THE FIRST INCEST TABOO

When and Why did it First Emerge?

Hey Folks,

Okay, so today we’re going to return to a book called The Sex Contract, which I previously wrote about in Female Orgasm: The Greatest Scientific Discovery of the 20th Century?

If you’re wondering what the Sex Contract is, no we’re not talking about Dave Chappelle’s Love Contract (although that would have spared a lot of men a lot of misery during the #MeToo era).

The term “The Sex Contract” comes from a book of the same name, and refers to the idea that the basis of human social organization is a male-female division of labour, in which females trade sex to males for meat. It was written by the Canadian anthropologist Helen E. Fisher, and was very influential in its day.

The world has moved on from what is now sometimes called “the Sex Contract era of anthropology”, but the basic idea firmly embedded in the minds of many people, aided in no small part by intellectuals such as Jordan Peterson, who promote the idea of hypergamy.

Strangely, I’ve never heard Peterson mention that the cutting-edge of evolutionary theory, known as “cooperative breeding”, which has a lot more to do with grandmothers, baby-sitting, and social bonding than women prostituting themselves for meat. Still, it’s hard to deny that a man’s perceived ability to provision a family is a major factor in female mate selection. There’s also something called love, but I guess that’s not scientific.

Although The Sex Contract has been supplanted by more sophisticated theories, it remains an important work. It introduced quite a novel idea concerning the origin of the incest taboo, which has always been a difficult question for evolutionary theorists.

If you’re like most people, you may not understand why incest is just a big topic in anthropology, but if you really take the time to think about, it’s not at all obvious how, when, or why it would have first emerged. After all, animals don’t observe incest taboos. To a male dog, a female in heat is a female in heat. What makes humans different? At which point in our development of our species did the first incest taboo emerge? Did it emerge prior to the invention of language, or after? Was it part of what made us human, or is it a more recent development?

As far as I can tell, anthropologists disagree, but then again, it’s sometimes hard to know what they’re really thinking these days, because there’s no such thing as politically correct anthropology. Even the great David Graeber steered clear of certain topics which were “too-hot-to-handle”, such as trans ideology. But there’s no way he didn’t know that the whole “Two-Spirit” movement was founded on false premises.

Case in point: cooking. Anthropologists regard the search for “human universals” - things that hold true across all or almost all cultures - as the Holy Grail, but seem never to mention one of the best-established of those universals is cooking.

The fact is that women do the vast majority of cooking in every single traditional society ever described in the anthropological record. It’s as solid of a human universal as anything you can imagine, but you almost never hear anthropologists say so, because they don’t want to run afoul of the woke mob. But if we’re studying anthropologists because we want to learn about human nature, we have to acknowledge such things.

There is indeed a sexual division of labour shared by literally all indigenous cultures, but it’s not just about sex. It’s about food and child-care. But yes, from a female evolutionary perspective, men are for provisioning first, protection second, love third, and sex fourth. So if you want to focus on that and say that women are whores, I guess you could say that. That’s really a very bleak and capitalistic way of thinking about it, though. The sexual division of labour is not transactional. It is cooperative.

Speaking of human universals, it is also a human universal that every culture on Earth has incest taboos, although those incest taboos vary widely.

Most people are under the impression that there’s an obvious explanation for incest taboos - the effects of inbreeding are disastrous, and every culture on Earth figured this out over time.

However, this idea is not widely accepted by anthropologists, because it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

According to Helen Fisher:

The serious effects of inbreeding occur much more slowly than is commonly thought, only after hundreds of generations.

Now, I was shocked when I read that, and I still don’t believe it. It is true that we are mammals, and most mammals will not hesitate to mate with relatives, but the effects of excessive in-breeding is evident in certain species of dogs, such as English bulldogs, after far less than “hundreds of generations”.

But if we’re talking about dogs, though, then we also have to talk about line-breeding, which is how pedigree dog-breeding work.

What is Line-breeding?

According to Chat GPT:

Line-breeding is a selective breeding strategy used in dogs (and other animals) to concentrate desirable traits by breeding animals that are closely related, but not as closely related as inbreeding. The goal of line-breeding is to produce offspring that inherit specific, desirable characteristics from a common ancestor while minimizing the risks associated with inbreeding, such as the expression of harmful recessive genes.

Key Points of Line-Breeding:

1. Common Ancestor: Line-breeding typically involves breeding dogs that share a common ancestor several generations back. This ancestor is often an exceptional dog with traits that the breeder wishes to replicate in future generations.

2. Selective Pairing: The breeder carefully selects which dogs to breed based on their lineage, focusing on those that are related through the desirable common ancestor. For example, a breeder might mate a dog with its grandchild or with a half-sibling that shares the same parent or grandparent.

