Were Cavemen Monogamous

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Were Cavemen Monogamous
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Apr 12, 2016 at 8:20 PM ET Prepare to disappoint a generation hooked on caveman erotica —the science suggests that, at some point in our species' ancient history, hominids became monogamous . But...
But, scientists said recently, around 10,000 years ago, something changed. Ancient humans became more monogamous . The theorized reason will be familiar to anyone who has sat through Sex Ed ...
Jan 12, 2021 Humans are broadly monogamous , so the researchers suggested that there might be a link between a species' digit ratio and sexual strategy. If they are right, Neanderthals - who had ratios in...
No species is truly monogamous , not even swans. Even in the most monogamous species we tend to find a bit of cuckoldry and serial monogamy. The average for modern human seems to be 'male polygyny where you can get it, but the majority are monogamous' . As the top commenter has pointed out, human mating systems vary quite considerably.
May 19, 2015 They are polyamorous, with both male and female apes having regular sex with multiple partners. This looks more like the societies Morgan and Engels were describing. When it comes to women's "low...
Aug 2, 2013 They had evolved the ability to hunt and scavenge meat, and they were supplying some of that food to their children. "They may have gone beyond what is normal for monogamous primates," said Dr....
A caveman can do it The long-running Homo sapiens may seem very different from its relative the Neanderthal, which overlapped with prehistoric humans on Earth until it vanished about 20,000 years...
Gibbons, swans, French angelfish and humans can all be monogamous (Getty images) Monogamy evolved in response to the threat of babies being killed by rival men, according to an extensive study of...
The results also suggest that early hominin, Australopithecus -- dating from approximately three to four million years ago -- was likely to be monogamous , whereas the earlier Ardipithecus appears...
Were cavemen monogamous ? Maybe but not too likely. Our current view of exclusively monagamous relationships is relatively recent, possibly only really taking hold in the last 150 years, more or less. "Bundling" teenagers of opposite sexes was common in the Colonial era in the future United States of America.
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Were prehistoric humans monogamous?
Comment removed by moderator · 7 yr. ago
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Were prehistoric humans monogamous?
Prehistoric is a awfully wide range of groups. Prehistoric simply means 'prior to a written history'. That means we're talking about any culture that hadn't developed writing yet. To answer your question, yes some of them were, and some of them weren't. Completely depends on which specific culture you are interested in.
Not only is prehistoric problematic but so, in some ways, is human. We are most closely related to bononos and chimpanzees (both in the genus Pan ). Our fossil ancestors were overwhelmingly likely to be polygynous, like those species. It is a current debate in paleoanthropology when this changed to mostly monogamous, known in biology as pair-bonded. We use clues, like the difference in size between males and females, because we know that in most mammals that have polygyny the males are much larger than the females. All Homo sapiens are pair-bonded, but who your 'pair' is sometimes changes over time, and we also often have sex with people outside our pair-bond. In modern societies, including some traditional hunter-gatherer societies, some people (in almost all cultures only men) are pair-bonded to more than one other person. Who gets to have multiple pair-bonds is based on who has enough resources to support more than one other person.
One thing to note is that the end of prehistory is more than 5000 years after the start of agriculture. Serial monogamy, with a little polygamy, is much more difficult when there is property involved, so monogamy the way we think of it today, with someone being 'married' (not all cultures have formal marriages the way we think of them in western cultures) to someone (or sometimes few someones) all of their life probably coincided with the start of agriculture.
One of my favorite books is The Sex Contract by Helen Fischer. My Anthropology of Sex course used it as a basis for a lot of the class content. We can't know what the sexual norms for ancient people were but we can theorize about it. This book looks at primate behavior to take a guess at have early humans may have acted.
It's considered that many primate females used sex as a bargaining tool for protection and resources. Sex possibly didn't mean the same thing as it does to us now but was likely used as a tool between people within the same group. The alpha male would get sex when he wanted it, but the "beta male" often created bonds with the female group members and also received sex, but not with as many females. It's good to note that not all primates had similar sexual behaviors. We can only assume that monogamy was a result of many factors that came along with religion, property ownership, rules of inheritance and such.
Sorry this may not be your field, but could you talk at all about how the book relates to bonobo sexuality, since as a species they seem to be dominated by the females, how does that relate to their interaction with sex as a bargaining chip?
Most living forager groups practice monogamy (with the exception of the australian aborigines). Using living foragers as models for the deep past is certainly problematic.. but they are the best model we have.
The human archaeological record shows a trend towards decreased sexual dimorphism (male/female body size differences). This is associated, cross species, with reduced male/male competition and, in many cases, more monogamy.
No species is truly monogamous, not even swans. Even in the most monogamous species we tend to find a bit of cuckoldry and serial monogamy. The average for modern human seems to be 'male polygyny where you can get it, but the majority are monogamous'.
As the top commenter has pointed out, human mating systems vary quite considerably. That does not, however, mean that we cannot try to make an educated guess about human behaviour on average.
