Excerpt from Chnimpanzees Don't Wear Pants.

[The chapter preceding this excerpt presents the conventional explanation of "pair bonding" in humans. It proposes that some time between a hundred thousand and a million years ago women gradually lost the obvious physical signs and behaviors that previously accompanied estrus (or "heat") and became sexually receptive throughout their ovulatory cycles. By offering a male continuous sexual access it became possible for a woman to secure the fidelity of a male and thereby gain his assistance in supplying her and her offspring with meat. In this chapter I proceed to demolish that explanation- first, on hypothetical grounds, and then (after the following excerpt) on empirical grounds. As usual, fact is mixed with humor, but in the end the point is made-with considerably less tedium than if the book had been written in the style of a textbook or scientific article.]



Excerpt from Chapter Seventeen:



The True Origins of the Family

Sex is fun, but it lasts only three to five minutes and then you have to think of something else to do.

Women can have non-stop orgasms, whereas men have to wait a while. On the other hand, women often need to be fiddled with for ten minutes or even longer in order to have their first orgasm, whereas the average man must make a serious effort if he wants to last more than ten seconds.

Those facts suggest that in prehistoric times our ancestors were addicted to group sex and gang bangs - just like our dear cousins, the chimpanzees. Such customs would have enabled women to achieve greater satisfaction with greater regularity, and men - as a result of witnessing the proceedings as they impatiently awaited their next turn - would have become re-aroused in the shortest possible time, thus maximizing their enjoyment also.

Another benefit is that no one would have known which man had sired which child. Every man in the tribe would have expected each new baby to grow up to look like him, thereby confirming his belief that he was the most potent man in the tribe.

Inasmuch as everybody looks a little bit like everybody else, such a fantasy could have been maintained until the child became a teenager and started smarting off to his putative fathers. By that time, all of the adult males would have taught the child everything they knew, and although that was precious little, their common interest in the welfare of each child would have helped to maintain harmony within the tribe.

The most aggressive men would have gotten more than their fair share of sex by threatening the less assertive and forcing their way to the head of the line. Although initially that would have led to fighting, a pecking order soon would have been established, and the least rational male would have been recognized and ultimately admired as a "natural leader", just as we see happening today in the United States, all over Africa, in the Middle East, and everywhere else.

No one, however, would have owned anyone else of the opposite sex. That would have prevented the sort of homicide rate and spousal abuse associated with today's impractical concepts of fidelity and infidelity. It also would have obviated the need for a man and woman to start finding fault with each other and eventually coming to hate each other simply to feel justified in dissolving a "permanent relationship" that still would be perfectly okay except for the fact that, like all permanent situations, it has become boring.

These congenial habits of sexual laissez faire began to break down as our ancestors learned how to make tools, thereby enabling jaws to become smaller and faces to become flatter.

For millions of years, protruding teeth and powerful jaws had been essential for biting a chunk out of a woolly rhinoceros or mortally wounding a loved one, but those constraints disappeared with the invention of stone knives and forks.

In keeping with the fact that solutions always create problems, the shortening of the human snout altered the shape of our tongue and palate. At the same time, walking on two legs and trying to see over the tall grasses of the savannah caused natural selection to favor individuals who held their head erect, and that gradually allowed relocation of the larynx (or "voice box") and redesign of the tongue, which together enabled the lucky individuals to articulate a much greater variety of sounds than other apes are capable of. As a result, it became possible for our ancestors to develop more complex language (and eventually thought) which, as you know, has greatly increased our capacity to cause misery and misfortune for ourselves and our loved ones.

No one knows when all of that was achieved. It probably began with Homo habilis and was reasonably complete by the time Homo erectus had matured, about a million years ago.

Now, an exciting consequence of flat faces is that it became possible for men to assume absolute control over women, a relationship that has persisted up to the present time, except in certain parts of Colorado. Although "sexual dimorphism" is evident in all of us Great Apes (i.e., males are larger and stupider than females) a small but enraged female with a long snout and sharp teeth would have been very dangerous to a man's health. In fact, the racial memory of that horrifying visage is why domineering wives are called "shrews".

As soon as women lost those defensive weapons it became safe for men to knock them around and beat or intimidate them into submission.



[Note: The chapter goes on to explain why "ownership" of women led men to take greater interest in the children they now had reason to believe were theirs, and how that led to the origin of harem-style families - and only very recently to monogamous relationships. Finally, it describes recent research that found genetic evidence for "sperm competition" in humans, an adaptation expected in species in which females copulate with multiple males.]