prehistoric societies, 7, 86-87, 94-95.

Neolithic era, 152-53 153,266
pelvic size, 34, 46 Contracted inhunMiioD, 179
as rite of passage, 110-11 Controlled crying, 1 'JO
under wâter, 29 Cosmetics, male use ol, 107
See aLw Abortifacients Couvade, 1 1
Child development, 62 Cross-dressing, 203^

Childe, V. Gordon, 151 Cuckold ry, 77-79, 219
Chimpanzee Culture
genetic code, 19 beginnings of human, 6
penis size, 25 biology entwined with. A, 70, 260-67
plant use, 95 development linked with man-the-
sexual behavior, 80—81 hunter, 26-28
sperm production, 24 as early childhood influence, 62,
China, female terra cotta figures, 205 256-58
Chivalry, 221 environmental adaptation and, 9
Christianity 7, 261-63
sexuality and,
influence of, 18, 82-83, 192, 194 abo Sexual culture

See
transvestism and, 22 Curragh Henge (Ireland), 189

Chromosomes, sex configurations,
6^-6E>
Churchill, Winston, 142 Darwin, Charles, 228-29
26,
Clvdizatlon of the GoddeM, The eugenics ideas, 2'S6-'S7
(Gimbutas), 118 evolution theory, 234, 235, 243
Clitoridectomy, 67 VS ,
on human hair loss, 28, 34
Clitoris sexual selection theory, 5, 35, 49
amputation, 67, 7'5
Darwinian medicine, 263
female unfamiliarity W\X\\, 76 Dawkins, Richard, 72, 245
orgasm role, 58, 61 Death of Arthur, The (Malor\), 221-22
prehuman, 4—5 Deegan, Alison, 68
"Cloaca concept," 76 Delporte, Henri, 122, 130
Clothing Denmark, Iron Age, 215-19
development 6—7, 25—26, '54
of, Denordization, 240
gendered,7, 203^, 224-25 Docent of Man, an() Selection in Rclatuyi /,'
sperm count linked with, 264—65 Sex (Darwin), 35, 235

Codpiece, 178, 180 Devil, origins, 223
Coffin birth, 66 Diet
Colostrum, 163, 190 australopithecine, 39
Communication. See Language hominids, 11, 101
Conception Dildoes, 128, 130, 181,262

female body fat and, 38 Dimini culture, 183
ovulation and, 102^, 156 Dinaric race, 237. 238

paternity, 77—7^ Dioscorides, 91
rape and, 84-85 DNA testing, archaeological. 1 12-13.
See abo Contraception; Reproduction 260

Continuum Concept, The (Liedloff), 83 Dolni Vestonice (Czech RopuhlkV 1 1 1
Contraception 112-14. 120. 130
266-67 phallic baton. 128

birth control pill,
Doura cave (Syria), 108-^1
plant-based, 74, 87-91, 94-95, 164,
Dunbar. Robin. 8^, 101. 2-^-4-45
202
1
346 Index
and development of sexual inequality,

East Baltic race, 238 9,205
Easter Island, 126, 237 ecological devastation and, 1
Eaton, Boyd, 263 invention of, 239

Ecofacts, 10 Female Euniwh, The (Greer), 54
Edelman, G., 62—63 Females. See Women
Egypt, ancient Feminism, matriarchy theory, 8
brother-sister marriage, 254 Fertility. See Conception; Contraception
contraceptive practices, 86 Fetishes, 248

