When did the concept of exclusive male-female pairings arise? Was there a time in ancient history where it was more of a harem type arrangement, or have humans almost always been 1 to 1 re male - female relationships.
Of course we have no direct evidence, but we can get some ideas based on comparisons between our closest primate relatives and ourselves.
Gibbons form territorial pairs. The males don’t allow other males to enter the territory, the females don’t allow other females. Gibbons have small testes size, indicating that they have relatively small levels of sperm competition. Males and females are about the same size, with little sexual dimorphism, indicating little male-male fighting. This is similar to what is found in pair-bonded birds, where males and females are of similar sizes.
Orangutans are solitary. Males mate with nearby females. Males are much larger than females, indicating that males compete physically for the right to mate with females. Males also have large secondary sexual characteristics…throat and cheek pouches.
Gorillas live in single male, multiple female social groups. Males are much larger than females, indicating male-male aggression, but also have small testes. Males have small testes, indicating little sperm competition. The males fight each other, but the alpha male monopolizes actual mating. One male typically monopolizes multiple females.
Chimps live in multi-male multi-female bands. Males are somewhat larger than females, males have very large testes and produce lots of sperm. Female chimps will mate more often with dominant males, and dominant males will attempt to prevent lower-status males from mating with females, but females will often mate with every male in the band. Therefore sperm competition is high and there is selective pressure to produce more sperm to–ahem–crowd out the other males’ sperm.
Humans live in multi-male multi-female bands, but have long term pairings within those bands. Males are somewhat larger than females, indicating some male-male aggression and the ability of dominant males to pair with more than one female. Human testes size is intermediate to gorillas and chimps, indicating more sperm competition than gorillas but less than chimps. Human males often monopolize a female’s mating, but the females have more opportunity to mate with more than one male at a time due to the multiple males in one social group.
Because human sexual dimorphism and testes size seem to be consistent with what we might expect given human social and mating patterns, it seems likely that those patterns are fairly long standing, long standing enough to have shaped our anatomy via natural selection. Anatomically modern humans almost certainly had mating patterns within the range of the mating patterns observable in widely different societies today. Every known human society has had a concept of marriage, albeit with different rules about divorce, who can marry who, whether polygamy is allowed, pre and extramarital sex, etc. We don’t have any direct evidence about the mating habits of Neandertals, Homo erectus, or Australopithecines, but they probably fell within some range between a chimp style mating system and a modern human style mating system, although certainly some could have evolved in a completely novel way. But I wouldn’t expect anatomically modern humans from 100,000 years ago to have a mating system any different than what hunter-gathering humans today might have.
Of course we have no direct evidence, but we can get some ideas based on comparisons between our closest primate relatives and ourselves.
Gibbons form territorial pairs. The males don’t allow other males to enter the territory, the females don’t allow other females. Gibbons have small testes size, indicating that they have relatively small levels of sperm competition. Males and females are about the same size, with little sexual dimorphism, indicating little male-male fighting. This is similar to what is found in pair-bonded birds, where males and females are of similar sizes.
Orangutans are solitary. Males mate with nearby females. Males are much larger than females, indicating that males compete physically for the right to mate with females. Males also have large secondary sexual characteristics…throat and cheek pouches.
Gorillas live in single male, multiple female social groups. Males are much larger than females, indicating male-male aggression, but also have small testes. Males have small testes, indicating little sperm competition. The males fight each other, but the alpha male monopolizes actual mating. One male typically monopolizes multiple females.
Chimps live in multi-male multi-female bands. Males are somewhat larger than females, males have very large testes and produce lots of sperm. Female chimps will mate more often with dominant males, and dominant males will attempt to prevent lower-status males from mating with females, but females will often mate with every male in the band. Therefore sperm competition is high and there is selective pressure to produce more sperm to–ahem–crowd out the other males’ sperm.
Humans live in multi-male multi-female bands, but have long term pairings within those bands. Males are somewhat larger than females, indicating some male-male aggression and the ability of dominant males to pair with more than one female. Human testes size is intermediate to gorillas and chimps, indicating more sperm competition than gorillas but less than chimps. Human males often monopolize a female’s mating, but the females have more opportunity to mate with more than one male at a time due to the multiple males in one social group.
