Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (57 page)

5. Leacock (1981), p. 50.

6. http://www.slate.com/id/2204451/.

7. Erikson (2002), p. 131.

8. Chernela (2002), p. 163.

9. Lea (2002), p. 113.

10. Chernela (2002), p. 173.

11. Morris (1998), p. 262.

12. Malinowski (1962), pp. 156–157.

13. See Sapolsky (2005).

14. Drucker (2004).

15. Even Jean-Jacques Rousseau, poster-boy for the Romantic ideal of the Noble Savage, made use of these baby disposals.

In 1785, Benjamin Franklin visited the hospital where Rousseau had deposited his five illegitimate children and discovered a mortality rate of 85 percent among the babies there (“Baby Food,” by Jill Lepore, in
The New Yorker,
January 19, 2009).

16. McElvaine (2001), p. 45.

17. Betzig (1989), p. 654.

Chapter 8: Making a Mess of Marriage, Mating,
and Monogamy

1. As we write this, Tiger Woods is being accused of having

“slept with” more than a dozen women in cars, parking lots, on sofas…. Are we to think he’s a narcoleptic?

2. de Waal (2005), p. 108.

3. Trivers’s paper is seen as the foundational text in establishing the importance of male provisioning (investment) as a crucial factor in female sexual selection, among other things. It’s well worth a read if you want a deeper understanding of the overall development of evolutionary psychology.

4. Ghiglieri (1999), p. 150.

5. Small (1993), p. 135.

6.

Roughgarden

(2007).

Available

online:

http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/

931165/

challenging_darwins_theory_of_sexual_selection/index.html.

7.
The New Yorker,
November 25, 2002.

8. Cartwright’s article is available here: http://www.pbs.org/

wgbh/aia/part4/4h3106t.html.

9. Symons (1979), p. 108.

10. Valentine (2002), p. 188.

11. Article by Souhail Karam,
Reuters,
July 24, 2006.

12.
The New Yorker,
April 17, 2007.

13. Vincent of Beauvais
Speculum doctrinale
10.45.

14. Both from Townsend and Levy (1990b).

Chapter 9: Paternity Certainty: The Crumbling
Cornerstone of the Standard Narrative
1. Edgerton (1992), p. 182.

2. In Margolis (2004), p. 175.

3. Pollock (2002), p. 53.

4. For more on the deep connections between a society’s levels of violence and its eroticism, see Prescott (1975).

5. Quoted in Hua (2001), p. 23.

6. Namu (2004), p 276. For an excellent look at Mosuo culture, check out
PBS Frontline World,
“The Women’s Kingdom,” available at www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/rough/

2005/07/introduction_to.html.

7. Namu (2004), p. 69.

8. Namu (2004), p. 8.

9. This sacred regard for each individual’s autonomy is characteristic of foragers, too. For example, when Michael Finkel visited the Hadza recently in Tanzania, he reported,

“the Hadza recognize no official leaders. Camps are traditionally named after a senior male … but this honor does not confer any particular power. Individual autonomy is the hallmark of the Hadza. No Hadza adult has authority over any other.”
(National Geographic,
December 2009.) 10. Hua (2001), pp. 202–203.

11. Namu (2004), pp. 94–95.

12. China’s Kingdom of Women, Cynthia Barnes. Slate.com (November 17, 2006): http://www.slate.com/id/2153586/

entry/2153614.

13. Goldberg (1993), p. 15.

14. (Photo: Christopher Ryan.) When I saw this old woman, I knew her face contained the feminine strength and humor I was hoping to convey in a photo. I gestured to ask if it would be all right to take her picture. She agreed, but asked me to wait, and immediately started calling. These two little girls (granddaughters? Great-granddaughters?) came running.

Once she had them in her arms, she gave me the go-ahead to take the shot.

15. The book was published in 2002, while Goldberg’s came out almost a decade earlier, but
all
of Sanday’s work on the Minangkabau, including the paper Goldberg cites, argues
against
his position—a point certainly deserving of mention.

16. Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-05/

uop-imm050902.php.

17.

Source:

www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-05/

uop-imm050902.php.