male masturbation, 182-83 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, 64
Ehrenberg, Margaret, 153-54, 162 Flynn, James R., 256
Ellis, Havelock, 73 Flynn effect, 256, 258
Ellis, Peter, 189 Food for sex theory. See prostitution
Enarees, 211-14, 218 theory
Endometriosis, 59 Formenkreb patterns, 244
Engels, Friedrich, 7^-77, 100, 203 Foucauk, Michel, 14, 16
England. See Great Britain Founder effects, 249-50
Erotica. See Pornography Frayer, David, 114
E,),)ay on Population (Malthus), 91-92 Frere, John, 245
Kiday on the Inequality of the Human Raced Freud, Sigmund, 7, 8, 58, 73, 83
(Gobineau), 233 Friday, Nancy, 76, 97, 249
Etruscan culture, 207 83
Friedl, Ernestine, 82,
Eugenics, 2'SG-'S7 Friesinger, Herwig, 52
Europe Frolov, Boris, 106
farming culture, 147, 149 From Ape to Adam (Wendt) ,21,22 •
Ice Age art, 115-41 Fuck, word origin, 187

LBK culture, 161-64, 165
medieval sexual activity, 222-23
Mesolithic, 145-66 Galton, Francis, 236, 238, 241
Neolithic, 11, 165-64 Gamble, Clive, 136
spread of modern humans into, "Gay gene," 68-71
247-48 Gellner, Ernest, 10
Upper Paleolithic art. 111, 115-41 Geloni (people), 232
See abo jpecific countries and dited Gender
Evolution archaeology and, 52-71
artists' depictions of human, 21-23 brain sex differences, 45^4, 50,
of bipedalism, 4-5, 5-6 61-62, 69
common ancestry, 235—36, 243 burial evidence, 223-26
human emergence, 246-A7 clothing and, 7, 224-25
Lamarckian vs. Darwinian, 9 cross-dressing, 203^
natural selection, 4, 5, 35 determination, 52-71, 112-13, 180-81,
pulselike pattern of human, 30—34 194, 195-99, 223-26, 260
race definition, 243-45 in Ice Age Europe, 139^1
See abo Sexual selection increase in importance of social, 194
Evolution of Early Man, The (Wood), 22 inequality causes, 172
Extended inhumation, 1 79 origin of, 50
sex chromosome configuration, 65-65
See abo Women
Falk, Dean, 39 Genitalia
Farming variety of human, 23-25, 228-29
cultural impact of, 147-55, 157, 158 See abo dpecific partd
1
Index 347
Genpharm Company, 264 Herodotus, 193-94, 200-201, 204, 205,

Gerhardie, William, 72 207,211,231,252,253
Gestation period, 106, 159-60 Herring gulls, 244, 248
Giddens, Anthony, 265 Herrnstein, Richard, 255
Gimbutas, Marija, 8, 118, 120, 148-49. Heterogender relationship, 203
155, 156, 159, 172 Heyerdahl, Thor, 237
Gobineau, Joseph- Arthur de, 233-34, Hierogamy, 198
237, 241 Hijraj, 2\2,2\7>
Godard, Jean-Luc, 1 Himmler, Heinrich, 234, 24 1
Goodall, Jane, 25 Hippocrates, 59-60, 90, 91, 200, 202,

Goren-Inbar, Naama, 98 204,210,211,212
Gorge d'Enfer, 127-28 Hidtoiy (Herodotus), 193
Gorillas, body size, 24 Huitoiy of SexuaUty (Foucauh), 14
Gould, Stephen Jay, 57-58, 61 Hobsbawm, E. H., 242
Grave goods, gendered, 52-71, 180-81, Hodder, Ian, 156
194, 195-99, 223-26 Hominids
Grave mounds, symbolism, 184—87 brain size, 33, 46-48
Grave of the Golden Penis, 175-82 cerebral development, 48
Great Britain diet, 11, 101
farming culture, 147, 149 diversification and extinction,
fieldmonuments, 183-84, 187-91 229-30
grave mounds, 184-85 physical characteristics, 4
legal definition of erotica, 261 sex organs, 22-25
Mesolithic camps, 143-44 subtype emergence, 2AA-A7
abo Stonehenge
See tool use, 39-40
Great Goddess theory, 8, 116, 117, 134, See abo Australopithecines; Ho/rwgenui
148, 149, 155, 156-58, 159 Homo erectiu, 33, 4
Greece, ancient Homo ergcuiter, 4\-A2
contraception practices, 90 Homo genus, 33
Nordic blood, 239 body hair, '56
Greer, Germaine, 52, 53—54, 236 brain size, 33, 48

