What does female sexuality tell us about evolution and pre-historic sex?

I often think my bisexuality or perhaps even lesbianism would have emerged naturally as I hit puberty, had I not had the misfortune to share a table with a couple of Beavis and Buttress boys in my class, who basically spent a term grunting two words I didn't even know at that stage 'lesbian' and 'prostitute' in a really hateful way. We were about 10 or 11. Sounds trivial but made me think about the genuine love between me and my bf as something dirty and wrong, whereas before that it was just love.

That bisexuality is the default setting. Or maybe that's just me.

This is so interesting! thanks for the thread.

Or gatherer fisher hunter scavengers maybe!

Yeah, I think maybe it would be more helpful to call them gather/hunters as it places them in a more correct order of importance

I suppose the word 'hunter' makes me think of large game and I was under the impression that these kills were not the norm. But collecting shellfish/grub's etc is more close to gathering than hunting - and I hadn't thought of that kind of protein.

Settled agriculture would lead to a rise in availability of carb heavy foodstuffs as Sylvia says. Protein intake came from several different sources, the ones Sylvia mentioned as well as insects, grubs, bats, monkeys etc. Large animal kills are thought to have been relatively infrequent partly because of the energy expended to hunt large prey, but also because killing large animals is really wasteful if you have no way of storing the excess meat safely.

I also don't know why you're surprised. Why is it more difficult to pick up limpets (protein) from a beach or catch fish (protein) in a net slung across shallow water than to pick plants.

The kind of carbs we eat in large quantities now - domesticated cereals weren't available.

And domestic species on intensive farms aren't that big. Cattle now are really small compared to the size of domestic cattle at the end of the Stone Age.

And much predation is of small species - shellfish, birds, fish, not of huge aurochs.

Chemical analysis of bones and teeth.

Ethnographic evidence also shows that hunter gatherers now eat more protein than us.

"Palaeolithic hunter gatherers ate more protein than us"
This I find extraordinary - intensive farming methods, domesticated thick-set animals, daily meat.... and hunter-gatherers ate more protein? What studies showed this?

What we have to remember when talking about evolutionary theory is that pretty much everything was weighed up as a cost in energy versus a gain in energy. Humans are such successful hunters, not because we were so terribly good at it, or even because we had superb tools, it's really that we are the fastest animal over about 26 miles and we expend relatively (compared to other animals) little energy doing it. We were a bad bet for most predators because it cost too much energy to chase us to exhaustion compared to the gain from eating us, whereas most prey animals had great burst speed, but poor stamina. So we naturally selected not for big teeth and strong arms, but for speed and stamina.

There is a phenomenon known as the "hungry gap" where agricultural societies had less food available to them and they then relied either on stored food supplies or on hunting and gathering. This suggests that more "primitive" societies tended not to have times of hunger, but simply moved on to areas where there were other resources. It may be that fertility/rebirth festivals evolved in early agricultural societies as times for humans to mate in order to produce healthy offspring during times when women wouldn't have been so badly affected by the hungry gap.

The thing with any discussion of evolutionary sex/psychology pathways is that the chances are that we'll never really know. We might be able to study HG societies now, but they only tell us things about that society in that area. It's fascinating to conjecture on though.

Palaeolithic hunter gatherers ate more protein than us, did not eat gruel and did not generally live in caves.

Sorry, I mean Nisa and Shostak talked about sex in Nisa's life, not sex between the two of them! Not good anthropology, if that happened.

In that book "Nisa" that I mentioned, there definitely is a lot of talk about sex between Nisa and the author Marjorie Shostak! Nisa makes her people sound very much aware of enjoyable sex, for women and men. Couples seem to make a nominal claim to be monogamous, but sex with others seems to be very common. (So it's relevant to the title here, you see.)

As for meat, I'm sure for a lot of people it would have been seasonal. When the caribou were migrating or the fish were running, maybe the whole tribe gorged on protein. Then at other times, there might be fruit or seeds, or plant foods we've forgotten all about (ask Ray Mears). And then there must have been times when everyone was hungry.

I am wondering about diet. This is thin gruel here.

I saw a programme that stated that while we think about cave people eating a lot of roasted meat....protein consumption was actually very low.

But I was thinking, if there is a relationship between testosterone and protein in building male muscle mass....could it be that way back then, if meat consumption was much less, could men have had a lesser strength advantage?

I know nothing about this subject...

"I wonder if Elaine Morgan (Descent of Woman) is right in her hypothesis that a lot of the physical pleasures women get from their babies as part of bonding, can be stimulated to bliss us out by a partner mimicking them in a sexual context...."
Well, explains why nipples are sensitive and pleasurable, even in men.

