A Lone Man, a Sabretooth Tiger, and a Long Walk Home
Have you heard the following story? Ancient men provided protection and provision for women, who gave them sex and sexual fidelity in exchange. Women preferred a man who could protect them from danger and successfully hunt that sabretooth tiger to bring home dinner. Men demanded sexual fidelity from their wives, because they didn’t want to waste their resources raising a child who was not theirs.
If this story rings a bell, particularly as the preamble to a series of dogmatic claims about the nature of human behavior in general, human sexual behavior in particular, and, even more particularly, about how we ought to behave now, it’s because it’s the dominant narrative being bandied about these days. You have my permission to question it.
Were men going hunting by themselves, miles from home, killing large game that they would then drag home by themselves, unmolested by other humans or beasts along the way? These questions don’t seem to bother those regurgitating standard fare of evolutionary psychologists. Would women even know who killed said animal? Also, who were these ancient women needing protection from? The other men of the tribe, with whom the aforementioned man just returned from a days-long team hunting expedition? Hmm. Don’t be too surprised if the thought occurs to you that relationship experts and psychologists who talk about the way we should behave because of how we’ve behaved for thousands of years maybe have never had these commonsensical contemplations.
And speaking of how we should behave because of how we’re wired: how long do we need to persist in a behavior pattern as humans for it to become part of our DNA? That question persists. Are desires perhaps also contingent on historical context, as well as DNA coding? Again, these are not questions that get asked by the evolutionary-psychology informed advice crowd. These would distract from the lucrative activity of giving advice.
While wiring is a good way to speak about some of our biological traits, humans may exhibit greater behavioral flexibility than we care to admit. And the inconvenient fact of our capacity to choose, even as far back as 100,000 years ago, what types of social and political and sexual behaviors worked best, does not figure in the standard literature and media milieu of today’s advice-giving industry.
Not all authors, youtubers, seminar speakers, and otherwise self-anointed gurus are interested in multiple books and confounding research findings. Better to scan one book for the content you need, annoying as all that muddled anthropological and archaeological research can be. Of course we can know with crystal-clear clarity how humans were 50,000 years ago. Never mind that one tribe in the Amazon practices marriage and has a reputation for violence inside and outside the tribe. In the same Amazonian rainforest, another tribe exhibits almost no intra-tribal violence, also practices marriage, but allows for extramarital affairs for both men and women. And then there’s the Canela, who encourage if not demand extensive promiscuity within the group. Now, cobble these tribal practices into a single, coherent narrative of human sexuality. Better to look away at this point if you're well into a lucrative practice of consulting men and women on how to find and keep their spouse.