Griffon, 253 diet, 39
Griggs, Wilfred, 254 evolution, 31,41
Grimaldi figure, 130-31 subspecies, 247^8
Gundestrup cauldron, 215—18 tool use, 39-40
Gunnhild, 219 Homophobia, roots, \6A-66
Giinther, Hans, 237-^1, 258 Homosexuality
Gusinde, Martin, 137 animal behavior, 79
gene theory, 68-71
H Iceman theorv', 14-16
Hagar Kim (Malta), 159-61 imagery, \7c)-74
Hair Nakedness
loss. See lesbianism, 222, 260
207
Hallstart culture, in medieval Europe. 222-23
Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. 103
Harald Bluetooth, 219
Hardy, Alister, 28, 30 Hua (people), 66^7, 6d^
Human Animal. The (Morris). 28
Harrison, Jane, 192
Hausler, M., 34 Humphrey. Nick, 43
Hawkes, Sonia, 220 Hunger, Heinz. 131
Hazda (people), 67, 180 Huns, 253
Hermaphrodites, 64-65, 165, 231 Hunter-gatherer comnuinitics. 2i>-28.
142-45. 146. 147, \A'\ U>4
Grimaldi figure, 130-31
348 Index
Hunting, male-developed culture linked Jolly, Alison, 81

26-28
with, Jordanova, L. J., 67
Hurcombe, Linda, 26—27 Juvenal, 240
Huron (people), 82
Hybridization, 230
Hyenas, 58
K
Kahun gynecological papyrus, 86
Hymen, 29
Kant, Immanuel, 244
Karagwe kingdom, 195—96
I
Kaska (people), 204
Ice Age
Kayapo (people), 139
art,115^1
Kimeu, Kamoya, 41
burials,112-14
Klna hut, 137
gender differences, 139—41
Kinnes, Ian, 189
Venus figurines, 12, 107, 108, 122
Kinsey, Alfred, 58
Iceman, 1—3
Kleinfe Iter's syndrome, 64
sexuality of, 14-16, 68-69
Klima, Bohuslav, 112, 114
Identical twins, sexual orientation, 70
Knight, Chris, 100, 101-2
Igurwa, iron production, 195—96
Kno-wledge, vs. intelligence, 256
Incest
Kniisel, Christopher, 41, 221
bonobo behavior, 81
Kossinna, Gustav, 238—39
brother-sister marriages, 252, 254
Kostienki statuettes (Russia), 140
India, herbal know^ledge, 88—89
Krafft-Ebing, Richard, 75
Indians, American. See Native Americans
Kurgan cultures, 172
Ingalik (people), 204
Ingold, Tim, b6, 173
Intelligence
Lamarckian evolution, 9
bipedalism linked with, 6
Language
man-the-hunter theory, 26—27
development of, 6, 45
measurement, 255—59
emergence and brain size, 49, 50
race and, 255, 257-59
role of, 20
Intersex individuals. See Hermaphrodites
Language Inj Unci, The (Pinker), 45
Introspection development, 43
Language of the Goddeîd, The (Gimbutas),
Inuit (people), 144
118
In vitro fertilization, 265
Lascaux cave, 132—33
IQ testing, 255-59
Laussel cave, 131
Iron Age
207-10
LBK culture, 161-64, 165, 168-70
art,
Leach, Exlmund, 261
mating patterns, 252—53
Leakey, Mary, 32, 39
Tantric sex, 215-19
Leakey, Richard, 41
Iron production, 195—96
Learned helplessness, 190—91
Isaac, Glynn, 42, 43
Lemurs, 58, 81
Issedones, 205
Lepenski Vir, 145
IVF, 265
Leroi-Gourhan, Andre, 121, 125, 131, 132
Lesbianism
J lack of archaeological record, 260
Jacobi, H., 87 in medieval Europe, 222
Jensen, A. R., 255 LeVay, Simon, 69
Jericho, 149-50 Lewin, Roger, 263
Jews, 232, 234 Lewôntin, Richard, 57—58
Johanson, Don, 32, ^^S-M, 44 Liedloff, Jean, 83
Index 349
Luiearbandkerainlk. See LBK culture as hunters, 26-28