3. Maintaining Genetic Diversity: Unlike inbreeding (which might involve breeding full siblings or parent to offspring), line-breeding aims to maintain some level of genetic diversity while still concentrating the desirable traits. The dogs being bred are not as closely related as in inbreeding, reducing the risk of amplifying harmful genetic issues.

4. Advantages: Line-breeding can help fix certain desirable traits in a lineage, such as conformation, temperament, or working ability. By focusing on a common ancestor with these traits, breeders can increase the likelihood that these traits will be passed on to the offspring.

5. Risks: Although line-breeding is less risky than inbreeding, it still carries some risks. The reduced genetic diversity can increase the chances of certain hereditary diseases or genetic disorders emerging, especially if there are any hidden recessive genes that both parents might carry.

6. Monitoring: Responsible breeders who use line-breeding must carefully monitor the health and temperament of the offspring to ensure that the desired traits are being passed on without negative consequences. They often use health screening and genetic testing to manage and mitigate risks.

Example of Line-Breeding:

If a breeder has a champion dog (let's call it "Dog A") known for excellent conformation and temperament, they might decide to breed Dog A's son ("Dog B") to Dog A's granddaughter ("Dog C"). Both Dog B and Dog C share the common ancestor, Dog A, but are not as closely related as parent and child or full siblings, thus concentrating Dog A's traits in their offspring while keeping some genetic variation.

In summary, line-breeding is a careful balance between concentrating desirable traits and managing genetic risks. It's a common practice in dog breeding when done responsibly and with a focus on the long-term health and well-being of the breed.

Yep. That’s how pedigree dog-breeding works. So why wouldn’t it work for humans?

Let’s ask Chat GPT:

Line-breeding and inbreeding, as practiced in animal breeding, are not ethically or socially accepted when applied to humans due to significant moral, legal, and health considerations. In most societies, close-relative marriages, which would be equivalent to inbreeding in animals, are highly discouraged or outright prohibited due to the risks of genetic disorders and the ethical implications.

There you have it, folks. We’re talking biology. Don’t shoot the messenger.

So, if eugenicists were serious about producing the best possible human specimens, they’d encourage the best and brightest to mate with their grandchildren. As a matter of fact, eugenicists did experiment with selective breeding, but that’s a topic for another day.

Furthermore, there are other reasons that the theory that the incest taboo developed to prevent in-breeding doesn’t hold up. Our primitive ancestors didn’t even necessarily know that male paternity was a thing. In Argonauts of the Western Pacific, the foundational work of modern ethnography, Bronislaw Manilowski reported that the Trobriand Islanders he was studying did not know that each individual child had a single biological father.

I’ll let Chat GPT explain:

The Trobriand Islanders have a unique belief system regarding conception and paternity. According to their traditional view, a child is not created by the physical union of a man and a woman. Instead, they believe that a child's spirit (baloma) comes from the mother's lineage and enters her body, initiating pregnancy. The role of the father is considered minimal in the biological process of conception.

Role of Sexual Intercourse: Sexual intercourse is acknowledged as a necessary act for pregnancy to occur, but the Trobrianders do not believe that the father's semen contributes to the creation of the child. Instead, the child is seen as being primarily connected to the mother and her matrilineal ancestors.

This was greeted with incredulity at the time, but there have been many such reports described in the anthropological record since. It is now a widely-accepted fact. And that’s to say nothing of cultures which believe in “partible paternity”, in which the sperm of multiple males is believed to contribute to baby’s development. In such cultures, women apparently have a “three daddies is better than one” attitude, which makes sense in cultures where your mate stands a decent chance by being killed by a snakebite or a wild animal long before your child’s old enough to fend for themself.

So, basically, the “prevention of inbreeding” theory is not adequate to explain the emergence of incest taboos, or why they are so cross-culturally ubiquitous. But they are cross-culturally ubiquitous, which means that there must be an evolutionary explanation for them. What could it be?

Various theories have been proposed by thinkers as Lewis Henry Morgan, Friedrich Engels, Sigmund Freud, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Chris Knight, but to this day, there is no consensus on the subject.

For obvious reasons, this is a subject about which it is difficult for humans to be objective. And I think that Freud’s absolutely batshit take on the Oedipal Complex, which were all the rage for a long time, poisoned the well. After awhile, everyone got sick about talking about fucking their moms and moved on without ever solving the riddle.

Jordan Peterson gets the last word on that one, by the way. Freud was wrong.

