Cavewomen and Us
Current science dispels some old myths
Consider this familiar scene — a scraggly man dressed in furs dragging a woman off to his cave by the hair. She will cook for him and raise his offspring, and in turn, he will provide for her, and his progeny. And thousands upon thousands of years later, we still act out the echos of that dynamic — with man as provider ruling over the family that he has created and woman as mother primarily interested in keeping a protector and a meal ticket.
That might be a familiar scene, but it’s also a false one.
Although it’s widely assumed that who we are at our core today is derived from those kinds of cultural conditions, they have only existed for the past 10,000 years -a drop in the bucket of human history. And far from being a paleolithic paradigm, it’s one from a very recent societal model - patriarchy. For 97% of our human past, we lived a much more cooperative existence in which women had social equality and a fair amount of sexual freedom. Males and females may have had distinct roles, but they shared power and decision-making. (1) It’s likely that there was some type of pair-bonding although it probably was quite different in many fundamental ways from later concepts of marriage that developed under a more hierarchical system.
What the latest science is telling us is that most of our ideas about the natural state of things, particularly as relates to female sexuality and sociology is really off base. Much of the current cultural narrative comes from what we’ve seen in movies about our ancient ancestors, and that, in turn, was either invented wholesale by Hollywood or was taken from incorrect assumptions made by earlier scientists who were steeped in patriarchal constructs.
Until the advent of agriculture, humans lived in small familial bands of about 25–50, in which they shared everything as part of their survival strategy. In order to prevent inbreeding, these small bands routinely interacted with other groups. “Small family bands are likely to have interconnected with larger networks, facilitating the exchange of people between groups in order to maintain diversity,” Professor Martin Sikora, from the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, said.”(2) This appears to have been done purposely and with the understanding that genetic diversity was desirable. No hair dragging necessary. This was a cooperative strategy undertaken by a highly social species.
Marriage, as we consider it today, did not exist before patriarchy, which arose with the advent of agriculture. Once paternity becomes important, because you have land and possessions to pass along to your heirs, control of women becomes intrinsic, and they are then held in a status that is somewhere between child and chattel, under the control of fathers and husbands where their sexual and social lives could be monitored.
Small bands of hunter/gatherers with strong kinship bonds would have cared for all children born into that group, regardless of paternity, which would have been unknowable without the sequestering and control of women. Because all food acquisition would have been done in groups and shared communally, there is no biological incentive to mating with the best provider. It was only with patriarchy that the role of a provider becomes important. Women no longer had any autonomy and had only one mate upon whom they were entirely dependent. It is only within this context that a good provider begins to truly matter.
If you are prohibited from providing for yourself and your children, and must rely on only one man to do that, then it is in your best interests to find a man who can do that well. Whereas, if you had been an adept gatherer, you might not have even needed a hunter at all. Neil Gaiman’s poem about the first scientists, The Mushroom Hunters, speaks to this.
And although a recent Pew study indicates that most Americans still do expect men to be good providers, it’s actually men who believe that even more deeply than women do. And both men and women agree that what is even more important is whether or not a partner is caring and compassionate. (3)
But even beyond these man as provider, woman as mother narratives are a host of other misconceptions that have arisen out of or alongside them.
Myth: Women are biologically programmed for monogamy, whereas men are programmed to spread their seed far and wide.
Truth: Current research indicates that women get bored with monogamy, even before men do (4) and are biologically driven to be that way. If women were biologically geared towards monogamy, it would not have been necessary to institute laws and customs to keep them away from other potential mating opportunities once there was a greater focus on having heirs to pass property along to.
When Darwin observed that females of many species were naturally coy and choosy and reticent, sexually speaking, and males were naturally competitive and randy, he set us on a course by distorting the lens through which we view behavior. What we know today thanks to mostly female primatologists, anthropologists, and sex researchers is that when the context is right, female sexuality is assertive, adventurous, and what we call “promiscuous.”
The great anthropologist and comparativist Sarah Hrdy tells us that, across species, including among humans, the best mother for many eons was the one who was, under particular and far-from-rare ecological circumstances, promiscuous. By being so, she could hedge against male infertility, up her odds of a healthy pregnancy and robust offspring, and create a wider network of support by lining up two or three males who figured the offspring might be theirs. (5)
Partible paternity, where a woman mates with several men, who are then all considered partial fathers of the offspring, still takes place in lowland South America. “Among the Bari of Venezuela, many women, but not all, take lovers during their pregnancy. They later identify these men as secondary fathers of their children. In this case, “possession of a secondary father was associated with a heightened probability that a pregnancy would eventually produce an adult Bari individual,”(6)
Myth: Women are not as interested in sex as men. They are primarily interested in relationships and the security that comes with them.
