13.
Janowsky, 1966a.
14.
Baker and Bellis, 1988, pp. 937–80.
15.
Hall and Devore, 1965.
16.
Tutin, 1979, pp. 29–38. See also Wallis, 1997, pp. 297–307.
17.
Hrdy, 1999, p. 85.
Chapter 13: Moon/Menses
1.
Stanford, 1999, p. 43.
2.
Grahn, 1993, p. 157.
3.
Ardrey, 1961, p. 104.
4.
In the ancient myths of the major cultures, people credited goddesses with having taught mortals the meaning of time. Because of women’s close association with moon, menses, and measurement, the first calendars fell under the goddesses’ aegis. Linear time, however, is a left-hemispheric function commonly associated with the masculine. It was not long afterward in the development of these same cultures that a god usurped the claim of primacy from goddesses for both the notion of time and the invention of calendars. In the real world, timekeeping functions presided over by priestesses were taken over by priests.
Beginning in 3000 B.C., Mesopotamians believed that the goddess Inanna taught mortals how to track time. Around her neck she wore the tablets that determined the fate of each person. Inanna’s totem was the owl, and she was the Mesopotamian goddess of wisdom.
About 1750 B.C., the fierce god Marduk gained power by murdering his grandmother, the Great Goddess Tiamat, and wrested control of the calendar from Inanna. The Seven Tablets of Creation, written in the Mesopotamian city of Babylon, coincided with Marduk’s triumph and the historical reign of King Hammurabi. The myths associated with Marduk soon displaced the myths of earlier times, and it was Marduk around whose neck hung the tablets of fate. Thereafter, a male priest oversaw the important task of marking the days of the calendar. So well did these Chaldean priests who replaced priestesses perform their duties that they became renowned throughout the ancient world as astute astronomers and mathematicians.
The Rig-Veda, the oldest Sanskrit account of Hindu myths, credits the goddess Sarasvati with teaching the secrets of the calendar to the people. Later, the god Shiva became the one who dispensed this gift.
In Greek mythology, an archaic version of the goddess Athena taught men about the periodicity of the months, equinoxes, and how to keep track of a year. Later, it was the Titan Prometheus who supposedly gave the gift to humankind. When classical Greece was at its zenith, in the fourth century B.C., the sun god Apollo was in charge of the function of time and calendars. The influence of women on the notion of time, however, can be discerned in the Greek psyche by the persistence of women’s roles over such matters.
The three female Fates, the Greek Moirae, played a paramount role in the pantheon of archaic Greece. Moira is the word from which our English words “mortuary,” “morbid,” “mortician,” and “mortal” are derived. In French, the word for “death,” mort, comes from the same derivative. Destino is the Latin word from which “destiny” stems, and means “woven.” The myth of the three Fates uses a metaphor of weaving a long thread to delineate the span of a man’s life. Each Fate plays a different role. Clotho the Spinner begins spinning the thread (she represents a man’s birth). Lachesis the Measurer determines how long the thread will be (she represents life). Atropos the Cutter snips the thread and ends each mortal’s life (she represents his death). A long thread captures poetically the essence of linear sequence and is an appropriate metaphor for that of passing time.
When archaic Greece passed into classical Greece, the Fates came under the control of the god Zeus, who assumed the ultimate authority over the timing of a mortal’s life and death. Zeus, who was not a weaver, became the master of destiny.
The Gregorian calendar, adopted in A.D. 1177, represented a major realignment. The sun, not the moon, now reckoned a year. To fit the scheme of twelve months into 365.25 days in a year, months were assigned arbitrary lengths that (with the exception of February) were no longer in synchrony with the actual lunar month. Sun time eclipsed moon time as the new improved method to keep time. Despite this increase in the accuracy of computing a year, many cultures continue to reckon time by the moon (Walker, 1983, p. 303).
5.
Menaker and Menaker, 1959, pp. 905–14; Law, 1986, pp. 45–48; McClintock, 1971, pp. 244–45; Vollman, 1968, pp. 1171–75; Cutler, Garcia, and Krieger, 1980, pp. 163–72.
6.
Menaker and Menaker, 1959, pp. 905–14.
7.