To answer your question: We do not know, but using dimorphism we can probably argue that prehistoric homo sapiens showed similar patterns of monogamy to modern foragers - that is most usually monogamous with occasional polygyny. Other, more dimorphic ancient human species may have had more polygyny - though still less than most other mammals who are largely polygamous. However, beyond fossil dimorphism and a couple of questionable genetic studies we do not have a lot to go on. Behaviour does not fossilize.
For a related discussion of monogamy in modern humans, I wrote a massive answer here .
If we are not talking about a specific time or culture but the evolutionary stable strategy that has survived through the making of the human species and still prevails. It is more successful for a male to stick with his mate and rear the offspring rather than having more children with different women.
You're going to need a source for that claim, considering how much debate there is over that topic.
So if a male wandered off and left his children with less related people (siblings, uncles ex.) to fend for them, his genes might have a lesser chance with another woman than if he had stayed.
Conversely, the increase in overall fitness from having many children with different women might balance out the loss in fitness from the decreased investment in each individual child.
There is a lot wrong with Sex at Dawn (I'm sorry I don't have time right now to provide links to some of the critiques.) The Red Queen, by Matt Ridley, might be a better option if you enjoy non-fiction.

This article is more than 7 years old
This article is more than 7 years old
The “standard narrative of prehistory” presents the idea that, like Fred and Wilma, men have always gone out to hunt/work and women care for home and children. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features
Early men and women were equal, say scientists
Being polyamorous shows there's no 'traditional' way to live | Laurie Penny
All the day's headlines and highlights from the Guardian, direct to you every morning
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A study released last week presented evidence that prehistoric men and women lived in relative equality . But is the truth even further from the nuclear narrative?
Last week, scientists from University College London released a paper presenting evidence that men and women in early society lived in relative equality. The paper challenges much of our understanding of human history, a fact not lost on the scientists. Mark Dyble, the study’s lead author, stated “sexual equality is one of the important changes that distinguishes humans. It hasn’t really been highlighted before.”
Despite Dyble’s comments, however, this paper isn’t the first foray into the issue. In fact, it represents another shot fired in a debate between scientific and anthropological communities that has been raging for centuries. It’s a debate that asks some fundamental questions: who are we, and how did we become the society we are today?
Our modern picture of prehistoric societies, or what we can call the “standard narrative of prehistory” looks a lot like The Flintstones. The narrative goes that we have always lived in nuclear families. Men have always gone out to work or hunt, while women stayed at home to look after the house and the children. The nuclear family and the patriarchy are as old as society itself.
The narrative is multifaceted, but has strong roots in biological science, which can probably be traced back to Charles Darwin’s theory of sexual selection. Darwin’s premise was that due to their need to carry and nurture a child women have a greater investment in offspring than men. Women are therefore significantly more hesitant to participate in sexual activity, creating conflicting sexual agendas between the two genders.
This creates a rather awkward situation. With women producing such “unusually helpless and dependent offspring” , they require a mate who not only has good genes, but is able to provide goods and services (i.e. shelter, meat and protection) to the woman and her child. However, men are unwilling to provide women with the support they require unless they have certainty the children are theirs — otherwise they are providing support to the genes of another man. In turn men demand fidelity; an assurance their genetic line is being maintained.
Helen Fisher calls this ‘The Sex Contract’ , but the authors of Sex at Dawn , Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, are a little more cutting in their analysis: “the standard narrative of heterosexual interaction boils down to prostitution: a woman exchanges her sexual services for access to resources … Darwin says your mother’s a whore. Simple as that.”
Herein, so some scientists say, lie the roots of our nuclear family and the patriarchy. Our gendered hierarchy is based on an innate biological need for women to be supported by men. The very capacity for women to give birth to children places them in a lower position within society.
Scientists use a whole range of other evidence to support this narrative. Many for example point our closest relatives. Scientists have researched monogamy of gibbons and the sexual hierarchies of chimpanzees to point to a “natural” expression of our innate desires.
Other scientists use human biology. A common example is women’s apparently weak libido. Discussing his book Why Can’t a Woman be More Like a Man ? released last year, for example, Lewis Wolpert states: “About half of men think about sex every day or several times a day, which fits with my own experience, while only 20 per cent of women think about sex equally often. Men are far more likely to be sexually promiscuous, a throwback to evolution where procreation was all-important.”
If you subscribe to the theory of a sex contract this is logical. A lower sex drive ensures women are more selective in their sexual decisions, making certain that they only mate with high-quality men. Women, so some scientists say, are evolutionarily designed to be selective in their mates.
Yet, for centuries many have questioned the logic, and the biology, of the standard narrative.
The first real splash in this arena came from the anthropologist Lewis Morgan, and his book Ancient Society . In the book Morgan presented the results of his study of the Iroquois, a Native American hunter-gatherer society in upstate New York. The Iroquois, Morgan observed, lived in large family units based on polyamorous relationships, in which men and women lived in general equality.