Longhouses, LBK culture, 161-62, 164, masturbation, 182-84
165 paternity studies, 77-78
Lovejoy, Owen, 40, 41, 44, 249 sexual behavior, 7-8, 84
Lucy, 32-34 superior intelligence theory, 26-27
gender issue, 54 use of red ocher, 107
pelvis, M, 46, 47 warrior initiation, 168-70
Lacy J Child (Johanson), 44 abo related topici
See
Men-an-Tol grave, 223
M Mensa, 256
MacLean, Rachel, 195 Menstruation
Madonna from Gradac, 159 contraception and, 86
Mahiu, 212 sex strike theory, 101-2
Maisel, Charles, 101-2 synchrony, 104, 105-6
Makapansgat pebble, 99 Mesolithic communities, 143-66
Makavejev, Dusan, 72 birth spacing, 1 63-64
Makeup. See Cosmetics Metal technology, 195-96
Males. See Men Mies, Maria, 203
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 13-14, 92-93 Milton, John, 167
Malory, Sir Thomas, 221 MitteUchmerz, 156
Malthus, Thomas, 91-92 Mohenjo-Daro, 217
Man-the-hunter theory, 26-28 M0ller, Anders, 78
Marriage Molleson, Theya, 151. 152, 153
brother-sister, 252, 254 Monasteries, 222
cuckoldry, 77-79, 219 Monogamy theory, 40-^ 1 {jec abo
LBK culture, 162 Marriage)
origins, 40-41, 125 Mor, Barbara, 119
patterns, 252-54, 261 Morgan, Elaine, 28-29, 44
Marshack, Alexander, 106 Morris, Desmond, 27-28, 36-38
Martinez Patino, Maria, 63 Mother Earth, 183-87
Marx, Karl, 76-77, 100 Multiregional hypothesis, 246-47
Masturbation, 73 Murray, Charles, 255
female, 61, 160
male, 182-84 N
Matriarchy Naharvali (German tribe), 220-21
goddess-centered farming, 148, 149, Naked Ape, The (Morris). 27-28. 36
155, 156-58, 159 Nakedness
myths, 8, 136-39 body decoration and, 99
McCray, Carrie Allen, 245 evolution of, 23, 25, 262
McDermott, Leroy, 124 hunting linked with. 27-28

McEvilly, Thomas, 217-18 theories, 34-3^
Nariokotome bo\', -^ 1-^2. -^ 3. 5^. 2-43
Meaden, George Terence, 149
Meaning of Race, The (Tobias), 242 Native Americans
Mediterranean race, 237, 238 cross-dressing, 211-12
Megalhaes de Gandovo, Pedro de, 203 outmarriages, 252
Megaliths, 187-92 sexual license, 82

Natural selection, A. o. 35
Melanesia, 92-93
Mellaart, James, 156, 157 Nazis, 239. 2^1-42
Men Neanderthals
classification, 2-^- --^8
animal association, 172-75
cultural development. 10. -8
contraception, 90-91
1 1
350 Index
extinction, 230 Patzold, J., 184