Because human sexual dimorphism and testes size seem to be consistent with what we might expect given human social and mating patterns, it seems likely that those patterns are fairly long standing, long standing enough to have shaped our anatomy via natural selection. Anatomically modern humans almost certainly had mating patterns within the range of the mating patterns observable in widely different societies today. Every known human society has had a concept of marriage, albeit with different rules about divorce, who can marry who, whether polygamy is allowed, pre and extramarital sex, etc. We don’t have any direct evidence about the mating habits of Neandertals, Homo erectus, or Australopithecines, but they probably fell within some range between a chimp style mating system and a modern human style mating system, although certainly some could have evolved in a completely novel way. But I wouldn’t expect anatomically modern humans from 100,000 years ago to have a mating system any different than what hunter-gathering humans today might have.
I always thought that the concept of monogamy came about when civilizations or smaller groups of people became more organized into villages, etc., and it became necessary to discern who or what belonged to whom.
If everyone just ran amok one would not know whose child was whose, and as societies became more and more civilized, the need to prioritize and and assign responsibility was felt. If one man and one woman were paired, and punishment for adultery was severe, the concept of monogamy and ‘marriage’ would have worked in that society.
This seemed to come about not as a reaction to how the huiman being really is, but rather as a response to that which is NOT human nature. Maybe that is why most marriages fail. Maybe we need a new concept.
Sorry about quoting the whole thing. I don’t have any ‘factual’ evidence for GQ and I’d bet this would be an incredible GD question. What I’ve always figured was, out of the human species(hell, any species for that matter), men are the most jealous… I’d guess that men were the ones that ‘invented’ the monogomous relationship. I’m sure it wasn’t women who invented the Chastity Belt either. 
Quite territorial us men seem to be…and it’s frustrating.
Females, by nature, may not be as broadly *territorial * as males, but are highly competitive in terms of more subtle inter-group hierarchcal issues and relative inter-group social rank relative to other females.
Yes, I too read this report from the Center for the Study of the Blatantly Obvious.
Lemur866 that post seems pretty much like a re-hash of Morris, and Morris’ work itself has more than a few critics. To point out some of the more obvious flaws or suspect assumptions.
· Male:female size ratios are related to male: male aggression.
This can only possibly be justified if both males and females are undertaking exactly the same tasks. That a near enough valid assumption for the other apes which are foragers. Unfortunately it isn’t even close to being true for humans. Humans aren’t just foragers, we are hunters. Not only are we hunters we are big game hunters. We indulge in an inherently risky task as part of our survival and that task is enhanced by physical strength.
The size difference between human makes and females can be more than adequately explained simply because human males were the hunters, and this is supported by the fact that in all HG societies large game hunting was a male-only pursuit. Human being have an extremely extended period of helplessness where the young are dependent on the mother. It simply made no sense for females to indulge in risky hunting practices which could so easily result in the death of both the mother and two or even more children.
You said of gibbons “This is similar to what is found in pair-bonded birds, where males and females are of similar sizes”. What you didn’t mention was that for many pair bonded birds there is considerable dimorphism when male and females have different functions. This has in some instances produced birds where the males and females can’t even be indentified as the same species until they are seen mating together, they are so physiognomically different in size, bill shape and behaviour.
· Testis size correlates to polyamory.
This is one of Morris’ more highly suspect statements. To begin with he ignored what was well known at the time, that females gorillas routinely cheat with sub-dominant males. Some researchers have suggested that very few gorilla pregnancies are of clearly defined paternity. That one point alone goes along way to discrediting the hyptothesis.
The next point is that the hypotheses only considers one correlation: testis size to polyandry.
Other scientists have pointed out that the correlation works reasonably well with protein intake, penis size, gut length and amount of non-productive time as well as numerous other correlations. The problem with the idea that testis size must be related to sperm competition is that it ignores the fact that sperm production is moderately expensive, especially in protein and some trace nutrients that can be hard to some by. That’s why not every animal has maximally large testicles. It’s entirely possible that the size is related more to available nutrients and the number of matings than to competetition.