Truth: My friend, Joe Duncan, says it so well. I’m going to let him tell you.
“Visual Women and Selective Men
Research and evolutionary psychology have basically said that men subconsciously see a woman’s reproductive capacity by analyzing things like her hips, her breasts, etc., and make a determination as to whether or not they would mate with that woman, thereby passing on their genes by creating offspring.
It’s also said that women are “the more social sex,” so they’re obviously less visual, more interested in things like personality, money, status, and power.
Women also have more options than men and therefore are much more selective, because they have more reproductive value than a man, so they’re less oriented to have sex with just anyone they find visually appealing, right?
Makes perfect sense, right? Wrong.
Both of these notions scientifically aren’t accurate.
Unfortunately, research left it at that, but new evidence is showing that the brains of women actually respond more to watching sex, overall, but men are more visually selective than women.” (7)
Women are just as interested in sex as men and in fact, for much of the past 10,000 years women were considered dangerously carnal and incapable of not tempting men to their baser instincts. It’s a part of the reason that women’s sexuality was controlled and still is in countries like Iran, where this is considered to be for the woman’s own good.
“Our Paleolithic and early Neolithic ancestors imaged woman’s body as a magical vessel. They must have observed how it bleeds in rhythm with the moon and how it miraculously produces people. They must also have marveled that it provides sustenance by making milk for the young. Add to this woman’s seemingly magical power to cause man’s sexual organ to rise and the extraordinary capacity of woman’s body for sexual pleasure — both to experience it and to give it — and it is not surprising that our ancestors should have been awed by woman’s sexual power.” (8)
In other words, now that the social norms that were created in the past 10,000 years under a patriarchal system are beginning to erode, we are starting to understand the real picture of evolutionary psychology and how it informs modern women’s actions, choices and sexuality. Neither ancient nor modern women are, in fact, biologically programmed for monogamy. And although modern women may choose it, they will need to work with their mates so as not to get so bored that they actually disengage from their sexual selves.
“Overfamiliarisation with a partner and desexualisation kills women’s libido. We used to think it’s only men who became sexually bored after marriage; turns out that’s not true. It’s when women get married that it’s detrimental to their libido.” (9)
Just like ancient women, modern women are designed for pleasure, exploration, and variety. They may be visually stimulated by potential partners with no thought to social factors such as status or power and they are happiest in collaborative, non-hierarchical relationships. (10)
Reality is a far cry from the pop-evolutionary psychology trope that men are wired to desire beautiful mates with symmetrical features and large breasts and women are wired to desire powerful men who can protect and provide well for them. Besides being a grossly oversimplified attempt to put billions of people into conforming boxes, current science indicates that it’s really not quite so.
If we want to get serious about living out our evolutionary hardwiring, we’d do better to examine the human desire for collaboration and community, the emphasis on pleasure and partnership rather than hierarchy, and to look for ways to bring those more fully into our current culture.
© Copyright Elle Beau 2020 Elle Beau writes on Medium about sex, life, relationships, society, anthropology, spirituality, and love. If this story is appearing anywhere other than Medium.com, it appears without my consent and has been stolen.
(1) Early Humans Had Gender Equal Societies, IFL Science
(2) Prehistoric Humans Are Likely To Have Formed Mating Networks to Avoid Inbreeding, Science Daily
(3) How Much Do Women Care About Male Earning Potential? Not As Much As Men, Medium, Elle Beau
(4) Monogamy May Be Even More Difficult For Women Than It Is For Men, Tonic
(5) Monogamy May Be Even More Difficult For Women Than It Is For Men, Tonic
(6) Some South American Cultures Have Partible Paternity, Unisci
(7) The Neuroscience of Sex, Love, and Drugs, Medium, Joe Duncan
(8) Eisler, Riane. Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth and the Politics of the Body HarperOne. Kindle Edition.
(9) A Strong Libido and Bored By Monogamy: The Truth About Women and Sex, The Guardian
(10) Women Initiate Divorce Much More Than Men, Here’s Why, Psychology Today