Morgan’s work hit a broader audience when it was taken up by Friedrich Engels (most famous for being the co-author of the The Communist Manifesto) in his book The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State . Engels drew on Morgan’s data, as well as evidence from around the world to argue that prehistoric societies lived in what he called “primitive communism”. Other anthropologists now call this “fierce egalitarianism” : societies where families were based on polyamory and in which people lived in active equality (i.e. equality is enforced).
Morgan and Engels were not painting a picture of a “noble savage”. Humans were not egalitarian nor polyamorous because of their social conscience, but because of need. Hunter-gather societies were based largely on small roaming clans where men engaged in hunting, while women’s roles focused around gathering roots, fruit and berries, as well as looking after the “home”. In these societies community was everything. People survived through the support of their clan and therefore sharing and working within their clan was essential. This crossed over into sex as well.
Polyamory helped foster strong networks, where it became everyone’s responsibility to look after children. As Christopher Ryan states : “These overlapping, intersecting sexual relationships strengthened group cohesion and could offer a measure of security in an uncertain world.” The same can be said for our other social hierarchies. As Jared Diamond explains , with no ability or need to store or hoard resources, “there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others”. Hunting and gathering enforced social equality. It was the only way people could survive.
While initially developed in the 1800s, these theories died down somewhat in the early 20th century. With Engels’ connection to Marx, many of these ideas were lost in the great philosophical debate of the Cold War. Many second wave feminists, led primarily by Simone de Beauvoir in her book The Second Sex, also argued against Engels’ ideas.
Recently however, these theories have had something of a renaissance. On top of Dyble’s study last week, new anthropological and scientific evidence backs up this challenge to the standard narrative. In 2012 Katherine Starkweather and Raymond Hames conducted a survey of examples on ‘non-classical polyandry’ , discovering the phenomenon existed in many more societies than previously thought.
In another example Stephen Beckman and Paul Valentine examined the phenomenon of ‘partible paternity’ in tribes in South America: the belief that babies are made up from the culmination of the spermatozoa of multiple males. This belief, which is common in tribes in the Amazon requires polyamorous sexual activity by women, and that men share the load of supporting children.
And then there is the example of the Mosua in China , a society in which people are highly promiscuous and where there is no shame associated with this. Mosua women have a high level of authority, with children being looked after by a child’s mother and her relatives. Fathers have no role in the upbringing of a child — in fact the Mosua have no word to express the concept of “father”.
In Sex at Dawn, released in 2010, Ryan and Jethá provided a range of biological evidence to back up this anthropological data. Let’s take a look at their counteractions to the two examples produced earlier: the behaviour of our closest relatives and women’s apparently low libido.
Ryan and Jethá argue that while yes, gibbons and chimpanzees are close relatives, our closest relatives are in fact bonobos. Bonobos live in female-centered societies, where war is rare and sex serves an important social function. They are polyamorous, with both male and female apes having regular sex with multiple partners. This looks more like the societies Morgan and Engels were describing.
When it comes to women’s “low libido”, Ryan and Jethá simply disagree, arguing in fact that women have evolved for sex with multiple partners . They look, for example, at women’s ability to have multiple orgasms in a sexual session, to have sex at any time during their menstrual cycle and their propensity to make a lot of noise during sex — which they argue is a prehistoric mating call to encourage more men to come and join in. These evolutionary traits have occurred, they argue, to ensure breeding is successful.
In short, Dyble’s paper is unlikely to provide the conclusion to a battle that has been raging for at least two centuries. The paper, however, certainly is another nail in the coffin of the standard narrative of prehistory. One this seems clear: our history is much more complex than previously thought. How complex, we may never know. Without a time machine it is impossible to confirm. But we now can be certain that things in the past were very different to the standard narrative. We are not all just versions of the modern stone age family.

Science | Monogamy and Human Evolution
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“Monogamy is a problem,” said Dieter Lukas of the University of Cambridge in a telephone news conference last week. As Dr. Lukas explained to reporters, he and other biologists consider monogamy an evolutionary puzzle.
In 9 percent of all mammal species, males and females will share a common territory for more than one breeding season, and in some cases bond for life. This is a problem — a scientific one — because male mammals could theoretically have more offspring by giving up on monogamy and mating with lots of females.
In a new study, Dr. Lukas and his colleague Tim Clutton-Brock suggest that monogamy evolves when females spread out, making it hard for a male to travel around and fend off competing males.
On the same day, Kit Opie of University College London and his colleagues published a similar study on primates, which are especially monogamous — males and females bond in over a quarter of primate species. The London scientists came to a different conclusion: that the threat of infanticide leads males to stick with only one female, protecting her from other males.
Even with the scientific problem far from resolved, research like this inevitably turns us into narcissists. It’s all well and good to understand why the gray-handed night monkey became monogamous . But we want to know: What does this say about men and women?
As with all things concerning the human heart, it’s complicated.
“The human mating system is extremely flexible,” Bernard Chapais of the University of Montreal wrote in a recent review in
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