Digging for Swingers

Independent on Sunday 29^th September 1996

Four million years ago, a group of chimp-like creatures stood on their hind legs, grew large breasts and buttocks, longer penises and lost a considerable amount of body hair. There is no reason why these changes should have occurred given the way in which natural selection operates. Darwin himself recognised that nudity makes little sense in terms of survival. He argued that sexual selection was responsible for altering our physique - females chose to mate with males on the basis of what they considered attractive rather than functional. A bird of paradise, for instance, is hampered by its long tail and will find it hard to flee from predators, but because females find the tail attractive, they will always pick a partner with the biggest, brightest tail. As a result, their descendants have longer tails, and over time male birds evolve larger and larger tails. In humans, an upright posture and no fur drew attention to sexual characteristics which, again, may have been selected for through female choice: for their height, men have the largest penises in the animal kingdom. Naked skin required clothing as a protection against the elements, but these clothes were then used to cover or draw attention to certain areas of the body. At the same time, our brains were getting bigger: in effect, biology and culture together were creating rapid biological changes to the human species. Dr Timothy Taylor, an archaeologist from Bradford University, says, "In a nutshell, humans have managed to pull ahead of the rest of the animal world by effectively opting out of Darwinian evolution, and I would argue that for the past four million years the human line has been able to consciously separate sex from reproduction."

Taylor, who has only recently completed his PhD, has already won a British Archaeological Award for a television documentary 'Down to Earth'. His new book, Prehistory of Sex: Four Million Years of Human Sexual Culture, is likely to be equally popular. In it he argues that much of the evidence of our ancestor's sexual past has been misinterpreted or simply secreted away in museums through the prudishness of past historians and scientists. Even today many relics are out of bounds to the general public. The Venus figurines from Willdendorf, in southern Austria, are a case in point. The earliest surviving sculptures are a few inches tall and were carved from stone during the Ice Age 30,000 years ago. Naked, large breasted, fat and faceless, the Venuses have puzzled archaeologists for years but prudishness has disguised their true function, says Taylor. One hypothesis is that they depicted images of the Great Goddess relating to a period of matriarchy, a theory that has been popularised by novelist Jean Auel in her best-sellers, The Clan of the Cave Bear, and The Mammoth Hunters. Taylor says, "Given that the widespread imagery of the Virgin Mary today does not demonstrate that the pope is a woman, the statuettes could be telling us something quiet different." He adds that Goddesses ought to be doing something - killing or copulating, for instance, but instead they are completely passive. However, Taylor bases this interpretation on the fact that Indian Goddesses are extremely active, yet Western images of Gods are rather more passive. Who can tell what a person from the Ice Age expected from a deity? A French gynaecologist believes they show women suffering from clinical obesity. Taylor argues that far from being overweight, the women may have needed to be sufficiently well-nourished in order to carry a child to term in an uncertain and hostile glacial environment.

Ultimately the reason they may have been carved was by men for men. "The essential features of the Venus figurines is that they are durable. The smooth-worn surfaces of many of them suggest that they were handled often and were passed around." In short, they were the equivalent of Ice Age porn. They reflected women as a commodity which could be given to other men. The 'attractive' parts - breasts and buttocks - are large: the feet and hands are tiny. "Nudity during the Ice Age would have been uncommon, packing an erotic punch," Taylor adds. If the figures were sculpted by women, and were expressing their sexuality, he feels sure they would have had faces and clitorises. This seems the wrong tack to take: one of the major sexual differences between us and other primates is the hidden nature of female genitalia - giving some indication of a clitoris without a woman looking as if she were preparing for a gynaecological examination would be hard for a sculptor today, never mind the first sculptors in history. Taylor's theory is backed up to some extent by Ice Age cave art which, again, he maintains was painted by and for men since the paintings are of active men and passive women. Other similarly shaped figures from Kostienki in Russia show women with their hands tied or with straps round their breasts but no other clothes. These fur straps hardly represent warm clothing by any stretch of the imagination. "My necessarily subjective interpretation of these sculptures is that they are explicitly sexual, sharing themes of objectification and possession," says Taylor, "A sculptor who can depict hands tied together has a pretty good notion of how hands actually are tied together." However, artists may not have tried everything they drew: one example of rock art shows a man on what look like skis having sex with an elk.

Despite the fact that women were portrayed in this passive manner, there is some evidence to suggest that they were as sexually aware as modern women. A Neolithic figurine from Hagar Qim in Malta has always been interpreted as a woman sitting up about to give birth. In fact, this posture is one that has been adopted comparatively recently, and her belly is only slightly swollen. The woman's back is lacerated with nine scars. Other archaeologists have claimed that these marks symbolise the nine months of pregnancy. This is a Western assumption for many traditional societies calculate the length of gestation by the cycle of the moon which lasts ten calendar months. The figurine has her hand on her vulva: "She is masturbating, one hand languidly supporting her head," says Taylor.

During the Ice Age many explicitly phallic-shaped batons were also carved. These have usually been considered to be ritual objects, or spear-straighteners. "It seems disingenuous to avoid the most obvious and straightforward interpretation," says Taylor. He believes they were dildoes - there is even a double one. No doubt out of a false sense of modesty, pictures of these objects are rarely published with dimensions. Those that have figures attached to them, do fall within the range of modern appliances. The first graphic depictions of these sexual devices were from the fifth and fourth centuries BC and were found on ancient Greek pottery, but there is no reason to suppose - especially as other primates occasionally use tools in the same way - that they were unknown to our Ice Age ancestors.