physical characteristics, 49, 56, 235 Peahens, natural selection and, 4, 5, 26
skull analysis, 250—51 Pelvis
Nelson, Sarah, 124 brain size linked with, 33-34, 46^8
Neolithic communities, 151—66 childbirth and size of, 34, 46
Britain, 183-84 scarring, 65
Europe, 11, 163-64 Penis
homophobia roots, 164—66 enlargement, 67
megalith architecture, 187—92 imagery, 175—92
penis imagery, 175-92 prehuman, 4, 5
psychological profile, 189—91 sheaths, 178, 180
Newgrange (Ireland), 185-87 size of human, 23-25
Niaux cave, 233—34 spasms, 61
Nikolov, Bogdan, 197 Varna artifact, 175—82
Nipples, male, 57 See abo Phallic symbols
Noonan, Katherine, 102 Peyrere, Isaac de la, 232
Nordic race, 237-42 Peyrony, Denis, 127
North America Phallic symbols, 175-92
first humans in, 1 batons, 127-29
first farming, 154 daggers and swords, 195
Novgorodova, Nora, 175-74 Neolithic megalith architecture, 188
Nu essence, 67 Phallus. See Penis
Pill (oral contraceptive), 266—67
Piltdown Man, 236
o Pinker, Steven, 45
Ocher. See Red ocher
Pitt- Rivers, George, 92
Odent, Michel, 29, 163, 189
Plants
Obrpata, 200
as archaeological evidence, 1
On Facial Treatment for Ladiej (Ovid), 213
as contraceptives, 74, 87-91, 94-95,
On the MuttipticLty of Human Racej
164, 202
(Pouchet), 234
medicinal, 108-9
Oral contraceptive, 266—67
Plato, 231
Orangutans, plant use, 95
Pleiotropy, 25
Orgasm
PoUticj of Breajtfeeding, The (Palmer), 266
faked, 45
Polybius, 90
female mammals, 79
Polygenesis, 232
female physiology, 58—61
Polygbtj, The (Gerhardie), 72
male spasms, 61
Polynesia, 126-27
Osteoporosis, 264
Polytypic, 242
Otzi. See Iceman
Population
Out-of- Africa theory, 247
control, 91-92
Ovid, 213-14
Mesolithic, 143, 155
Ovulation
Neolithic, 11, 172
concealed, 102-3, 104
Pornography
signals, 103-4, 156
differing cultural determinants of, 261
Venus figurines as, 120—21
Posner, Richard, 74-75, 265
Palmer, Gabrielle, 266 Pouchet, Felix-Archimede, 234, 243
Papoose. See Baby-sling Power, Camilla, 101
Paranthropines, 39, 40 Pregnancy. See Childbirth
Paternity, genetic study, 77—78 Premarin, 213
1 1
Index 351
Primates transvestism and, 220-23, 225

earliest, 32 See abo Christianity
nakedness, 36—37 Reproduction
sexual activity, 80-81 K-strategy, 94
Princess of Vix, 226 rape and, 84-85
Principal components analysis, 250-5 sex and, 7, 79, 83
Privacy, sexual behavior and, 82-83 abo Conception
See
Property Rhesus macaques, 80
origins of, 150 Rice, Patricia, 121
rise in idea of, 1 75 Ridley, Matt, 62, 78
Prostitution, brothel tokens, 205-7 Rift Valley 32
Prostitution theory, 101, 106 Rites of passage, 1 09-1 2
Proudhon, Pierre- Joseph, 150 Roberts, Nickie, 119
Psychological profile. Neolithic society, Romanes, George, 235
189-91 Rome, ancient
Pygmy chimps. See Bonobos brothel tokens, 17, 205-7
contraceptive practices, 87
Nordic blood, 239^ 1
Rosenberg, Karen, 49
Queen Anne's lace, 88, 90
Rotter, Hans, 16
Rousseau, Jean- Jacques, 233
R Ro\vley- Conwy, Pete, 143
Ra, 237 Russell, Robert Jay, 8
Race
inequality arguments, 232-42
intelligence measurement and, 255,
257-58 Sag-ur-jag, 65
meaning of, 242^3 Sauromatia, 201, 202
prehistory of, 226, 227-59 Schmid, R, 34
See abo Racial Racism
purity; Scyles, 225
Racial Eleinentd of European Hutoiy Scythians
(Giinther), 237 adornments, 196-97
Racial purity, 238, 241, 242, 254 dual-race societv', 231-32
Racism gender roles, 201-4
birth of, 243-49 inheritance practices, 197-99
existence in prehistory, 229—30 transvestism, 210-14. 225
"Radiator theory," 39 warrior women, 253
Rape Sears, William, 48
archaeological evidence, 219-20 Seligman, Martin, 190-91
property aspect of, 1 7S Selk'nam (people). 157-38, 159
sociobiological explanation, 84—85 Semen. See Sperm
Rathje, Bill, 12-13 Sermo Lap/ acK-i/h/U' (Wultstan). 220
Redocher, uses, 97-98, 101, 106, 107, Sex
behavior defmition.
"
112-14
Red Queen, The: Sex and the Ei'olution of cultural attitudes. 1 7- 1 8. 2o -o5
1
Human Nature (Ridley), 62 instinct role. 7S

