I want to be an evolutionary anthropologist when I grow up
November 10, 2003 by Jane
Below are what I think are the most interesting main points and theories raised in the book I am currently reading: “Sex, Time, and Power: How Women’s Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution,” by Leonard Shlain.
Humans are the only bipedal mammals; that is, the only mammals to walk exclusively on two (flat, non-grasping) feet, perpendicular to the earth. When humans stood up, the course of history was changed.
No one agrees on why humans stood up. There are numerous theories. One of the most interesting I read posited that for a part of our history, humans lived in and near water, in order to escape a prolonged African drought. People needed to stand up in order to wade in the rivers; needed to have a long, straight body in order to swim in a streamlined fashion; thus we also lost our ape body hair. Interesting. Humans are the only primates who swim well, and one of the only land mammals with relatively little body hair.
Anyway, humans stood up. Concurrently, our brains began to grow radically in size. Standing upright, however, is quite unnatural, and places the organs directly over the pelvis, the heart right over the anus, and the only thing keeping our guts falling out are the pelvis and powerful sphincter muscles. The pelvis became bowl-shaped, with a small opening at the bottom. As fetal brains grew larger, and the pelvic opening became smaller, suddenly humans were faced with a crisis of extinction.
No other creature on earth dies in childbirth as frequently as the human female. For women, childbirth became laborious, painful, and a threat to her life. Passing that big head through that small opening became a risk to her existence, and her baby’s survival. Our big brains, which gave us so many advantages, became our potential downfall.
No other mammal menstruates the way women do. Other mammals go into estrus, but we lost our estrus long ago, when our mating ritual had to change in order to keep the species alive. At the dawn of Homo Erectus, a woman made the connection that no other animal has made — that birth is a result of sex. Taking into account the risks associated with birth, women began to choose whether or not to mate at all, which none had ever done before. She said “no.” She began to be picky about whom she would take this risk with. She wanted it to be worth it.
Women lose more iron in their lives than men do, mostly through loss of blood in menses, and through pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing. They require iron much more than men do in order to stay healthy and strong and to produce healthy, intelligent offspring. Women also live on a lower total level of iron in their bodies than men. They are at constant risk of anemia. A woman with a vegan diet who gets pregnant will almost certainly be anemic, and her baby may end up with a lower intelligence than normal. Eating the placenta (as all other mammals do) would replenish the woman with a great deal of lost iron, protein, and other nutrients, but no human society engages in this.
Because of the awkwardness of being an upright pregnant woman, because our menstrual blood can attract predators, and because our babies are defenseless as any others, women did not participate in the hunt. Men began to hunt for meat in much greater numbers to satisfy and impress the women they wanted to mate with. She needed iron. He wanted sex. Call it prostitution, but it is similar to other species’ females choosing to mate with the biggest, strongest male in the herd–the one who can ensure her breeding success.
Unlike all other mammals, women can and do have sex at any time throughout the year. Full breasts give the impression that they are always fertile. Their ovulation is kept a secret from men, and from even themselves. This was so that a man would not know when she could get pregnant, and so thus would continue having sex with her, and continue bringing her meat from the hunt. Everyone’s happy!
Men became hunters, and more fearsome and fearless than any predator, in spite of usually being outweighed by their prey. They were compelled, driven, by the highest libido and sex drive of any species on the planet. No other animal is as obsessed with sex than the human male.
(Though humans are the only animals that rape their females, this was not a solution to women establishing their choice and power. Inter-gender animosity would have surely driven us to extinction, and rape has always been a pathological, aberrant behavior.)
Women have orgasms to keep them interested in having sex at all. Otherwise, the risk of childbirth is again far too great. The maternal instinct also plays a part, of course. The mate who can give her pleasure is the one who is given more access to her company, and a guaranteed “yes.” Not to mention the privilege of passing on his genes.
The G-spot exists not for sexual pleasure during intercourse. It is located in a place that would receive the most pressure during childbirth, and acts as nature’s anesthetic. Some pleasure, or a high feeling, during birth, ensures an easier time for the mother, and increases the odds that she will willingly do it again. Of course now we have drugs for that.
The lifespan of the human female has for a million years or so been the same as it is now (about 70-80 years) — we just have modern methods in place to let people live to their potential. Women stop menstruating just over halfway through life. It is after this change that they (should) become even more powerful, and their role becomes that of teacher and caretaker to all the other women in the group. Grandmothers play a vital role in society.
The synching of women’s periods in a group exists so that no alpha male will dominate and mate with all the females. In other species, the females don’t all ovulate on the same day, thus the dominant male can have sex with one or two per day and eventually get around to all of them. By ovulating around the same 48-hour period, it makes it pretty much impossible for the alpha male to have sex with all of them (very tiring!), and thus male equality is achieved, and women can choose their own mates based on other things, like how well they hunt and how much iron they can collect. Lemurs do the same thing.
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Of course all these ideas have been boiled down and simplified. In the modern world, many of these mating rituals have been reduced to subconscious impulses. I am only a third of the way through the book. I imagine that later on, Dr. Shlain will explain how men became terribly threatened and afraid when they realized how much power the women were holding, and proceeded to subjugate them (using religion, mostly) for several thousand years.
I AM SUCH A NERD.