In summary there’s no particularly credible way to deduce what the ‘natural’ human mating system was from physiology.
Won’t someone please think of the BONOBOS?!?!?!
Exclusive possessiveness of alpha men over womenfolk is a product of accumulated property and inheritance. Men demanding that only their genetic offspring can get their goodies. First ask what caused society to develop in such a way that some men accumulated such unequal amounts of personal wealth that they would feel a necessity to restrict it to only their own personal genetic line. From this grew patrilineal inheritance, patriarchy, subordination of women, and the whole thing. The accumulated wealth to be inherited was fundamentally noe of two things: either land (in agricultural economies) or herds & flocks (in pastoral economies).
Where do we find the strongest insistence on controlling women’s reproductive freedom and the dominance of the male lineage? In the desert religions from the Middle East: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Their social norms go back to the values of pastoral herders. Living on the ecological margin in arid environments, their need for tight control over scarce resources made their menfolk very particular about just who can get their hands on those resources. To keep the property exclusively within the male line, they had to implement religious/legal controls over women, to keep other men’s DNA out of the picture.
The ancient Romans were another extremely patriarchal society, although agriculturally based; so were the Dorian Greeks. If you look at the origins of the Indo-European peoples, descending from the Kurgan culture, their patriarchal social norms go back to when they were nomadic pastoralists from the steppes. Even when the Indo-Europeans and Jewish/Christian/Muslim Semites took up agriculture, the patriarchal control over property, inheritance, parentage, and women persisted until the 20th century. There could still be found in historical times remnants of earlier societies in which women had more freedom, where the Goddess was worshiped primarily rather than punitive, jealous male gods, where lineage and inheritance were such an overriding concern of alpha men. Anyway, the patriarchal insistence on inheritance seems to be at the source of both harems and monogamy. In either case, women are restricted to a single paterfamilias to control their reproduction.
In pre-Islamic Mecca, one alternative form of reproductive arrangements went like this: a woman would invite up to ten different men to be her lovers, one after another. When she became pregnant, she would choose one of these men to be responsible for funding the child-rearing. He would be identified as the father, and he had to pay up. All the men had entered the agreement with this understanding, that one of them would be chosen and would be responsible. No attention was paid to the male genetic line. This was a survival of an earlier era when women had control over their own power and could call the shots.
Sorry, I meant to type
“where lineage and inheritance were not such an overriding concern”
(What is it about typing here that we keep omitting the word “not” so frequently?)
The idea that monogamy is a result of human society and civilization can not be completely true. Here is my reasoning: Geese find a mate at about 12 months old then pair for life. They can live for 90 years and if one dies it is very hard to make the other accept a new mate even years after. Even more fathful than humans you could say but they are certainly not civilised (they don’t stop eating to go to the loo).
Look, if marriage and sexual jealousy were the result of agriculture or pastoralism, then why does every known hunter-gatherer society also have marriage? As for the contention that Christianity or Islam is somehow inherently patriarchal, I don’t see China or India or Japan brimming with sexual equality and non-hierarchical relationships. Neither was pagan Europe or the Middle east.
Sure, hunter-gathering societies tend to have more sexual equality than other societies, but all hierarchies are flatter in hunter-gatherer societies, since there isn’t much surplus production to accumulate. Yes, social rules about divorce, pre and extramarital sex might be looser in hunter-gatherer societies, but all social rules tend to be looser in hunter-gatherer societies. Conflict can be solved by splitting up the group and moving to another location. You can’t easily move a farm without losing a lot of sunk capital investment. Therefore conflict resolution has to be more formal.
Now, the contention that human males are specially adapted to be big-game hunters. I don’t buy it. Did human males in the Pleistocene really engage in a lot of big game hunting? How can we prove that? Sexual dimorphism in mammals can be explained by sexual competition among the males, why should we expect humans to be different? We know from empirical observation that high status human males mate more frequently than low status males. I don’t think hunting has anything to do with it.
