Equality and polyamory: why early humans weren't The Flintstones...

https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2015/may/19/equality...

Equality and polyamory: why early

humans weren't The Flintstones
A study released last week presented evidence that prehistoric men and
women . But is the truth even further from the nuclear narrative?
Simon Copland
Tuesday 19 May 2015 07.15BST

Last week, scientists from University College London released a paper

presenting evidence that men and women in early society lived in
relative equality. The paper challenges much of our understanding of
human history, a fact not lost on the scientists. Mark Dyble, the studys
lead author, stated sexual equality is one of the important changes
that distinguishes humans. It hasnt really been highlighted before.
Despite Dybles comments, however, this paper isnt the rst foray into
the issue. In fact, it represents another shot red in a debate between
scientic and anthropological communities that has been raging for
centuries. Its a debate that asks some fundamental questions: who are
we, and how did we become the society we are today?
Our modern picture of prehistoric societies, or what we can call the
standard narrative of prehistory looks a lot like The Flintstones. The
narrative goes that we have always lived in nuclear families. Men have
always gone out to work or hunt, while women stayed at home to look
after the house and the children. The nuclear family and the patriarchy
are as old as society itself.
The narrative is multifaceted, but has strong roots in biological
science, which can probably be traced back to Charles Darwins theory
of sexual selection. Darwins premise was that due to their need to
carry and nurture a child women have a greater investment in
ospring than men. Women are therefore signicantly more hesitant

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Equality and polyamory: why early humans weren't The Flintstones...

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to participate in sexual activity, creating conicting sexual agendas

between the two genders.
This creates a rather awkward situation. With women producing such
unusually helpless and dependent ospring, they require a mate
who not only has good genes, but is able to provide goods and services
(i.e. shelter, meat and protection) to the woman and her child.
However, men are unwilling to provide women with the support they
require unless they have certainty the children are theirs otherwise
they are providing support to the genes of another man. In turn men
demand delity; an assurance their genetic line is being maintained.
Helen Fisher calls this The Sex Contract, but the authors of Sex at
Dawn, Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jeth, are a little more cutting in
their analysis: the standard narrative of heterosexual interaction boils
down to prostitution: a woman exchanges her sexual services for
access to resources Darwin says your mothers a whore. Simple as
that.
Herein, so some scientists say, lie the roots of our nuclear family and
the patriarchy. Our gendered hierarchy is based on an innate biological
need for women to be supported by men. The very capacity for women
to give birth to children places them in a lower position within society.
Scientists use a whole range of other evidence to support this
narrative. Many for example point our closest relatives. Scientists have
researched monogamy of gibbons and the sexual hierarchies of
chimpanzees to point to a natural expression of our innate desires.
Other scientists use human biology. A common example is womens
apparently weak libido. Discussing his book Why Cant a Woman be
More Like a Man? released last year, for example, Lewis Wolpert states:
About half of men think about sex every day or several times a day,
which ts with my own experience, while only 20 per cent of women
think about sex equally often. Men are far more likely to be sexually
promiscuous, a throwback to evolution where procreation was
all-important.
If you subscribe to the theory of a sex contract this is logical. A lower
sex drive ensures women are more selective in their sexual decisions,
making certain that they only mate with high-quality men. Women, so
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Equality and polyamory: why early humans weren't The Flintstones...

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some scientists say, are evolutionarily designed to be selective in their