Knight, 1991, p. 215.
8.
Goldsmith, 1990, pp. 14–15.
9.
Briffault, 1927.
10.
Brown, 1959, p. 247.
11.
Walker, 1983, pp. 636–43.
12.
Shuttle and Redgrove, 1999, p. 149.
13.
Marshack, 1964, pp. 743–45; Marshack, 1972, pp. 445–77.
14.
White, 1989, pp. 211–31.
Chapter 14: Woo/I Do
1.
Huxley, 1943, p. 3.
2.
Rich, 1978.
3.
Eliot, 1986 (1871), p. 9.
4.
Holloway, 1983, pp. 105–14; Geschwind and Galabruda, 1985, pp. 428–59.
5.
Frisch, 1967.
6.
Dunbar, 1996.
7.
Byrne and Whiten, 1988.
8.
Dunbar, 1996, p. 172.
9.
Ibid., p. 173.
10.
Leakey and Lewin, 1992, p. 181.
11.
Chris Knight, personal communication.
12.
Pinker and Bloom, 1990, pp. 707–84.
13.
Jesperson, 1922, p. 436.
14.
Calvin, 1983, pp. 121–35.
15.
Kimura, 1979; Lieberman, 1984.
16.
Donald, 1991.
17.
Bickerton, 1990, pp. 341–58.
18.
Deacon, 1997.
19.
Corballis, 2002.
20.
Christiansen, 1994, p. 187; Christiansen, unpublished manuscript.
21.
Miller, 2001, p. 357.
22.
Fisher, 1999, pp. 58–59.
23.
Miller, 2001, pp. 369–75.
24.
Walker and Leakey, 1978, pp. 54–66.
25.
Fisher, 1999, p. 59.
26.
Hrdy, 1999, p. 235.
27.
Fitch, 2002. See also Proceedings of the Royal Society, vol. 268 (Mar. 1999), p. 1669.
28.
Pinker, 1997, p. 192.
Chapter 15: Anima/Animus
1.
Quoted in Brown, 1959, p. 134.
2.
Jung, 1964.
3.
Kruuk, 1972.
4.
Thornhill and Thornhill, 1990a, 1990b.
5.
Brownmiller, 1976.
6.
Low, 2000.
Chapter 16: Gay/Lesbian
1.
Potts and Short, 1999, p. 74.
2.
Symons, 1979, p. 300.
3.
Reyes, Winter, and Faiman, 1978, pp. 74–78.
4.
Smuts and Wantanabe, 1990, pp. 147–72.
5.
Sagan and Druyan, 1992, p. 299.
6.
Hamer, Hu, Magnuson, and Pattatucci, 1993, pp. 1405–9.
7.
Blanchard, 1997, pp. 27–67.
8.
Ridley, 1993, p. 264.
9.
Small, 1995, p. 178.
10.
Kruijver, Zhou, Pool, et al., 2000, pp. 2034–41.
11.
LeVay, 1991, pp. 1034–37.
12.
Winter, trans. and ed., 1961, pp. 88–90.
13.
Laumann, Gagnon, Michael, and Michaels, 1994.
14.
Wilson, 1978.
15.
Mondimore, 1996, pp. 82–87.
16.
Kinsey, Wardell, and Martin, 1948, pp. 651.
17.
Hooker, 1967, pp. 167–84.
18.
Small, 1995, p. 358.
Chapter 17: Same Sex/Hermaphrodite
1.
Quoted in Hrdy, 1999, p. 205.
2.
Woolf, 1929, p. 98.
3.
Hamilton, 1964, pp. 1–52.
4.
Trivers, 1971, pp. 35–37.
5.
Wilson, 1978.
6.
Aiello and Dunbar, 1993, pp. 184–93.
7.
Allen and Gorski, 1999, pp. 97–104; Holloway and De Lacoste–Utamsing, 1982, pp. 1431–32.
8.
LeVay, 1994, p. 102.
9.
Nathans, Thomas, and Hogness, 1986, pp. 193–202.
10.
Corballis, 2002, p. 172.
11.
Corballis, 1991, p. 94.
12.
Lindsay, 1996, p. 24.
13.
Falk, 1990, pp. 333–81.