Reich, Wilhelm, 73 as power, 83—8vT
Reid, Andrew, 195 prehuman, -l-o
Religion privacy role. 82-83

goddess-centered farming, 148, 149, reproduction link. . . ^\ 83
155, 156-57, 158, 159 role in human societies. Iv>-18
352 Index
Sex and Reojon (Posner), 74-75 sexual behavior interpretations, 78,

SexiiiHutoiy (Tannahill), 91 83, 263
Sex strike theory, 100-103, 104-5 Sokolova priestess, 2 14
Sexual culture Solecki, Ralph, 108
baby-sling role, 50-51 Soranus, 90
components, 12 "Spandrels of San Marco, The" (Gould),
contradictory meanings, 14 57-58
evolution of human, 19—51 Specific Mate Recognition System,
role of, 9-10 35-36
Sexual dimorphism, 34, 56 Sperm
race, 226 count, clothing effects on, 258, 264-65
Sexual Life of Savages In North- Wed tern female manipulation, 60-61, 93, 266
Melanesia, The (MalinoAvski), use of Iceman's, 3, 14—16
92-93 Sperm competition, 23-24, 77-79
Sexual selection, 5, 20, 49, 236, 244-47 Sperm Wars (Baker), 84
brain size and, 49 Spindler, Konrad, 2, 15-16, 68, 168-69
intelligence criterion, 256 Spirit and the Flesh, The: Sexual Diversity in
nakedness and, 35 American Indian Culture (Williams),
Shakespeare, William, 19, 230 203
Shamanism, transvestite, 212 Star Carr (England), 142-43
Sham menstruation, 99-100, 102 Steatopygia, 241
Shanidar cave (Iraq), 108 Stonehenge, 10, 11, 167, 183, 187-88,
Sharp, Mick, 185, 187 191
Sheridan, Alison, 191 Stopes, Marie, 237
Sherratt, Andrev^, 170 Sumptuary laws, 225
Simon, Erica, 1 Swâab, Dick, 69
Singh, Devendra, 123 Swastika, 239
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (epic), Swôrn Virgins of Albania, 54—55
221 Symposium, The (Plato), 231
266
5/^«/ârt, 237-10, Syphilis, 207
Sjoo, Monica, 118-19
SJ0vold, Torstein, 3
Skarzynski, Boleslaw, 87 Tacitus, 219, 220-21
Skateholm, Sweden, 144^5 Talheim (Germany), 168—70
Skeletons Tannahill, Reay, 91
as archaeological evidence, 10 Tantricyoga, 73, 194, 215-19, 266
gender determination, 52—71, 180-81, Tasmanians, 229
194, 195-99, 223-26 Tattooing
pelvic scarring, 65 as Paleolithic art, 126—27
rape evidence, 220 Scythian practice, 1 96-97
skull analysis,250—51 as sexual differences emphasis, 67

