Sex at Dawn

Monogamy is bullshit. It's unnatural. Everybody knows that, yet we spend our lives living and defending the lie. How did the myth get started? Why does it persist? In a word: agriculture. It's a long and convoluted story, but it all boils down to Stuff. Once we settled down and started accumulating Stuff, we had to start defending it. And “Stuff”, of course, includes wimminfolk. There you go.

It's hard to imagine prehistory. Really hard. There's not much to go on... but there's a lot more every year: archaeological evidence, anthropological, DNA analysis, behavioral studies of our Bonobo cousins. And all of it – all of it – points to a history that's different from what we grew up believing. The last 10,000 years are an aberration, and one that's making us sick.

Sex at Dawn is the most thorough study I've yet read on the subject. It's also the most readable. Ryan and Jethá present the evidence clearly, in a sometimes chiding but always loving voice. They don't always agree with the conclusions of the scientists whose work they cite... but they gently show how even the scientists themselves don't agree with the evidence they've collected. (It's understandable: we've all got a lot of misconceptions to outgrow, and that's hard.)

Sex at Dawn explains us better than anything I've yet read. This is an important book, well worth reading and thinking about.