14.
Crawford and Marsh, 1989, p. 157.
15.
Kimura, 1999, p. 169.
16.
Grahn, 1993, p. 202.
17.
Potts and Short, 1999, p. 76.
18.
Small, 1995, p. 163.
Chapter 18: Mortality/Angst
1.
Appel, 1967, pp. 140–41.
2.
Becker, 1973, p. 283.
3.
Moussaieff Masson and McCarthy, 1995, p. 74.
4.
Leakey and Lewin, 1992, p. 303.
5.
Moussaieff Masson and McCarthy, 1995, p. 95.
6.
Becker, 1973, p. 87.
7.
Herodotus, 1954, pp. 460–61.
8.
Quoted in Becker, 1973, p. 25.
9.
Mithin, 1996, p. 152.
10.
Piaget, 1974; Gould, 1977.
11.
Bronson, 1982, p. 100.
12.
White, 1993a; White, 1993b.
13.
Wexler, 1992, pp. 2820–25.
Chapter 19: Superstition/Laughter
1.
Barlow, 1958, p. 93.
2.
Thompson, 1984, p. 134.
3.
Ferenczi, 1955, p. 246.
4.
Shaler, 1900, p. 22.
5.
Calhoun, 1962, pp. 139–46.
6.
Quoted in Brown, 1959, p. 100.
7.
Ortega y Gasset, 1957, pp. 156–57.
8.
Camus, 1955, p. 3.
9.
Quoted in Potts and Short, 1999, p. 189.
10.
De Waal, 1996.
11.
Rousseau, 1964 (1755), p. 141.
Chapter 20: Father/Mother
1.
Quoted in Fisher, 1992, p. 47.
2.
Batten, 1992, p. 186.
3.
Mead, 1967, p. 192.
4.
McBrearty and Brooks, 2000, pp. 453–563.
5.
Anthropologist Richard Klein proposes that the Creative Explosion resulted from a brain mutation that rather abruptly changed the way Homo sapiens thought. The mutation would have had to have occurred prior to the last significant exodus of sapients out of Africa, and then would have had to have lain relatively dormant for approximately 10,000 more years before manifesting in the Creative Explosion. The 10,000-year unexpressed mutation could be the only way Aborigines in Australia could have paralleled the development of the Cro-Magnons in southern France. Recent research has reduced the age of the oldest Australian aboriginal, but it still remains at somewhere around 40,000 years ago. Klein’s work draws on the conclusions of Ingman et al., who trace the DNA in everyone living today back to a small group of Homo sapiens that left Africa 52,000 years ago.
Klein and others propose that it was this group of very recent immigrants that replaced the older Homo sapiens, and everyone alive today derives from this last group. Many experts disagree with Klein’s theory, and his proposition of a sudden brain mutation that increased awareness sufficiently to lead to art, music, and burials is as plausible, in my opinion, as my theory of our ancestors’ rapid maturation of consciousness due to multiple insights about the human condition. (Ingman, Kaessmann, Pääbo, and Glyllensten, 2000, pp. 708–13; Klein, 2002.)
6.
Malinowski, 1929, p. 242.
7.
Walker, 1983, p. 680.
8.
Holmberg, 1950, p. 73.
9.
Brown, 1959, p. 185.
10.
Quoted in ibid., p. 107.
11.
Ridley, 1993, p. 226.
12.
Herodotus, 1954, p. 111.
13.
Walker, 1983, p. 709.
Chapter 21: Incest/Dowries
1.
Tiger and Fox, 1971, p. 261.
2.
Schull and Neel, 1965.
3.
Morton and Neel, 1967, pp. 55–62.
4.
Lévi-Strauss, 1969, p. 136.
5.
Canetti, 1963.
6.
Commager, 1977, p. 8.
Chapter 22: Wife/Husband
1.
Quoted in Batten, 1992, p. 22.
2.
Lewis, Amini, and Lannon, 2000, p. 89.
3.
Quoted in ibid., p. 204.
4.
Ibid., p. 144.
Chapter 23: Misogyny/Patriarchy
1.
Hrdy, 1981, p. 14.
2.
Quoted in Coutinho, 1999, p. 164.
