Sex, Time, and Power

by Leonard Shlain

  You appreciate that a human pregnancy equaling nine lunar months might not be noted immediately, but you decide it is worth putting in place as one more factor tying the moon to menses. You have created conditions so that a majority of women bleed on the dark night of an absent moon and birth their babies in the light of a full moon. Your intense labor done, you can now sit back and wait. Over the course of many generations, a few of your chosen group of females begins to perceive a pattern roughly twenty-nine days in length. Since a month is an exceptionally long time for an animal to hold steady in its consciousness, you clap your hands in glee when first one, then another, and then another finally gets it.

  Then you stand back and watch in awe. Once the first group of Gyna sapiens have breached this critical time barrier, the rest pour through the gap. On the other side lie the wide expanses of the future, a dimension uninhabited by any other life-form.

  Freedom of movement back and forth along the salient of time gave first women, and then men, the means to control their personal destinies better. A short time later, this skill would present sapients with control over the earth’s destiny.

  Menstrual cycles do not fossilize. We may never know what exactly was the relationship between ancestral Gyna sapiens’ periods and the periodicity of the moon. There is, however, a rich historical and ethnographic record linking the moon to menses. Historian and anthropologist Robert Briffault accumulated a vast number of such connections in diverse cultures. Many of his methods, from another era, might not be up to current standards of research; nevertheless, the sheer volume of his findings makes his work difficult to dismiss. Briffault records that German peasants called a woman’s periods “the moons.” The French term is le moment de la lune. Mandango, Susu, and Congo tribes in Africa call menstruation “the moon.” Maori in New Zealand refer to the same event as “the moon.” The Fuegians, living at the tip of South America, call the moon “The Lord of the Women.” In rural India, the moon is believed to be “the cause of time,” just as it is the cause of menstruation.9

  Close links among the words for “moon,” “menses,” and “time” are present in every language. The English “menses,” “month,” “moon,” and “measurement” have their roots in the Latin words mens (“mind”) and mensis (“menses”) and the Greek word menos (“menses”). So, too, do “mental,” “meter,” “metric,” “mentor,” “diameter,” “commensurate,” “immensity,” “parameter,” “perimeter,” and “dimension.” “Calendar” comesfrom the Latin calendare, which means “to proclaim.” In ancient times, it was the task of a priestess to scan the sky searching for the arrival of a new moon. All anticipated her public pronouncement, as it was an event laden with significance. The timing of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan and the Jewish High Holy Days depends on a priest “proclaiming” his sighting of a new moon. Easter falls on the first Sunday following the month’s first full moon after the vernal equinox. The Arab peoples once worshipped a moon goddess, and Islamists have retained the crescent moon as a symbol of their culture, prominently displaying it on their flags and emblems.

  The same correlation exists in foreign languages. In German the word for menses is Regel, in French règles, and in Spanish reglas. All of these words are synonyms for “measure” or “rule.” “Regulation” is our English word derived from the same root. The ultimate measure of value, money, is also linked in this ancient numbers game. The relationship between silver and gold throughout classical times up to and through the Middle Ages intrigued economist John Maynard Keynes. Silver maintained a constant 13:1 ratio to gold, regardless of marked fluctuations of market forces. He speculated that, since value is usually determined by supply and demand, the constancy of the 13:1 ratio had more to do with magico-religious considerations than with the actual value of these two metals. The ratio of thirteen and a half silver to one gold approximates the ratio of the number of lunar orbits to the number of Earth’s orbits in a solar year.10 Reminder: There are twelve calendar months but closer to thirteen lunar cycles in a year.

  Barbara Walker, an encyclopedist of women’s issues, has collected considerable evidence from a wide variety of cultures that express poetically the notion that men acquired an immense gift of knowledge from women, and it had something to do with their menstrual blood. The Norse god Thor owed his enlightenment to bathing in a river of menstrual blood. Odin was similarly gifted with shrewdness because he stole and drank the wise blood from the Mother Goddess, a myth quite similar to the Hindu god Indra’s theft of knowledge from the Primal Matriarchs via their menstrual blood. Soma, the Sanskrit word for “body,” was also the name of the mystic drink of the Hindu gods. A synonym for soma was “wise blood.” The Hindus particularly revered soma on Monday, the day of the moon. Celtic kings acquired their right to rule by drinking the “red mead of the Fairy Queen Mab.” Egyptian pharaohs, in a holy ceremony, ingested an ambrosia called sa that was called “the blood of Isis.”* Perhaps all these references allude metaphorically to a profound truth: Women’s menstruation was the key to men’s learning how to measure time. Men acquired this knowledge from women and used it to catapult themselves to become, first, formidable hunters and then, masters of the universe.11

  Only since the 1950s has the scientific community begun to examine the link between women’s menses and the moon, and many continue to insist it is an artifact. Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove admonish the naysayers in their 1999 book, The Wise Wound: “In view of this ‘constellation of coincidences’ it seems churlish not to postulate some connection between these astronomical and biological phenomena.”12 I agree. The consonance between moon, month, menses, and measurement is too rich, too universal across geographic regions, involves too many diverse language groups, and spans too many historical periods to be a mere accident. Something of immense significance occurred to the human species long ago that intertwined menses, the moon, and the duration of a month.