18. Most of these quotes are from an article by David Smith that appeared in
The Guardian,
September 18, 2005, available online

at

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/sep/18/

usa.filmnews, or Stephen Holden’s review in
The New York
Times,

June

24,

2005,

available

online

at

http://movies.nytimes.com/2005/06/24/movies/

24peng.html?_r=2.

19.
The San Diego Union-Tribune:
“Studies Suggest Monogamy Isn’t for the Birds—or Most Creatures,” by Scott LaFee, September 4, 2002.

20. “Monogamy and the Prairie Vole,”
Scientific American
online issue, February 2005, pp. 22–27.

21. Things have become a bit more muddled since Insel said that. More recently, Insel and others have been working on trying to discover the hormonal correlations underlying the fidelity or lack thereof among prairie, montane, and meadow voles. As reported in the October 7, 1993 issue of
Nature,
Insel and his team found that vasopressin, a hormone released during mating, seemed to trigger protective, nestguarding behavior in some species of male voles, but not others, leading to speculation about “monogamy genes.” See http://findarticles

com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_n22_v144/

ai_14642472 for a review. In 2008, Hasse Walum of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden found that a variation in the gene called
RS3 334
seemed to be associated with how easily men bonded emotionally with their partners. Most interestingly, the gene appears to have some association with autism as well. The reference for Walum’s paper is
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073pnas.0803081105. A news article summarizing the findings is online at http://www.newscientist.com/article/

dn14641-monogamy-gene-found-in-people.html.

Chapter 10: Jealousy: A Beginner’s Guide to
Coveting Thy Neighbor’s Spouse

1. Darwin (1871/2007), p. 184.

2. Hrdy (1999b), p. 249.

3. Known to historians as The Wicked Bible or The Adulterous Bible, the mistake led to the royal printers losing their license and a £300 fine.

4. Confusingly, the tribe that came to be known as the Flatheads was not one of them, as their heads were “flat,” like the white trappers’, while the neighboring tribes’ heads were bizarrely conical.

5. Grayscale reproduction scanned from Eaton, D.; Urbanek, S.: Paul Kane’s Great Nor-West, University of British Columbia Press; Vancouver, 1995.

6. In fact, Maryanne Fisher and her colleagues found the opposite; distress was greater if the infidelity involved someone with familial bonds (see Fisher, et al. [2009]).

7. Buss (2000), p. 33.

8. Buss (2000), p. 58.

9. Jethá and Falcato (1991).

10. Harris (2000), p. 1084.

11. For an overview of Buss’s research on jealousy, see Buss (2000). For research and commentary rebutting his work, see Ryan and Jethá (2005), Harris and Christenfeld (1996), and DeSteno and Salovey (1996).

12. www.epjournal.net/filestore/ep06667675.pdf.

13. Holmberg (1969), p. 161.

14. From an “On Faith” blog post in
The Washington Post,
November 29, 2007: http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/

onfaith/panelists/richard_dawkins/2007/11/

banishing_the_greeneyed_monste.html.

15. Wilson (1978), p. 142.

Part III: The Way We Weren’t

Chapter 11: “The Wealth of Nature” (Poor?)
1. Presumably, he was reading the sixth edition, published in 1826.

2. Barlow (1958), p. 120.

3. It’s no accident that Darwin was well aware of Malthus’s thinking. Harriet Martineau, an early feminist, economic philosopher, and outspoken opponent of slavery, had been close to Malthus before striking up a friendship with Darwin’s older brother, Erasmus, who introduced her to Charles. Had Charles not been “astonished to find how ugly she is,” some, including Matt Ridley, suspect their friendship might have led to marriage. It would surely have been a marriage with lasting effects on Western thought (see Ridley’s article, “The Natural Order of Things,” in
The
Spectator,
January 7, 2009).

4. Shaw (1987), p. 53.

5. Darwin (1871/2007), p. 79. Both Malthus and Darwin would have profited from familiarity with MacArthur and Wilson’s (1967) thoughts on r/K reproduction and selection.

Briefly, they posit that some species (like many insects, rodents, etc.) reproduce quickly to fill an empty ecological niche. They don’t expect most of their young to survive to adulthood, but they flood the environment quickly (r-selected). K-selected species have fewer young and invest heavily in each of them. Such species are generally in a state of Malthusian equilibrium, having already reached a population/food supply stasis point. Thus, these questions: as
Homo sapiens
is clearly a K-selected species, at what point did our environmental niche become saturated? Or have we continually found ways to expand our niche as human population expanded? If so, what does this mean for the underlying mechanisms of natural selection when applied to human evolution?