The Oedipal Complex is very real, but it describes a pathological psychological condition in which a man fails to reach maturity because he never breaks free from his mother to become his own person. It is not universal, and it is sign that something has gone wrong when an adult is sexually obsessed with his mother.

As for myself, I think that Helen Fisher proposes the most reasonable explanation for the emergence of incest taboos that I have ever heard. As you may have noticed, all of the aforementioned thinkers were men. It turns out that this debate really needed a female perspective.

She proposes:

[A]ll things considered, the incest taboo seems to have stemmed from nothing more than practical economics and the childhood familiarity that makes siblings find one another unattractive as mates.

Picture yourself as the adult female of a tiny family group 4 million years ago. You and your mate have a daughter. Together you raise her. Then, at adolescence, your “husband” starts mating with her. They produce three hungry, rambunctious infants in the next three years. Not only will this cause friction in the group, but you now have three grandchildren and no extra help. Your family has increased by three members— all infants—and no new adults have joined the group to help you and your family support your multiplying numbers.

Economically, you’re in a bind. Thus it is to everyone’s advantage that individuals who reach puberty either import mates from somewhere else or leave the family to find them. Those who stick around and produce new infants with a parent put an economic burden on everyone involved. This early men and women could not afford.

There you have it, folks - the first incest taboo. I still have questions, because this doesn’t explain prohibitions against brothers and sisters mating, but this seems very reasonable to me. A helluva lot more reasonable than Freud’s cockamamie ideas, which he probably came up with on a cocaine binge.

(By the way, did you know that Freud actively promoted cocaine for Merck? Psychiatrists have been pushing drugs since the very beginning! I picked this fun fact up from the Mad in America podcast, which I highly recommend!)

So, I am reposting a chapter from The Sex Contract called The Promiscuous Horde, in which Helen Fisher lays out her theory. She also explains why siblings rarely marry with reference to something called “the Westermarck Effect”, which seems to be widely-accepted. I haven’t gotten around to studying that yet, but I’ll let you know when I do!

In case you’re wondering, I don’t buy every aspect of her theory. My studies into anthropology have led me to utterly disavow Darwinism, and I’m not sold that scientists have any real idea about the age of the Earth, the universe, or the human species.

Still, it seems clear that human societies must have been become increasingly complex over time, which means that we evolved from a more primitive state. If we’re animals, and I’m pretty sure mammals are animals, then there must have been a time before incest taboos existed. Correct me if I’m wrong.

Although I now identify as a Creationist, I’m still very interested in the non-Darwinist evolutionary theory, such as the work of Sarah Hrdy.

If you’re still living within a Darwinist paradigm, all I can really say is that you’ve got some catching up to do. I suggest going straight to the source and reading Mothers and Others, which has revolutionized evolutionary theory.

What do you think? Am I on the right track? Am I mentally deranged for comparing human beings to other mammals? Is there something I’m missing? Am I totally out to lunch?

Please me know in the comments!

for the wild,

Crow Qu’appelle

THE PROMISCUOUS HORDE

by Helen Fisher

For at least a hundred years, men and women have argued—sometimes viciously—about the nature of the first human family. That it evolved from a primal horde in which promiscuous men and women made love indiscriminately was not doubted for a minute. But how did it happen that ancient human beings evolved a complex system of kin—a system of who in the group is “one of us,” whom you are allowed to marry, and to whom you have what obligations? In short, a system of who’s who.

In 1877, Lewis Henry Morgan postulated that primitive families began as matriarchies, lines of females each of which took their ancestry from their mother. Envisioning early people as dumb brutes with small brains and little sense, Morgan figured that when a male became bonded to a female, he joined her social group; because paternity was often questionable, the children were automatically considered hers. Thus the first form of kinship was matriliny—in which descent was traced from the female.

To support his theory, Morgan cited the Iroquois Indians of the American Northeast. Because these people traced their ancestry from the female, he likened them to the primitive stage of matriliny—evidence that such a stage had once prevailed.

The latter half of the nineteenth century saw other early evolutionists reveal their formulas for the beginning of kinship. Three other treatises, all by influential social scientists, traced primitive kinship to the female, the mother. These essays attributed no generous social status to ancient females however. Because most of these thinkers envisioned prehistoric men and women as similar to those they saw around them in Victorian England, they pictured their ancestral male forebears as aggressive, dominant, authoritarian, militant overlords of these matrilineal families. And they portrayed the females as submissive, weak, inactive dependents who, by virtue of their sexual attributes and ability to care for children, were supported by their male superiors—despite the fact that they were economic drains. Many of us have not yet recovered from these stereotypes.