I’ve never heard of this kind of arrangement being present in the ancient near east or middle east. Do you have any kind of a cite for this assertion?
astro, you asked for a cite. This was something I remember reading in a mosque newsletter about 20 years ago. Apparently it was recorded in the book called Sahîh by al-Bukhari, a book compiled in the 9th century.
Looking around at the books on my shelf for something on this, I looked at Women and Gender in Islam by Leila Ahmed (Yale University Press, 1992), which corroborated the idea in general, although I didn’t find anything so specific.
(p. 41) The type of arrangement I related, which you questioned, fits Professor Ahmed’s descriptions of both uxorilocal and polyandrous.
(p. 43.) Now we come to what I think was the source of the matter:
(p. 44) The footnote at this point refers us to Sahih al-Bukhari 7:44. The two other works cited were W. Robertson Smith, Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia (Cambridge University Press, 1885) and W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad at Medina (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), p. 272-73.
Will that do for a cite?
you seem to be completely unaware that exclusive possessiveness of alpha men over womenfolk is just as common and just as rigorously enforced in HG societies as in any agricultural society. Indeed it is only in a small minority of agricultural societies such as some Polynesian cultures that I have ever heard of any real degree of sexual liberty for women.
Since this is GQ I’m going to ask for a reference for the above claim that society with heritable possessions are less likely to tolerate extra-marital sex than HG societies with no such possessions.
Can I have a cite for that too please? Are you aware of the degree of control asserted by some Australian Aboriginal men over their wives for example? That included the right to kill them for any or no reason. Female intercourse outside of sexual relationships in most Aboriginal cultures was punished by death administered at the whim of the parents of husband. Can you please provide a reference that the Middle.
Johanna your view of the world totally ignores the fact that males in the human species have to provide for their offspring if they are to survive, and that such caring can only be genetically warranted if there is a reasonable degree of monogamy. Moreover your view totally ignores the problem of incest and inbreeding in small isolated HG bands. The idea that monogamy is only beneficial in materialist cultures is simply nonsense.
That is debatable at best. All the HG societies I have ever heard of have been at least as stringent about non extramarital sex as any agricultural society. Can you name any HG societies at all that have more sexual equality than agricultural societies?
Well we can’t ‘prove’ anything, including your own existence. What we can do is look at the plethora of bones where the knife marks that stripped the flesh underlie the tooth marks of lions and hyaenas. Never do the predator tooth marks lie over the human workings. That proves that humans were butchering large prey and it also suggests strongly that they were taking the kill before other predators arrived, ie they were hunting the large prey and not scavenging.
Because humans are different as you well know. We are the only mammal species where the males and females have distinct and rigorously enforced roles and behaviours. Only in the late 20th century did this begin to break down. For the previous 120, 000 years human males and human females had distinct roles, obtained food by distinct means and had distinct behaviours. AFAIK we are unique amongst mammals in that respect.
In some bird and insect species there is an equivalent demarcation in male and female roles in obtaining food and in those species without exception there is a distinct gender dimorphism even when the pairs are lifelong monogamous and territorial.
Or to put it another way, in every other species on the planet with distinct gender roles dimorphism has evolved to adapt the genders to those distinct roles. Why should we expect humans to be the only species where distinct gender roles hasn’t led to adaptation to filling those roles?
Do we? Can I have a reference for that? How do we define high status? I know plenty of unemployed men who have far more sex than well paid professional geeks for example. It seems to me that such empirical observations could only arise if we define high-status by an ability to get the babes. If it’s base don anything else objective like salary or parental occupation then it’s not particularly true in my experience.
Um? I should have though almost every species that procreated by sex have different roles for the two sexes. Female elephants are pack animals, the male live alone. Or were you thinking about obtaining food only? Mostly only female lions partake in the hunt. The male lion seldom hunt food for himself. He just kinda scrounges off the females.
Don’t know how much it reveals, but statistics in today’s society shown that rich, successful males have on average more children than poor unsuccessful males. Also isn’t it fairly much generally accepted that many women are attracted by power and success?
Yes, very cute.