See abo Burials; specific skeletal reniaiiw Teeth, differences in canine, 40^1
Skhul Cave (Israel), 109, 251 Thailand, fertility control, 88
Slavery, 231, 233 Throwing, 41
sexual, 205 Tobias, Philip, 242, 255
Smith, Grafton Eliot, 237 Tool use, 39-40
SMRS, ^b-7>^ Traiuformation of Intimacy, The
Sociobiology (Giddens), 265
concealed ovulation theory, 102 Transsexuals, brain sex, 69
offspring recognition theories, 93—94 Native American, 17
rape argument, 84—85 Zuni, 183
1
I ND 1^: X 353
Transvestism Walking upright. See Bipedalism

Old Testament view of, 225 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 34-35
religious, 212, 220-23 Watts, Ian, 'i'J fJO 1
Scythian, 210-14 Weaning cups, 171-72

Transvestite shamanism, 212 Wells, Calvin, 220
Trobriand Islanders, 92-93 Wheeler, Peter, 34, 39\Villiams, Waht-r
Tucson (Arizona), garbage dump study, 203
12-13 Wolpoff, Milford, 246-47
Turner's syndrome, 64 Women
Tuttle, Russell, 34 burials, 189, 194, 195, 197-99
Twin studies, sexual orientation, 70 conception, 38, 102-4, 156
2001: A Space Odyjjey (film), 192 creation of human culture, 6
cross-dressers, 203—4
u hair loss, 35
ultimogeniture, 198 masturbation, 61, 160
UNICEF, 264 menstruation synchrony, 104, 105-6
Upper Paleolithic society orgasm physiology, 58-6
art. 111, 115-41 rape and, 84-85, 175,219-20
marriage, 125 semen expulsion, 60-61, 93, 266
Upright walking. See Bipedalism sexuality, 7-8, 61, 7 A, 7S-76, 82. 84
Urine, effect of pregnant mares', 213 societal position, 9, 153-54, 205
warrior, 194, 200-205
V Seeabo Childbirth; Gender; Great
Vagina, orgasm role, 58, 60 Goddess theory; Matriarchy; other
Val Camonica (Italy), 10, 172-73 related toptcj
van Gennep, Arnold, 109-10 Wood, Bernard, 22, 41

Varna cemetery (Bulgaria), 175-82 Woodhenge, 189
Vasey, Paul, 95 Woodward, Scott, 254
Venus figurines, 8, 12, 107, 108, 113-14, World Health Organization, 264
115-41 Wulfstan, 220
123—27
creators,
interpretation, 120—23
Venus of WiUendorf, 115-16, 119 Yamana-Yaghan (people), 157, 159
Vix skeleton, 226 Yequana Indians, 83

Vogt, Carl, 234 Yoga, Tantric, 7^, 194, 215-19, 266
Vulva, abstract symbolism, 125-26, 127
W Zubrow, Ezra, 251

Walker, Alan, 41 Zufii (people), 183
About the Author
Timothy Taylor, Ph.D., is a lecturer in ar-

chaeology at the University of Bradford in
the United Kingdom. He has presented his
Avork on Down to Earth in an episode that
won the British Archaeological Award for
best popular archaeology on television in

1991—92. He has contributed articles to Sci-
entific American, Antiquity, and The Oxford li-
Ludtrated Prehidtoiy of Europe.

to sex? Taylcjr expjores these questions
and sets out to prove that our sexual h)ehavior
is and has always been a matter of choice
rather than somethii.g genetically determined.