Images and carvings of the penis were predominant during the Ice Age, but disappeared in the Mesolithic, only to resurface by the Neolithic. Some of the graves found at Varna on the Black Sea Coast show skeletons buried with a wealth of riches. The most striking is a skeleton complete with a penis sheath made out of gold. It wasn't some fancy condom, there is a hole in the tip. Because the penis sheath had not been displaced from its correct location by gases released during putrefaction, the body was probably kept until it began to decay before being buried with the man's treasured possessions. Taylor believes that it may have been akin to a Renaissance codpiece. "It was clearly a piece that was made to be seen - gilding one's penis is hardly modest."

During the Neolithic it appears that gender and biological sex were clearly differentiated. Beaker graves were discovered containing male skeletons with traditionally male tools such as axes. Women were buried facing north, rather than south like the men, and with pottery objects rather than metal implements. However, Taylor says, "Some female graves were found containing hunting kit - the skeletons were clad in male dress and were buried with copper daggers and archery wrist-guards. I think this shows that gendered artifacts had emerged, but that they were not always consistent with biological sex." A thousand years later, there was stronger evidence for transvestism - men or women dressing as the opposite sex. The Scythian Nomads of the Black Sea Steppes were a ferocious warrior elite. According to Hippocrates, they were also impotent. Years in the saddle had given them what the Greek philosopher Herodotus referred to as 'female sickness', a complete loss of functional manhood. Herodotus described them as 'androgynous' and maintained that many became shamans or prophets and wore women's clothes. There is even evidence from Ovid to suggest that a fuller transformation was intentionally wrought as the Scythians drank mare's urine. 'Premarin', an extract of pregnant horse urine, is marketed today for male-to-female transsexuals as part of their hormone therapy: rich in oestrogen, it can suppress beard growth and help breasts develop. Taylor adds, "Any subsequent work conducted in the light of the Greek written evidence would have to take into account the fact that the skeleton of a biological male who had drunk pregnant mares' urine out of a ritual container all his life might well be difficult to recognise as male by today's standards."

What we are beginning to realise is that hormones from animals and plants have long been used by our ancestors, most commonly as contraceptive devices. It is a myth that ancient humans had no idea of the connection between sex and reproduction: after all, some female orangutans have been observed to eat certain plants which make them ill, but might possibly induce abortion (orangs, along with mallard ducks and dolphins are one of the few nonhuman species where it is possible for males to rape females). That plants have hormones which can affect humans and animals was not scientifically accepted until earlier this century when oestrogen was found in willow and other female hormones were discovered in date palms and pomegranates, all of which can prevent or induce menstruation, reduce PMT or function as contraceptives. Queen Anne's lace, a parsley-like plant related to the carrot, is a strong 'morning-after' drug. The Ayurvedic system of medicine from the Indian subcontinent uses about 75 plants, 28 of which can cause abortions. Ancient Egyptians utilized hydrated sodium carbonate mixed with crocodile droppings - a recipe, one imagines, that may have been spermicidal but is unlikely to have been an aphrodisiac. There is even evidence to suggest that men took contraceptives: Dioscorides, a medical writer in the first century, describes a drug to make men barren derived from a plant which he calls periklymenon, but is probably honeysuckle.

This lore has, to a large extent, been lost. Taylor believes women started to lose control over their own fertility during the advent of farming. Farming is usually associated with settling in one place, greater productivity, an increased division of labour into male and female roles, and polygyny - where the wealthiest men were able to marry a number of women. Far from being cast out of Eden, we turned ourselves out, says Taylor.

Taylor's fascinating, insightful, and often amusing account of our journey from Eden seems to me to contain two major flaws. He argues that scientists were biased when they examined archaeological remains, but there is little evidence to show that we are any less free from our own biases. Furthermore, it is often unclear what exactly is taking place in many paintings and carvings, much less what they mean. Eminent scientists still argue whether the 'Grimaldi' figurine is hermaphrodite, one person using a dildo, or two people having sex. Depictions of female genitalia drawn by priests during a clitoris-stretching exercise in the Easter Islands look, says Taylor, "like cartoon cockroaches to the untrained eye." But who trains archaeologists to see?

Secondly, it seems perfectly rational to believe that as a species we are affected both by our culture and our biology but Taylor argues that this interplay between the two forces began 4 million years ago when we first recognised the difference between sex and reproduction. However, the first evidence for this comes from the Ice Age which leaves a short-fall of three and a half million years to account for. Appealing to evidence from other animals can, at best, only be suggestive. The majority of species only have sex when the female is in season. Apart from homosexual rape in the acanthacephalan worm, there is little to suggest that animals play the kind of sex games that we do. The exception is the pygmy chimpanzee. All members of the troop, from the youngest to the oldest will have sex with each other, male-to-male, females with females, and in mixed groups. It's thought that this year round sexual activity promotes harmonious relationships. Females sometimes trade food for sex, a fact which has led to many spurious arguments about human sexual relations. If pygmy chimps have sex all the time, maybe they are incapable of separating sexual pleasure from reproduction; in any case, how would one know if a chimp knew where babies come from? More to the point, chimps have been evolving for the past 4 million years too - no one can tell what their ancestors did or did not do to promote peace in their troop, and they certainly haven't left us any rock art to speculate about.

Taylor hasn't set out to give us all the answers, he is deliberately thought-provoking, and will inspire radical new ways of thinking about our past. What can be said without a shadow of a doubt is that from the first daubs of paint on cave walls to today's cybersex culture our species has long been obsessed with sex.

The Prehistory of Sex: Four Million Years of Human Sexual Culture by Timothy Taylor, published by Fourth Estate