Sex, Time, and Power

by Leonard Shlain

  Adam continues along this line of reasoning. “Why, a man unable to prove that he could make children would be humiliated before the other members of the tribe. If he couldn’t demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that the child a woman bore was as much his as hers, then everyone would whisper behind his back that his essence was not very manly!” He luxuriates in the thought that, once he explains to everyone the significance of his relationship to Eve’s little boy, everyone will look at him in a new way. And he thinks, “If one son will raise my stature among the other men and women, how much more they would admire me if I could demonstrate my virility by having many, many sons and daughters.”

  Again his thoughts return to the redheaded boy’s robustness. “But it is not enough that Eve and I have produced a son. The boy’s vigor and strength also reflect on the vigor and strength of my essence. I will be judged by the kind of son I produce. It is important, therefore, that my son grow up to be a strong, skilled, leader among men.”

  These thoughts create a kernel of responsibility for his son that goes beyond his desire to achieve a sort of immortality. Although he, like the other men, is generally protective toward all the children in the tribe, he has never before felt so personally responsible for one particular child. The more he mulls these new ideas over, the more determined he becomes to see to it that his son has every advantage.

  A strong maternal instinct resides in the heart of every female mammal. Very few male mammals possess the neurocircuitry for a strong paternal instinct. And for those few in possession of one, concern for the welfare of their young rarely extends beyond infancy. Stemming from Adam’s facility of foresight, he begins to feel deep in his solar plexus a paternal instinct unrivaled by any other living creature.

  The concept of paternity, in distinction to the instinct for paternity, is an idea incomprehensible, I suspect, to the nonhuman male. A powerful shaping influence on human relationships, it forced each man to face the prospect that sex brought with it a passel of heavy responsibilities. Some men denied them outright, some chafed at the idea, some men, frightened, ran away from them; but most men, considering the onerous nature of these responsibilities, unexpectedly welcomed these added burdens with open arms.

  Adam is one such man. The idea of immortality, mixed with the realization that his little boy is a diminutive version of himself, engenders in Adam tender thoughts that are the beginning of an entirely new kind of love.

  The only way to stack the odds in the little boy’s favor so that he can accomplish all the things Adam dreams for him is for Adam to stay close to aid and protect him and his mother. He feels a new sense of urgency to see to it that Eve has everything she needs to nurture his son so that the little boy can resist disease, injury, or death. Adam realizes that he will have to establish an entirely new kind of long-term relationship with his son’s mother, but is not exactly sure how to go about it.

  Beads of sweat form on his forehead as he contemplates the complex negotiations that he will have to enter into with Eve in order to settle all the details resulting from his newly acquired paternal determination. Finally, all these new thoughts, each demanding attention from his overworked brain, exhaust Adam. He sits down on a log and mops his brow, exclaiming out loud to no one in particular, “Being personally responsible for bringing a child into the world is far more complicated than first I thought it was.”

  Further confusing Adam is the emergence of another unfamiliar emotion. Mixed with his anxiety is a warm feeling toward Eve that has been increasing in intensity ever since he understood that the two of them are tightly connected in the person of the little red-headed boy. “Hmmm,” Adam wonders, “how will the boy’s mother, Eve, react to all my new interest in her…um, er…I mean my—no, wait!—our son? I think I know her. After all, I had sex with her. That means I know her, right? Or does it? We did talk a lot. Let me see, what can I remember of the things she said?” Adam realizes that he must get to know her better. Energized by all the thoughts whizzing around his mind, he abruptly turns on his heel and heads in the direction of the forest. He wants to be away from the others so he can savor all of the startling insights he has had on this most momentous evening.

  Another happy thought enters his head. “If pleasure results in children who have my essence, then pleasure with lots of women will give me lots of children. I will have as many different women as I can, and accumulate many sons and daughters. Each son and daughter will possess my essence…. Lotsand lots and lots of my children, all running around looking just like me—this is a very good thing!” Loping along, a new spring in his step, he suddenly stops short and frowns. “But wait! How will I know for sure if a new child is mine? Suppose he doesn’t look exactly like me? What if another man puts his essence into the same woman? How will I know that this child is mine and not his? Hmmmm.”

  Resuming his walk but now at a much slower pace, he entwines his fingers behind his back. By bringing to bear all his powers of concentration on this problem, he comes up with a solution. He will force the woman to take pleasure only with him. Immediately he discards that idea. Shaking his head involuntarily, he mutters, “Forcing a female to do anything is a very bad idea. And,” he thinks grimly, “nearly impossible.” Gradually, another solution occurs to him.

  It occurs to Adam that if he understood this amazing fact about how a man and a woman made a specific child, then Eve, being more attuned to the subject, surely would have been aware of this knowledge for some time. He strikes his forehead with his palm. “I am so stupid! Why hadn’t I figured this out much sooner?”