  In 1964, American anthropologist Alexander Marshack proposed that a puzzling group of hand-crafted objects excavated from Ice Age Europe were lunar calendars. Widely distributed through space and time beginning some thirty-five thousand years ago, they were originally thought to be ceremonial objects. Some continue to insist that this is the case. But Marshack believed otherwise. He presented compelling evidence that these objects were lunar calendars. One of the oldest, dated at thirty-two thousand years ago, was a segment of antler containing an elaborate notching pattern. Examining the notch marks under a microscope, Marshack noted that they were not uniform but seemed to have been fashioned by an assortment of instruments, and he posited that a human hand had methodically picked at the bone at different intervals. A periodicity seemed to be involved in these objects, for the marks were placed in a sinuous configuration with nodal breakpoints at twenty-nine days in some of them. Some ancestral individual (or group), Marshack hypothesized, was keeping track of the moon.*13 To reiterate the words from the epigraph that opened this chapter, of the two human sexes, a woman, far more than a man, “had motive, method, and opportunity to be the originator of lunar notation.”

  A drawing of an etched bone that Alexander Marshack proposed was a lunar calendar fashioned by an Upper Paleolithic man or woman.

  Few other subjects fascinate as thoroughly as do the sex lives of Nature’s creatures. Despite the originality exhibited by many unusual specimens, not a single one diverges so far from the average as do humans, particularly the female of our species. A yawning chasm separates the reproductive life history of Gyna sapiens from that of the females of the other three million sexually reproducing species. Features such as harmonized menses, loss of estrus, cryptic ovulation, lunar synchrony, year-round receptivity, early menopause, the need for delivery assistance, fulsome orgasms, dramatic periods, and iron loss are far, far away from the standard boilerplate designs of nonhuman females. In the Great Game of Sex played by the forces of the environment on one side and genetic mutations on the other, fielding so unusual a female as Gyna sapiens mar
ked a notable event in the history of the game. Although numerous commentators have proposed theories to explain one or a combination of two of her unusual features in isolation, perhaps it would be more productive to examine all of them together, as if they were part of a single magnificent huge adaptation.

  The prehistoric Venus of Laussel holds in her right hand what appears to be a crescent moon (or an animal horn). The thirteen notches on it approximate the number of lunar cycles in one year. A coincidence?

  I propose that Gyna sapiens’ reproductive novelties were not for the primary purpose of immediately advancing the fitness of the human species. Too many of them either had a neutral effect or were counterproductive to survival and reproduction. The reason for their persistence in the human genome is that, when linked together, they were the agents that taught our species how to tell time.

  Foresight has proved to be the sexiest idea that Mother Nature came up with since Her clever invention of the penis two hundred million years earlier. Whereas the penis significantly advanced the fortunes of every reptile and mammal species that acquired one, foresight dramatically increased the fortunes of only humans, at the expense of all other species.

  Here, then, is the answer to the key question I posed in the preface. The reason women bleed so copiously every month is so that humans could anticipate the future. Gaining the ability to maneuver conceptually in the dimension of time was so powerful an adaptation that whatever price the human species would have to pay would be worth it, because it guaranteed that they would exercise dominion over all the other animals. Unfortunately, one sex was more disadvantaged than the other. The Faustian bargain Gyna sapiens unwittingly and involuntarily entered into was an awesome tradeoff. Iron-deficiency anemia, loss of estrus, and potentially debilitating menses were the tolls she paid to do something no other animal had ever done before—see beyond the moon to the next month.

  Speech is a human’s signature feature.

  Chapter 14

  Woo/I Do

  Plenty of animals can express the fact that they are hungry, but none except man can ask for an egg or a banana.

  —Julian Huxley1

  What kind of beast would turn its life into words?

  —Adrienne Rich2

  “No, no Bessy…I meant what I said to stand for summat else; but never mind—it’s puzzling work, talking is.”

  —George Eliot character

  Mr. Tulliver, in conversation

  with his wife3

  Among the many innovations that issued from an enhanced sense of time, none is more spectacular than the human capacity for language. Linguists, anthropologists, neuroscientists, and archeologists have engaged in a lively debate as to how and when this wondrous invention came into being. The preponderance of circumstantial evidence suggests that human language is a relatively recent development. Most experts in the field believe that Homo sapiens forded a linguistic Rubicon about a hundred thousand years ago.*

  A question haunting the discourse: What evolutionary factor, either positive or negative, could have transformed a grunting, relatively inarticulate Homo erectus into an eloquent Demosthenes, spellbinding his fellow Athenians in the agora? Why did humans, alone among the multitudes of life’s creatures, evolve so towering a form of communication? There remain enormous swaths of ignorance waiting to be filled in by scientists concerning the complexity of other animals’ systems of communication. Still, not another creature seems able to employ the pluperfect subjunctive tense. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein mused, “A dog cannot have the thought, ‘Perhaps, tomorrow it will rain.’”

