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Sex at Dawn - or, our promiscuous human past

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DeepGlue:
Any anthropologists out there? Have you heard of this new book Sex at Dawn?


--- Quote ---Since Darwin's day, we've been told that sexual monogamy comes naturally to our species. Mainstream science--as well as religious and cultural institutions--has maintained that men and women evolved in families in which a man's possessions and protection were exchanged for a woman's fertility and fidelity. But this narrative is collapsing. Fewer and fewer couples are getting married, and divorce rates keep climbing as adultery and flagging libido drag down even seemingly solid marriages.
How can reality be reconciled with the accepted narrative? It can't be, according to renegade thinkers Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá. While debunking almost everything we "know" about sex, they offer a bold alternative explanation in this provocative and brilliant book.
Ryan and Jethá's central contention is that human beings evolved in egalitarian groups that shared food, child care, and, often, sexual partners. Weaving together convergent, frequently overlooked evidence from anthropology, archaeology, primatology, anatomy, and psychosexuality, the authors show how far from human nature monogamy really is.
--- End quote ---

While I have no real reason to doubt its conclusions, and they probably echo what I've previously read in Jared Diamond's Why is Sex Fun?, I can tell that this is a book written to spur controversy. I heard about it through Dan Savage, who's been pretty hard on monogamy for all of his sex column, and I kind of agree with him. From what I've gleaned listening to him, the book posits that hunting-gathering required that everyone share their possessions, and people also shared their sex, and no one even knew that sex made babies. Then when societies established agriculture, systems of ownership came into place, which essentially included women.

I could buy this, but I just wanted the opinion of someone who knows what they're talking about. Has "mainstream science" really always maintained that monogamy has been homo sapiens standard position back into hunter-gatherer times? Or is this a standard opinion that no anthropologist has written a book about yet? Or do these guys have a very marginal position in the field?

leonet:
I don't know what the current mainstream consensus is.  I'm sure some researchers think that we are "programmed" for monogamy, since it's (currently) the most common arrangement in humans, but I think the authors of the study might be overemphasizing the rigidity of mainstream opinion in order to contrast it with their own.

I'd be inclined to speculate that we aren't really programmed for any particular sexual arrangement.  We have certain instincts like pair bonding, but we are very flexible in how we apply them.

Anders:
There's no particular reason for men and women to want the same thing, is there?

DeepGlue:
What I read in Why is Sex Fun? is that different primate species have switched over time between pairs, promiscuity, and harems, following small selectionary pushes. This was linked to whether or not females advertised ovulation, which also changed based on species and time. So given that all primate species are within a hair's breadth of being any one of these three, I could totally buy a lot of what Sex at Dawn purportedly says. Of course, Jared Diamond was writing out of his discipline, and the psychologist/psychiatrist authors of Sex at Dawn might be.

Chew:
7 hours and not a single morning wood joke. Tsk.

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