  He carefully reasons through his options and finally comes to what he is sure is the perfect answer. “I know! I will ask the mother if the child she bears is mine. She would certainly know.” A bit of doubt creeps in. “Or would she? I will simply have to trust her. But suppose she doesn’t tell me the truth about whether she has had sex with other men? We hunters often talk among ourselves about how differently women think about things from men. Especially when the subject is either sex or children. Suppose she has sex with lots of the men, as some women in the band are prone to do. Could she even know for sure who the father was?” Putting his hands to his head Adam laments, “Aiee, all this thinking hurts my head. I cannot keep this to myself. After I have thought more about this great secret, I will tell the other men. We should talk this over around the fire. Perhaps they might have some suggestions.”

  For the Homo sapiens male who first had the paternity insight, sex passed from being great fun to being deadly-serious business, all in a single afternoon. What the others who had not yet figured out this connection did not know is that relations between men and women were on the verge of a convulsion. Once everybody understood the function of sex, sapients’ mating patterns would never be the same again.

  Let us leave the befuddled, trailblazing ancestor of all dads and return to Haeckel’s Biogenetic Law, “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.”* Previously, I conjectured that a critical mass of humans most likely discovered death approximately forty thousand years ago. I based that assertion on the fact that this was the time frame when sapients first began to fashion what appeared to be lunar calendars. It was also the period when they began to bury their dead consistently in what appear to be elaborate funerary rituals. I compared these insights in the life of our species to similar insights that occur to a seven-year-old child. Earlier, at about the age of five, children learn how to tell time in terms of multiple months. Before that, they had lengthened their time horizon from first a day, to a week, to a month; but at around the age of five, the significance of their birthday hits home, and they grasp that one year hence on the same day they will enjoy another special day. This milestone signifies that a child is capable of anticipating an event that is a year in the future. But it is not until one or two years later that a child finally understands the personal implications of death.

  Making an analogy to Haeckel’s law again, I set the date of men’s discovery of paternity also at a
bout forty thousand years ago. Children usually comprehend death coincident with the moment they grasp that storks do not bring babies. Both insights depend on a well-developed sense of the future. The archeological record of modern humans reveals a tediously slow accretion of cultural advances for the first 110,000 years without any gross discontinuities. Throughout this period, which covers more than two-thirds of our existence as a distinct species, there is no consistent record that Homo sapiens created art, music, funerals, or grave goods, or routinely adorned their bodies.* I shall advance the idea, endorsed by others, that the first 110,000 years of the species Homo sapiens sapiens were analogous to the early childhood of a single individual. My emphasis will be on the timing of three major human conceptualizations.

  If the insights about sex, death, and paternity were not behind the extraordinary Creative Explosion, what was? No significant physical changes occurred in our ancestor’s brain or body forty thousand years ago. Nomadic hunting and gathering in small bands of a little over one hundred individuals seems to have remained the norm during the transition from pre–Creative Explosion to post–Creative Explosion. Nothing in the environment seems to have altered so drastically that it could explain Homo sapiens’ traverse across that mysterious forty-thousand-year-old date line.

  Some have posited that human language fully emerged at the advent of the Creative Explosion. There are strong counterarguments to this hypothesis. The human vocal tract and its complex supporting apparatus were in place at the outset of our species. It is doubtful that these sophisticated adaptations would have sat idle in the preceding 110,000 years. Endocasts of early Homo sapiens’ brain cases reveal the same degree of left-hemisphere language-center indentation as those present in a contemporary man’s skull. Most linguists would agree that humans of forty thousand years ago were sophisticated symbol-makers and most likely would have been using an advanced form of vocal language.

  If the Creative Explosion was not due to a physical change in our body or brain, and there were no sharp shifts in how our species responded to environmental challenges, then one must consider a third option. Through the marvel of human language, the few early consciousness explorers were able to communicate what they had discovered to others nearby. Rapidly disseminated crucial insights concerning the human condition would have brought about a revolution in human culture. Like a spark struck from a hard flint, a culture-wide mental conflagration ignited.

  Some might argue that archeologists have not looked hard enough or long enough. Perhaps the record prior to forty thousand years ago is too degraded to supply evidence that would point to a more gentle transition. But this is unlikely, because caves and mounds can faithfully preserve evidence of art and burials for exceedingly long periods.4 Some researchers propose, however, that the Creative Explosion is an artifact. Their counterarguments notwithstanding, the evidence accumulating from numerous excavations of earlier Homo sapiens’ living sites points to something quite remarkable occurring to our species around forty thousand years ago. Though it is still possible that a magnificent cache of sophisticated art or bones that predate the Creative Explosion will be discovered, it becomes increasingly unlikely as teams of archeologists fan out across the world.5

  Another puzzle: The Creative Explosion seems to have developed nearly synchronously in areas extremely distant from each other. There is no feasible way Aborigines in Australia could have learned from Cro-Magnons in the Dordogne to bury their dead or create art (or vice versa). Yet both groups seemed to have made these cultural markers commonplace nearly simultaneously.