3.
Quoted in Symons, 1979, p. 253.
4.
Innumerable artists believed that capturing the love between a mother and her son and re-creating it on canvas or in marble represented the greatest challenge for their artistic skills. Painters and sculptors of the highest renown have filled museums and private collections with their attempts to distill this essence. The Madonna with her child ranks as the single most familiar theme in Western art. Note that a clear representation of the lad’s dad is missing from every single one of these paintings, making Mary history’s most famous single mom. Lest someone claim that the second commandment forbids the depiction of the Father, the numerous portrayals of Him engaging in other activities—for example, sparking Adam’s finger—make His failure to appear in Christianity’s most important family portrait all the more puzzling.
And where is Joseph, Jesus’ surrogate father? The gospels tell us that Jesus learned the trade of carpentry from his mortal father. Undoubtedly, the kind and gentle Joseph would have taught his son many other useful things. One would expect that more than a handful of artists would have dared to depict the nuclear family from Bethlehem. Joseph’s virtual and Yahweh’s complete absence from any artwork portraying mother and son is all the more remarkable in a religion that claims that the Holy Trinity is a father, a son, and…a Holy Ghost, or, as in the more modern parlance, the Holy Spirit. This third entity is, most tellingly, not the Holy Mother.
Long before Christianity, the image of a solitary mother holding her son on her lap either just following his birth or immediately following his death had been a central theme in many cultures. A powerful mother embracing her tiny man-child is universal. Tiamat and Kingu, Isis and Horus, Aphrodite and Adonis, Cybele and Attis, and other mother-and-son combinations are a constant thread connecting all the generations back into the miasmic bogs of prehi
story.
5.
Beauvoir, 1953, p. 239.
6.
Tanner and Zihlman, 1976, pp. 585–608.
7.
Ortner, 1974, pp. 67–88.
8.
Coutinho, 1999, p. 6.
9.
Buckley and Gottlieb, 1988, pp. 3–50.
10.
Sagan and Druyan, 1992, p. 223.
11.
Fisher, 1999, p. 258.
12.
Ibid., p. 264.
13.
Buss, 1994, pp. 22–26.
14.
Ellis, 1992, pp. 241–42.
15.
Engels, 1972 (1884), p. 461.
16.
Fox, 1972, p. 292.
Chapter 24: Unknown Mother/African Eve/Modern Woman
1.
Quoted in Brown, 1959, p. 134.
2.
Konner, 2002, pp. xix–xx.
3.
Morgan, 1972, p. 155.
4.
Daly and Wilson, 1978, p. 303; Ford and Beach, 1951, p. 86.
5.
Ridley, 1993, pp. 294.
6.
Morgan, 1990, p. 109.
7.
Ginsburg, Jurenovski, and Jamieson, 1982, pp. 1079–82.
8.
Frisch, 1984, pp. 161–88.
9.
Goodall, 1986, p. 484.
10.
Smuts et al., 1987, pp. 385–99.
11.
Quoted in Mithin, 1996, p. 123.
12.
Bickerton, 1995, p. 65.
13.
Washington Post, 2002, p. AO1.
Bibliography
Ackerman, Diane. 1994. A Natural History of Love. New York: Random House.
Adams, Carol J. 1992. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum.
Aiello, L., and R. I. M. Dunbar. 1993. “Neocortex Size, Group Size, and the Evolution of Language,” Current Anthropology 34: 184–93.
Aiello, L., and P. Wheeler. 1995. “The Expensive Tissue Hypothesis,” Current Anthropology 36 (no. 2): 199–221.
Alexander, Richard. 1990. How Did Humans Evolve? Special Publication no. 1. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.
Alexander, Richard, and K. M. Noonan. 1979. “Concealment of Ovulation, Parental Care, and the Human Social Evolution,” in Evolutionary Biology and Human Social Behavior, ed. N. Chagnon and W. Irons (North Scituate, Mass.: Duxbury), pp. 436–53.
Allen, L. S., and R. A. Gorski. 1991. “Sexual Dimorphism and the Anterior Commissure and the Massa Intermedia of the Human Brain,” Journal of Comparative Neurology 312: 97–104.
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