  And how to explain the fantastic abruptness with which this all came about? One moment, our distant ancestors were probably lip-smacking and pant-hooting at each other, and the next, two of their descendants were sipping espresso at the Deux Magots, engaged in sophisticated discussions about the meaning of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism and Jacques Derrida’s deconstructism—all in a wink of evolutionary time.

  Most believe that language was the premier behavioral innovation that gave the sapients the critical edge enabling them to cage all the other species in zoos. Why, then, did it develop only once, rather than erupting all across the evolutionary spectrum? When Natural Selection finally smoothed out the aerodynamics of the wing, it released into the air an immense variety of swooping, gliding, and thrumming creatures. The need to see was so pressing that an adaptation as indispensable as an eye appeared in many different configurations and evolved independently forty different times. One would certainly anticipate that an innovation as superior as human communication might manifest in loquacious llamas, articulate hippos, and chatty tabbies.

  To understand better just how complex human language is when compared with all other forms of animal communication, consider the following. Having discovered a food source, bees use a distinctive waggle dance to inform other bees as to its distance, nature, and direction.5 Their repertoire contains twenty-two different routines, each one conveying a slightly different message. The bees’ waggle dance is all the more remarkable when one considers that this industrious insect doesn’t even have a brain. Clumps of nerve cells, called “ganglia,” are the meager stagecraft behind the curtain. Adding an arabesque, recent research indicates that the bee’s ability to remember details about former treasures is more extensive than we had previously imagined.

  Now fast-forward the evolutionary talent show several hundred million years. Chimpanzees are our closest kin. They sport a brain of immense complexity when compared with the nervous system of a bee. Chimps are capable of deceit, empathy, morality, self-awareness, toolmaking, and complex problem solving. Yet, after logging hundreds of thousands of hours of observations in the wild, ethologists have been able to identify only a measly thirty-five distinctive chimpanzee calls and gestures. Despite the sophistication evident in chimpanzee neuronal brain wiring, communication between members of a troop has not advanced all that much beyond that of the busy bee.

  It is entirely possible that chimps possess many subtle signals that human observers cannot discern. But even if we grant chimpanzees a thousand additional signals, their calls and gestures would fade to faint echoes and pale shadows when placed alongside the full-throated three-dimensionality of human speech.* Compared with the bee’s twenty-two and the chimp’s thirty-five variations, the English language alone contains a half-million words that can be arranged in an infinite variety of sentences to convey the most delicate distinctions. Insects can signal and some complex creatures can inform, but only a human can ask a compound question and, further, dispute the answer. Which brings us again to the overriding question: Why did we need to evolve such a robust, high-speed, and exquisitely intricate ability to communicate?

  Over the centuries, numerous theories have been posited. So many, in fact, that in 1866 the Linguistic Society of Paris banned the subject altogether. Some of the society’s members had bloviated so much about the origins of human speech that those with more sensible dispositions declared the topic unfit for consideration by such an august body. Their proclamation, however, did little to still speculation.

  Darwin, in his 1871 book, The Descent of Man, proposed that speech, similar to the function of birdsong, evolved gradually through sexual selection as a means to display verbal skills to impress prospective mates. Early on, one school of thought suggested that human speech evolved primarily so that cooperative hunters could better coordinate their movements while stalking large prey. This idea has steadily lost favor because of emerging contradictory evidence from anthropological studies of the habits of extant hunter-gatherer tribes. Stealth and silence are more typical of a group hunt than is running commentary.

  Watch a pride of lions spread out to bring down a wary gazelle cooperatively. Observe the sophisticated division of labor deployed by chimpanzees intent on snaring a colobus monkey. Nonhuman social predators proceed without resorting to the most basic subjects and verbs. (The planet contains over six thousand tongues, but one univers
al gesture, acknowledged by all humans, is a forefinger placed upright against pursed lips, meaning, “Shhh—no talking.” Finger-to-lips is commonly encountered during a hunt.) The hunting hypothesis, therefore, seems inadequate to explain completely the exuberant robustness of human language.

  Another popular theory is that the social complexity of human groupings required a better way to communicate the needs and desires of their expanding membership. Kinship, friends, cheaters, enemies, and reciprocal relationships created a pressing selective pressure to track the complexities of who-is-doing-what-with-whom-when-where-and-why. Anthropological linguist Robin Dunbar is one of the most articulate proponents of this school. Gossip, according to Dunbar, has replaced grooming as the social glue used by primates of the human persuasion.6 Machiavellian intelligence, the ability to deceive others while remaining undeceived, demands that human language possess the nuances necessary to implant the mendacious messages of the kind that a scheming Iago whispered into the ear of a gullible Othello.7 Leda Cosmides proposed that the human brain evolved a special language module designed to detect cheaters.8

  Psychologist Nick Emler proposes that the majority of human speech is for the purpose of what he calls “reputation management.”9 Anthropologist Glynn Isaac suggested that language was the strategy an individual used to play the complex game of “social chess.”10 Chris Knight and Camilla Power hypothesize that language arose from humans’ first ritualistic practice of adorning their bodies with red ochre. Ritualistic signaling laid the foundation for mutual trust between humans. This led to the fundamental prerequisite for language—agreement among individuals that a particular sign or sound stands for a specific thing.11