  Since the work of Piaget, psychologists have accepted that human brains mature according to a remarkably stable schedule. A parent using Piaget’s developmental guidelines can predict with reasonable accuracy when a child will sit, walk, and talk. The sum of all individuals’ maturation schedules traces out a bell-shaped curve.

  I would assign a similar schedule to the mental maturity of the sapient species as a whole. Within a few years after children learn how to tell time, they understand that they are going to die. Soon afterward or simultaneously, they roughly understand how sex has something to do with how babies are made. Analogously, after ancestral humans learned how to track the moon’s phases, they comprehended death. Soon after these two insights, they deduced the male’s contribution to birth. Suggestive evidence that the male’s involvement in procreation was the last of the three culture-changing insights that early sapients comprehended has emerged from anthropological field studies, most notably of those few cultures that had not yet made the connection between fathers and their offspring.

  In the early years of the twentieth century, anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski lived among the Trobrianders, a Melanesian people who inhabited several isolated South Pacific islands. Trobrianders believed that a mischievous water spirit, the balima, gained entrance into an unsuspecting woman’s vagina when she waded out to the point where the water reached her groin, and caused conception. Trobriander society allowed their young people considerable sexual latitude. Invoking the balima was a creative way for the tribe to accept a new child into the community without ever having to know who the father was.6 Other indigenous peoples—the Arctic inland Chukchi, the Australian Aborigines, and the Sumatran Bataks—had also not yet discovered the secret of impregnation when they first came in contact with explorers.7

  The Siriono, a remote tribe in the Amazon, believe in partible paternity.8 They hold that every man who has sex with a woman prior to her evident signs of pregnancy contributes a small part of his essence to the making of her child. The man having the most sex with her contributes the most. Each child begat under the concept of partible paternity can have many fathers. Partible paternity is a clever way to involve multiple men in the care of a child. In the event that the actual father is killed or dies, other men will remain engaged with the mother and her child, as they remain convinced that part of their spirit lives in the child.

  These few isolated cultures are rare exceptions. The overwhelming majority of people living in major contemporary and historical cultures throughout the world understand and understood paternity as we do. All cultures understand the succession of the seasons far into the future, comprehend personal death and care for their deceased, and personally adorn their bodies. Since there remained a few cultures that had not yet uncovered the secret of paternity by the early part of this century, it would be a fair presupposition, then, that, of the three, paternity was the last and most difficult insight for sapients to comprehend.

  A woman would have been far more likely than a man to be the first to grasp the connection. How could she have not? Having been the first to make the connection between sex and pregnancy, a woman was in a better position to make the next logical leap—that sex with a specific man led to the birth of his specific child.

  Women’s close association with their offspring would have prompted them to recognize the similarities in both features and character of each of their children and those of the child’s father. In an age without mirrors and few chances to see one’s reflection accurately, a woman looking at a man she suspected of being the father and then at her children would have had an easier time ferreting out the links of paternity than a man looking at a woman and then at her children. Few men would disagree with the statement that women in general are more astute at discerning the slightest nuances of a child’s expressions, and that a woman’s intuition is more finely tuned than a man’s. This is especially true when it concerns subtle matters relating to interpersonal relationships.

  The mother, most likely, would have known the father intimately, and would be familiar with his distinguishing physical characteristics. She also would have had the opportunity to observe his idiosyncrasies. Since children inherit many physical traits and personal quirks from their fathers (as well as their mothers), it’s reasonable to assume women made the connection sooner than men.

  Knowledge of fatherhood gave men a new sense of purpose.

  We w
ill probably never know whether paternity was an independent discovery by a man, or whether a woman taught this life-changing connection to her lover. Identifying which of the two sexes first made the discovery is not nearly so important as assessing how each sex was affected by the knowledge. Unquestionably, it was for the male of the species a profound revelation. His response to this news then deeply affected all females.

  Knowledge of paternity forced men to make major adjustments in their attitudes and behavior toward children and women. These, in turn, greatly affected child-rearing and the relations between the sexes. The structure of human society and its dramatic divergence from the mating and parental-investment strategies of every other of the three million sexually reproducing species has come about largely as the result of men’s recognition of the paramount importance to them of paternity.

  Norman O. Brown describes man’s longing for immortality as “the wish to be father to oneself.”9 Nietzsche believed that men’s fear of death underlies both the religions of immortality and the economic institution of hereditary property. He encapsulated this urgent desire when he wrote, “I want ‘heirs’ thus speaks all that suffers; ‘I want children, I do not want myself.’”10