He eloquently and accessibly explains how
—
our sexual politics issues of gender and
power, control and exploitation are not — new
but are deeply rooted in our prehistory.
Surely one of the most illuminating and
books on human sexuality ever
controversial
The Prehistory of Sex invites readers
written,
to become voyeurs into the bizarre and so far —
—
hidden prehistoric sexual world.
TIMOTHY TAYLOR is a lecturer in archaeolog>-

at the University of Bradford in the United
Kingdom. He has presented his work on Doirn
to Earth in an episode that won the British
Archaeological Award for best popular
archaeology on television in 1991-92. He has
contributednumerous articles to Scientific
American, Antiquity, and We OAfonI Illustrated
Prehistory of Europe.
Jacket design © One Plus One Studio
Front cover photo: © Erich Lessing Art Resource. N 'S'

Thracian silver-gilt horse harness decoration, fourth centur. n .
From National Museum of Histor\-. Sofia. Bulg-aria
Back cover photos:

Grave of the Golden Penis: Photograph ® Vitalv \'iianov AgcrKT
The Lascaux Shaft Scene: Photograph © Spadeni
Men An Tol. Cornwall. England: Photograph T Mick Sharp
The Cerne Abbas Giant. Dorset. England: Phvitograph C Bob Croxford
Three Venus Figurines: Photograph >r Paul Bahn
Bantam Books
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What does the book aim to uncover about human sexuality throughout history?

What does the book aim to uncover about human sexuality throughout history?

How does the author trace various sexual practices back through history?

How does the author trace various sexual practices back through history?

T^ F^I

This lively and provocarivt r^ook leaves no

THE PREHISTORY OF SEX

How has human sexuality ^hanged —and how

New York Toronto

All rights reserved

From National Museum of History, Sofia, Bulgaria.

Book design by Ellen Cipriano.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or

Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data

Taylor, Timothy, 1960-

Puhiuhed ..limuLtaneoiufly in the United Stated and Canada

Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of

other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Introduction: Beyond Nature

The Evolution of Human Sexual Culture 19

2 Skull Sex and Brain Sex 52

6 The Milk ofthe Vulture Goddess 142

7 The Grave ofthe Golden Penis 167

9 The Return ofthe Beast with Two Backs:

(Fig. 0.1) The Iceman.

Viciis culture pot.

(Fig. 1.1) From Ape to Adam.

(Fig. 1.5) The Nariokotome Boy.

(Fig. 1.7) Lucy s pelvis.

(Fig. 1.8) Australopithecine birth mechanics.

(Fig. 4.1) A 230,000-year-old sculpture from

(Fig. 4.2) IceAge triple burial.

(Fig. 5.11) The Lascaux shaft scene.

Les Trois Freres.

Les Trois Freres.

(Fig. 6. A) The "Great Goddess" of Qatal Hiiyiik.

(Fig. 6.6) Temple of the Vulture Goddess;

(Fig. 7.2) A breast-shaped weaning vessel;

(Fig. 7.9) Standing stone; Kintraw^.

(Fig. 8.5) A competitive sex game; Brezje.

(Fig. 8.6) The "priestess" of the Sokolova Mogila.

(Fig. 8.8) Goddess on the Gundestrup Cauldron.

This book is based on a certain amount of firsthand archaeological

neither of them necessarily agree with my vievv^s.

My editors, Christopher Potter at Fourth Estate and Brian Tart

'Eroticism, one may day, id

DiR. Jean- Luc Godard

In 1991 a corpse was found melting out of a glacier in the Otztal

icate proportions that it was a \voman's, perhaps that of an

^^dsJdit^M^- -l.^li.,^1: î^^^^î: - : l^îw»4.Ja^^c-£C1

September 20, 1991. Photograph courtesy of Gerhard Tomedi.

publication of the detailed and painstaking scientific investigations of

Although the Iceman's scrotum was visible in the initial forensic

investigation, a mystery surrounded his penis or, more accurately, its

apparent absence. Bizarre stories began to circulate: his penis had

sum — to a collector of prehistoric sex organs. Someone informally ac-

been "scraped out of the scrotum also circulated and led

their genitals in order to be allowed to officiate in the temples of the