mates.
Yet, for centuries many have questioned the logic, and the biology, of
the standard narrative.
The rst real splash in this arena came from the anthropologist Lewis
Morgan, and his book Ancient Society. In the book Morgan presented
the results of his study of the Iroquois, a Native American huntergatherer society in upstate New York. The Iroquois, Morgan observed,
lived in large family units based on polyamorous relationships, in
which men and women lived in general equality.
Morgans work hit a broader audience when it was taken up by
Friedrich Engels (most famous for being the co-author of the The
Communist Manifesto) in his book The Origin of Family, Private
Property and the State. Engels drew on Morgans data, as well as
evidence from around the world to argue that prehistoric societies
lived in what he called primitive communism. Other anthropologists
now call this erce egalitarianism: societies where families were
based on polyamory and in which people lived in active equality (i.e.
equality is enforced).
Morgan and Engels were not painting a picture of a noble savage.
Humans were not egalitarian nor polyamorous because of their social
conscience, but because of need. Hunter-gather societies were based
largely on small roaming clans where men engaged in hunting, while
womens roles focused around gathering roots, fruit and berries, as
well as looking after the home. In these societies community was
everything. People survived through the support of their clan and
therefore sharing and working within their clan was essential. This
crossed over into sex as well.
Polyamory helped foster strong networks, where it became everyones
responsibility to look after children. As Christopher Ryan states:
These overlapping, intersecting sexual relationships strengthened
group cohesion and could oer a measure of security in an uncertain
world. The same can be said for our other social hierarchies. As Jared
Diamond explains, with no ability or need to store or hoard resources,
there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on

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food seized from others. Hunting and gathering enforced social

equality. It was the only way people could survive.
While initially developed in the 1800s, these theories died down
somewhat in the early 20th century. With Engels connection to Marx,
many of these ideas were lost in the great philosophical debate of the
Cold War. Many second wave feminists, led primarily by Simone de
Beauvoir in her book The Second Sex, also argued against Engels
ideas.
Recently however, these theories have had something of a renaissance.
On top of Dybles study last week, new anthropological and scientic
evidence backs up this challenge to the standard narrative. In 2012
Katherine Starkweather and Raymond Hames conducted a survey of
examples on non-classical polyandry, discovering the phenomenon
existed in many more societies than previously thought.
In another example Stephen Beckman and Paul Valentine examined
the phenomenon of partible paternity in tribes in South America: the
belief that babies are made up from the culmination of the
spermatozoa of multiple males. This belief, which is common in tribes
in the Amazon requires polyamorous sexual activity by women, and
that men share the load of supporting children.
And then there is the example of the Mosua in China, a society in
which people are highly promiscuous and where there is no shame
associated with this. Mosua women have a high level of authority, with
children being looked after by a childs mother and her relatives.
Fathers have no role in the upbringing of a child in fact the Mosua
have no word to express the concept of father.
In Sex at Dawn, released in 2010, Ryan and Jeth provided a range of
biological evidence to back up this anthropological data. Lets take a
look at their counteractions to the two examples produced earlier: the
behaviour of our closest relatives and womens apparently low libido.
Ryan and Jeth argue that while yes, gibbons and chimpanzees are
close relatives, our closest relatives are in fact bonobos. Bonobos live
in female-centered societies, where war is rare and sex serves an
important social function. They are polyamorous, with both male and
female apes having regular sex with multiple partners. This looks more
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Equality and polyamory: why early humans weren't The Flintstones...

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like the societies Morgan and Engels were describing.

When it comes to womens low libido, Ryan and Jeth simply
disagree, arguing in fact that women have evolved for sex with
multiple partners. They look, for example, at womens ability to have
multiple orgasms in a sexual session, to have sex at any time during
their menstrual cycle and their propensity to make a lot of noise during
sex which they argue is a prehistoric mating call to encourage more
men to come and join in. These evolutionary traits have occurred, they
argue, to ensure breeding is successful.
In short, Dybles paper is unlikely to provide the conclusion to a battle
that has been raging for at least two centuries.
The paper, however, certainly is another nail in the con of the
standard narrative of prehistory. One this seems clear: our history is
much more complex than previously thought. How complex, we may
never know. Without a time machine it is impossible to conrm. But
we now can be certain that things in the past were very dierent to the
standard narrative. We are not all just versions of the modern stone age
family.
More news

Topics
Evolution Anthropology Gender Sexuality Biology Relationships
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