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

[Ava5]

The fact that it's so complex and responsive to patient, fear-free stimulation and so easily hurt by the wrong kind of handling? Women's bodies can be played like violins by a skilled partner: we have clits, we're sexual from head to toe if properly caressed and there're the multiple orgasms. All this seems like a total evolutionary waste if Homo Sapiens have always primarily engaged in the rapey patriarchal model of sex.

Is it all just a carry-over from our bonobo DNA? Is it supposed to facilitate pair bonding (maybe the 2nd trimester horniness is part of this)? It also all seems really excessive if it was all just intended for making babies. Just musing here.

[TeiTetua]

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.

[TeiTetua]

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.

[SylviaPoe]

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

[Xenophile]

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.

[GuardianLions]

"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?

[SylviaPoe]

Chemical analysis of bones and teeth.

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

[SylviaPoe]

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.

[Xenophile]

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.

[GuardianLions]

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.

[Xenophile]

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

[SylviaPoe]

Or gatherer fisher hunter scavengers maybe!

[GuardianLions]

[FuckYeah]

This is so interesting! thanks for the thread.

[user1487175389]

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

[user1487175389]

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.

[Elendon]

It is known that stone age groups feasted on shellfish because of archeology finds termed middens (heaps of shells). They moved to the forested areas in the winter. Forests were in abundance then and provided shelter.

Women tend not to ovulate during times of famine. I suspect breast feeding was a shared task too. In all, it would have been necessary to have a cohesive group to ensure survival.

[Elendon]

Today the word midden means mess, my mum used to say that about our bedrooms when we were teenagers (I'm from N Ireland). 'Clear that room out it's a right midden!'

[Datun]

Gosh, what an interesting thread.

In terms of sex. I was two weeks late with my first child. I was enormous and pissed off (he came out over 10 pounds in the end).

My health visitor suggested we have sex because of the prostaglandins in sperm. They induce labour, by softening the cervix?

What's that all about?

[makeourfuture]

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

Thanks. My theory on this was based on I think, of all things, an old Mortimer Wheeler BBC show.

Too, I remember reading, again poorly sourced, that this image we have of the men coming back into the village with a haunch of bison and keeping them alive is the stuff of the museum diorama. That most calories came from more mundane sources.

Please don't read any of this as holding any scientific value!

And I realise that we are talking about thousands of years of development pre-history and that locations vary greatly....

But I am intrigued by a couple of things. First when excavating graves from pre-history it is often very difficult to tell male from female. I believe they use the jaw spread, the brow ridge and the muscle anchor at the back of the neck to determine sex. Is this determination easier with a modern skeleton? Hips perhaps? Height differential? And if so why? Could the nature of the diet then have caused less of a differential between the size and strength between male and female?

Because, and this is part of my crackpot theory....we find weapons in female grave goods. Not as much as men (and weapons are seemingly rare at any rate), but enough to think that perhaps women were indeed warriors.

We know our modern diet has led in just a few decades to height increases. If diet was different then would male and female differences be less? And if so could this mean that more women were warriors?

Secondly....Diana...the cult of the female huntress.

[makeourfuture]

I think, please forgive me, that I saw the "weapons in female grave goods" on Time Team...

[makeourfuture]

And lastly, having read my previous posts....should a person whose knowledge is based on 1950s Mortimer Wheeler, Wiccan literature and Tony Robinson....should I back out now and save myself embarrassment?

[GuardianLions]

Really Diana and the rest of the Greek gods and myths there was far more sex equality than ancient Greeks, but the Minoans (fabulously wealthy and well-cultured) of Crete and Thera (which exploded and some believe is the origin of the Atlantis myth) had far greater sex equality where the myths originated (eg- Zeus was born on Crete).

[GuardianLions]

More about Minoans if you are interested, had a very musical culture and rites that invloved dancing and kind of Shamanic snake/cat Goddesses, who were all about lactation (depicted with bare breast's painted white), and birth/rebirth - coiling snakes represented in the area of the womb - perhaps to suggests menstrual pain/contractions, and held snakes in their hands and had fearsome stares. I imagine they could stop people in their tracks with their fierce charisma and this could be the origin of the Medusa myth of being able to petrifying people with her eyes.

[larrygrylls]

On an evolutionary basis orgasms have been shown to increase probability of conception as they 'sweep' the sperm up the vagina. It seems to
Me that, biologically, for human beings, pair bonding is optimal to bring our young up to survive. On the other hand, I also think (purely on a biological level) some 'cheating' diversifies our gene pool and gains our genes the optimal chance of long term survival.

[larrygrylls]

This has been shown to be the model for pair bonded birds.