Also explains kissing somewhat in terms of maternal food-passing (although I believe chimps kiss as well, and pass chewed food, so OLD part of our system).

What IS different between ourselves and our nearest relatives is hidden ovulation, and permanent breasts (I hadn't really twigged that apparently chimp breasts shrink back again after lactation has finished. Whereas ours are out there all the time. O, and the face-to-face coupling position as a result of bi-pedalism.

"where all the women in the tribe take themselves off to a separate tent and essentially masturbate each other" Wouldn't be surprised. Various claims of younger men/boys giving other men blow jobs, and the greeks certainly socialised a certain amount of male homosexual activity. Female chimps masturbate, so society deciding to add in some female on female action (well, bonoboes do it!), isn't that extraordinary. Although I suspect the patriarchy might have stomped in there at some point to put the kybosh on that, along with FGM and breast ironing, fear of unbridled female sexuality and what we might get up to without men seems quite old as well.................

I keep meaning to read some of Margaret Mead's works, having read Lily King's Euphoria which is largely based on her life and works. MM was an anthropologist with a particular interest in female sexuality and it is suggested that she herself was bisexual. There is an interesting scene in the book - which some people have said was completely fabricated, some claim it is based on actual practice - where all the women in the tribe take themselves off to a separate tent and essentially masturbate each other, and generally hang out without male companionship.

On the OP, surely we already know all about prehistoric sex from the Clan of the Cave Bear books

Indeed, addressing the OP seems to require busting a few myths such as women not having the wherewithal to use the tools they fashioned and used in normal life as weapons to protect themselves and their babies when necessary, but instead waited around for 'protection' by strong men.

Something else that might be relevant to the OP though is breastfeeding, and other aspects of our biology to do with pregnancy, birth and motherhood .

Breastfeeding triggers the contraction of the womb after giving birth. Also I found it annoying in the time when I was still nursing that I would start lactating when I orgasmed - I could not see what purpose that could serve. It did give me a sense that all these things interlink somehow. Also there's the blissful feeling that you get when your baby sleeps on top of you or strokes your arm. Although it is a bit hard to get my head around, I wonder if Elaine Morgan (Descent of Woman) is right in her hypothesis that a lot of the physical pleasures women get from their babies as part of bonding, can be stimulated to bliss us out by a partner mimicking them in a sexual context....

I assume it turned into making tools because many Stone Age tools are also weapons?

I've never read Under The Mountain, but just looking at the blurb I can see it involves farming. So what does that as an example tell us about the kind of hunter gatherers societies that humans evolved in and lived in for most of our existence?

The OP was talking about why our bodies have evolved to have certain sexual characteristics. We didn't evolve in a farming society.

Hey, did "wielding weapons" turn into "making and using tools" back there?

Apart from trying to understand ancient societies, there's some stuff to ponder in reports on tribal societies that survived long enough to be studied. One book that was popular a while ago was "Nisa" by Marjorie Shostak, which is the reminiscences of a !Kung San ("Bushman") woman from southern Africa. There's a summary here:
www.sparknotes.com/lit/nisa/summary.html

One relevant thing that I remember in that book was that there was a woman in the village who loved to eat meat, married to a man who was too lazy to go out hunting with the other men. So she joined the hunting parties herself, and Nisa recounted this as the biggest joke in the village, laughing at both members of the couple. Nisa also endured a lot of violence, including domestic violence and fights with other women(!!) In fact, her own daughter died from an attack by the daughter's husband. But at least the !Kung don't fight wars.

And I read "Under the Mountain Wall" by Peter Matthiessen, which is about a tribe in New Guinea, who had never encountered white people before. Warfare was constant there, both pitched battles and surprise raids, in which anyone the raiders met, even children, might be killed. Feuds were common, and rape is mentioned more than once. The !Kung weren't entirely patriarchal, but the New Guinea tribe was no place for a feminist.

Toolmakers, gorillas, and all night lesbian sex sessions... this thread really has it all!

My hunch is domesticating animals for labour and food, through selective breeding, relating to polygyny in nomadic tribes:

A large flock = wealth & status
+
Lots of wives = lots of kids = status and power for a man.
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Women being exploited and controlled by males for their reproductive and domestic labour (like domestic animals) = the oppression of women for the wealth, status and power of men = Patriarchy.

some it is annoying
I assume it was when money and transferable assets came in but it's just a hunch.

Just to add, since I've been rambling on a bit, that I've been wondering what the current research is on exactly when the ole patriarchy got going. Used to be 'when agriculture started'. So, I was then thinking about when sexual division of labour supposedly started. And then just got plain annoyed how so much was just assumed................
Got some books on women in prehistory, plodding my way through them........................