Calgary, March 2022
Sex at Dawn, written by Christopher Ryan and Caclida Jethá, is not a porno video, it is a serious and sometimes funny book about human sexual evolution. It provides an alternative to what the authors call the Standard narrative of human sexual evolution. That theory claims that ever since the beginning of the modern humans some 200,000 years ago, their sexual relationships were monogamous. Men were selecting women to spread their, and only their genes. For that reason, women were not allowed to have sexual relations with other men, because that would put the paternity of a man in doubt. Women were selecting men to provide for them and for their family, and for nobody else. Men were not allowed to have sexual relations with other women because that could produce illegitimate children, forcing the men to support them. So, to test the theory, I applied it to a small group of people living in African jungle some 100,000 years ago. The tribe was hunting and gathering food together, sharing everything, the concept of a private ownership didn’t exist, but, according to that theory, each man would own a particular woman and she would own him. How would they make the selection? What if two men wanted the same woman? Such a system would inevitably lead to fights, endangering the existence of the tribe.
Sex at Dawn proposes an alternative to that. It suggests that in the pre-agriculture tribes of hunters and gatherers people shared everything, included themselves. Sex was freely available, and paternity was a nonissue. The children belonged to the tribe, not to the biological parents, and the tribe was responsible for their upbringings. The book also claims that the notion of monogamy appeared only after of the advent of agriculture, no more than 10,000 years ago. Agriculture introduced the concept of the private ownership, so now there were men owning a piece of land. That piece of land included the shelter, the livestock, and the woman. She belonged to him and nobody else. She would also watch carefully that her man was not fooling round with the neighbor’s wife, because that would distract him from his family duties. Then, later, this concept of monogamy was legalised by the church into the formal matrimony.
My own experience doesn’t support the Standard narrative of sexual evolution theory. In western countries, particularly in United States, woman might have expected a man to provide for her and for their children, but not where I grew up. Czechoslovakia in 1950s was a poor country, where a man alone couldn’t support a family. When a woman got married, she knew very well that she will have to work just as hard as her husband. On the top of that, she will have to cook, look after children, and share the dwelling with her parents or with parents of her husband. Marriage was a raw deal for a woman. On the other hand, since she was working, it gave her certain economic independence. She didn’t have to get married to survive. She could stay single and have a lover here and there to satisfy her biological needs. Virginity in Czechoslovakia was and still is a nonissue. But, despite that, women did get married. Why? The Standard narrative of sexual evolution doesn’t explain it.
Not surprisingly, Sex at Dawn was harshly criticized by some readers. The notion that in prehistoric times sex was freely available outraged many people. Here are some comments readers wrote: “This is pop-science at its worse,” said one. Another comment: “I rarely stop reading books before I'm done (and I've read a lot of pretty bad books as a result!), but I think I will with this one.” Obviously, those readers were scandalised. In western culture sex is treated with a great deal of hypocrisy. Officials and church preach monogamy, but people get rich by selling pornography and by advertising all kinds of sex-provocative products. Some people are upset if that hypocrisy is pointed out.
The less emotional critiques of the book mention its non-academical style of writing (I don’t know if that is a good or bad), and that it presents too rosy picture of the pre-agricultural tribes. In his article The Human That Never Evolved, published in Evolutionary Psychology, Ryan M. Ellsworth wrote: "Curiously omitted (in the book) is the fact that the !Kung (a tribe in southern Angola) referred to by Thomas (1959) as the “harmless people,” engaged in lethal intergroup raiding and had a homicide rate rivaling that of the most violent American urban ghettos.” The article also indicates that in current primitive hunter-gatherer groups jealousy exists, but it doesn’t dispute the book’s claim that in the pre-agricultural tribes, sex was freely available. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a tribe of hunters-gatherers 100,000 years ago somewhere in African jungle practicing matrimony.
My own criticism of the book has nothing to do with sexual liberty in prehistoric times. I disagree with the author’s condemnation of the advent of agriculture. The book declares that agriculture was “the worst mistake in the history of the human race,” and applauds the healthy lifestyle of pre-agriculture hunters-gatherers. It is all very nice to share everything, eat healthy food and enjoy sexual liberty, but such system doesn’t provide any incentive for innovations or improvements. Why would a smart tribesman of that era put a lot of effort into inventing a new tool, if he wouldn’t have any benefit from it? This is the reason why human life didn’t change much for 100,000 years prior to agriculture and it is also the reason why communism failed. People need personal incentive. The book lists all the problems of the current western civilization: greed, overwork, stress related diseases, family breakdowns, poor nutrition etc. All that is true, but those are personal choices. There is no requirement to be greedy, to work 60 hours a week, to compete with neighbours who has a better car, or to eat only hamburgers. I came from a background where greed didn’t make any sense because there wasn’t much to buy, and I managed to avoid greed also in the western society. There were no 60 hours weeks for me, instead I rather went for a holiday with my wife, and I always had enough time for my hobbies. True, the price of all that was having only one woman available for sex during my marriage. It would be nice to have the sexual liberty of the prehistoric tribe, but, as they say, you cannot have it all. There are always trade-offs and compromises, and for myself, I wouldn’t trade my lifestyle for that of a primitive tribesman.