I was thinking about exactly what I said. Allow me to repeat: had distinct roles, obtained food by distinct means and had distinct behaviours.
Male elephants and female elephants have distinct behaviours only to the extent of sociality. Beyond that they obtain food the same way, react the same way to predators and so forth. If we transplanted the brain of a female elephant into the body of a male and vice versa there would be no tasks they couldn’t still perform beyond those directly associated with reproduction.
The same is not true of humans, some birds, some insects etc where the sexes have distinct roles, obtained food by distinct means and had distinct behaviours.
No, he does not. Where do you think lions come from? Do you suppose they spring fully formed form the ground? Lions need to be able to hunt just as well as lionesses in order to survive until such time as they can gain control of a pride, something that may never occur.
Once they obtain a pride lions may seldom hunt, although in smaller prides they do indeed hunt, but lions and lionesses both need to be designed as efficient predators and both obtain food in the same manner. It’s not like lions only ever catch small games and lionesses only ever scavenge and hunt large game. That would be distinct roles. Instead we find both males and females as active hunters of small and large game and scavengers.
Really, can I have a cite for that? I have seen several references that show a negative correlation between income/education and family size. My personal observations also tend to agree, professional couples rarely have more than two children while working class or unemployed couples are far more prone to. You seem to be saying exactly the opposite and I would love to see the reference for it.
“Traditional models of fertility involve a tradeoff between child quantity and child quality in order to justify the observed negative relationship between family income and total family size.”
http://www2.gsb.columbia.edu/divisions/finance/seminars/micro/Fall_04/Black.pdf.
Women are humans, they are attracted by a great many things including power, social status, looks, personality, sens eof humour and so forth. But I’m really not sure what this is supposed to tell us.
Blake, I’m curious. What to you is the difference here? You say male and female elephants only differ to the extent of sociality. How do you feel humans differ from that? Yes, we have (to our knowledge) enforced gender roles over the many years of our evolution. So have the elephants. Those are both social, not physical. Physically, nothing prevents a male elephant from living with females. Its their society that wont allow it.
Both lion sexes need to be able to hunt prey. The lion is bigger than the lioness and lion “society” allows him to lounge around once he’s in a pride, but he still has claws and can still survive on his own if he leaves the pride.
Likewise, human males and females both have opposable thumbs and are capable of throwing a spear or digging up a root. And humans are perfectly capable of learning different gender roles if they leave the tribe. but our many societies enforce gender roles to such an extent that, like lions and elephants, it can sometimes seem that there’s no other way of behaving, even though physically, we’re pretty much all capable of doing the different tasks.
So what is this “only mammal species” stuff?
I would imagine the “physical” reality of male bull elephants entering musth would make it exceedingly dangerous to have them in continuous close proximity to a herd of females and younger elephants.
Warrior Slashclaw you seem to be missing the point entirely. A female elephant can and does obtain exactly the same food as a male elephant and it does it exactly the same way. The two sexes are functionally identical. Similarly a male lion can and does obtain exactly the same food as a female lion and it does it exactly the same way.
That’s not the case with humans. Human females do no obtain food the same way as males and never have before the 20th century. In all human societies there are dictates in what foods males collected and how and what foods females collected and how.
A male lion obtains food by chasing down a zebra and killing it and it does so exactly the same way as a female lions does, Similarly when a male elephant up roots a shrub and eats it is not doing something that a thousand females aren’t doing simultaneously somewhere else.
That is NOT the case with humans. When a human male goes out and throws a spear through an antelope he is doing something that no female has ever done or ever will do, at least within his society and probably ever. Indeed in all the HG societies I know of females are strictly forbidden form owning and using the primary hunting weapons, be that spear, harpoon or bow. Similarly in most societies the collection of many plant foods and small game like insects and rodents is an exclusively female occupation and forbidden to men.
See the difference here? The two human genders have very different roles. They contribute to the troupe in vastly different ways. Never mind what they may be capable of, they simply never do obtain food the same way. That is not the case for any other mammal species that I know of. It certainly isn’t true of elephants or lions where both males and females obtain the same food in precisely the same manner.