6. For example: “In the roughly 2 million years our ancestors lived as hunters and gatherers, the population rose from about 10,000 protohumans to about 4 million modern humans. If, as we believe, the growth pattern during this era was fairly steady, then the population must have doubled about every quarter million years, on average.”
Economics of the
Singularity,
Robin Hanson, http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/

jun08/6274.

7. Source: U.S. Census Bureau: http://www.census.gov/ipc/

www/worldhis.html.

8. Lilla (2007).

9. Smith’s essay is online at http://realhumannature.com/

Ppage_icU26.

10. Hassan (1980).

11. For a different take on how and why prehistoric population levels grew so slowly, see Harris (1977), particularly Chapter 2. For yet another take, see Hart and Sussman (2005), who argue that our ancestors did in fact live in Hobbesian fear—but not from each other so much as from constant predation. Malthus acknowledged the low population growth of Native Americans, but he attributed it to lack of libido caused by food shortages, “phlegmatic temperament,” or “a natural defect in their bodily frame” (I. IV. P. 3).

12. Most of the other species of hominids that had spread from Africa to Asia and Europe previously were already long gone by the time modern humans wandered out of Africa.

Those still hanging on, Neanderthals and (possibly)
Homo
erectus,
would have been at a huge disadvantage if there was interspecies competition—which is unclear. One could argue that the presence of Neanderthals in Europe and parts of Central Asia may have led to competition over hunting areas, but the extent of contact between our ancestors and Neanderthals, if any, is unresolved. Also, any overlap would have been partial, as Neanderthals appear to have been top-level carnivores, while
Homo sapiens
are and were enthusiastic omnivores (see, for example, Richards and Trinkaus, 2009).

13. The question of when humans first arrived in the Americas is unresolved. Recent archaeological finds in Chile suggesting human settlements dating to about 35,000 years ago have thrown open the question of how and when the first humans arrived in the western hemisphere. See, for example, Dillehay et al. (2008).

14. See Amos and Hoffman (2009), for example.

Paleoanthropologist John Hawkes isn’t convinced that population bottlenecks necessarily imply sparse prehistoric human populations overall, proposing that “many small groups of humans were in fact competing intensively, and many of them failed to persist over the long term. In other words, a small effective size is hardly evidence of no ancient competition or warfare. It may be the result of intense competition leading to many local extinctions” (see his blog: http://johnhawks.net/node/1894). Given the persistence of hunter-gather populations in the world’s least habitable zones, the relative abundance of the rest of the planet, and the genetic evidence of just a few hundred breeding pairs after the Toba eruption 70,000 years ago (Ambrose, 1998), we aren’t convinced by Hawkes’s scenario of “many local extinctions” due to competition—as opposed to planetary catastrophe.

15. Agriculture itself can be seen as a response to ecological saturation brought about by the combined effects of gradually rising regional population and catastrophic climate change.

For example, Nick Brooks, a researcher at the University of East Anglia, argues, “Civilization was in large part an accidental by-product of unplanned adaptation to catastrophic climate change.” Brooks and others argue that the agricultural shift was a “last resort” response to deteriorating environmental conditions. For a comprehensive discussion of how climate change might have provoked agriculture, see Fagan (2004).

16. Known as “geophagy,” dirt eating is common in societies around the world—especially among pregnant and lactating women. Additionally, many otherwise toxic foods containing poisonous alkaloids and tannic acids are cooked along with alkaloid-binding clays. Clay can be a rich source of iron, copper, magnesium, and calcium—all critical during pregnancy.

17. August 5, 2007.

18.

http://moneyfeatures.blogs.money.cnn.com/2009/04/30/

millionaires-arent-sleeping-well-either/

?section=money_topstories.

19. See Wolf et al. (1989) and Bruhn and Wolf (1979).

Malcolm Gladwell (2008) also discusses Roseto.

20. Sahlins (1972), p. 37.

21. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2009/04/

the-exchange-david-plotz.html.