As these treatises go on to say, when early peoples began to grasp the concept of paternity, the males confiscated what little power, property, or insignia the women had acquired as family matriarchs and nominated themselves the patriarchs—from whom all their children would mark their patrilineal descent. Finally, many of these speculators concluded that among the advanced societies of the 1880s—their own, of course—kinship had become bilineal (in which individuals trace their descent from both parents). This, they said, was the pinnacle of civilized social order.

Soon after Morgan published his idea of the primitive matriarchy, however, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s close collaborator, wrote a book called ‘The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,” in which he, too, adopted the matriarchal theme. Some anthropologists were uncomfortable with this tainted association. So with the decline of evolutionism at the turn of the century, they changed their views. The concept of an ancient matriarchy was dropped like an infected sponge and anthropologists proclaimed that extant matrilineal societies such as the Iroquois were merely in transition—on their way back to patriliny, the basic form of human kinship. Furthermore, they erroneously announced that in no society had women ever held “the” political power. Now the dual role of the human male as family patriarch and dominator reigned uncontested and the matter dropped out of the literature.

It was revived again, though, in the 1960s—a full century after the first go-around. Again men were doing the writing and again they championed males as patriarchs of the first human families. The most avid supporters of this view were Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox, anthropologists at Rutgers University. These scholars maintained that early male hunting practices initiated the evolution of human kinship. They reasoned that early males had to travel in groups, to discuss, plan, cooperate, compromise, and coordinate their efforts to fell their prey. And when they caught an animal they had to distribute the parts. This fostered a matrix of loyalties, debts, duties, and obligations between males and initiated the beginning of male-male group cohesion or, as they called it, male bonding. Because these males learned to hunt in adolescence, on their mutual turf in the company of each other, it was vital that they remain in the same territory, and together, as adults. This they did. They imported their mates from elsewhere and assumed leadership as patriarchs of the first human families.

Early females, Tiger and Fox go on to say, rarely participated in the hunt because they were burdened down with children. Also, because females were slower, weaker, less coordinated, subject to moodiness due to their sex cycle, and, as sex objects, disruptive to male group function, they were rarely welcomed along on the hunt. Thus they did not bond, never learned advanced social behaviors such as cooperation and compromise, never played roles as group leaders or matriarchs.

These anthropologists had a good idea—early cooperation probably started kinship. But they pinned their theory on the incorrect assumption that hunting played a huge role in ancient days.

When Johanson’s Lucy and The First Family were leaving their bones and footprints on the plains of East Africa almost 4 million years ago, they left no evidence of big-game hunting.

No hunting tools have been found. No giant carcasses have been excavated near their bones or footprints. No herds of elephants (or other animals) appear to have been driven over cliffs. Yet these hominids lived in groups, and their teeth and jaws (like ours) were designed for grinding hard, fibrous fruits and vegetables as well as meat. So what did they eat? Probably predominantly vegetables.

That is not to say that men did not hunt. Undoubtedly they did. That’s why females had hooked up with them in the first place; why the sexual revolution had taken place. Yet chances are men scavenged for most of what they brought home. Undoubtedly sometimes they hunted in groups and caught medium-sized animals. Occasionally they may even have carted home a larger animal that they had injured with a rock and then chased until it collapsed. This hardly constitutes “big-game hunting,” “man-the-provider,” or “man-the-family-chief.”

But Fox, Tiger, and others didn’t know this. At the time, the faddish theory was “male hunting.” Moreover, Lucy and her friends had not yet been unearthed, nor had anthropologists yet emphasized the role of early females in family life. So they backed up their argument for the male patriarch on what appeared indisputable evidence from animal studies. These would further denigrate the familial position of the female in human history.

The first animal study was one done in 1913 which discussed the “pecking order,” the dominance hierarchy that defines the social world of domestic chickens. It was noticed then that the biggest, loudest, strongest, smartest, or otherwise most socially adept rooster ran the coop. He ate first, was given the most space, and had first access to the hens. Below him was number two rooster, who submitted to pecking by “alpha” chicken but who overlorded all the others. And down the line it went, a ranked regiment of male chickens, each dominant over some and submissive to others. Of course, this pecking order changed from time to time. The throne could be usurped by a younger, more aggressive chicken. Number two might lose to number five and a restructuring would ensue. But flexible as the system was, it involved all male chickens, and on any one day “king” chicken could be identified.

With time, the concept of a pecking order was applied to other animals. Baboons became classic examples. When anthropologists first watched a troop of baboons living on the plains of southern Africa in the 1950s, they quickly found the boss. He was the baboon in the center of the troop being groomed by three females at once. Near him, researchers spotted his immediate subordinates, two other grand monkeys. Then, on the periphery, beyond the females and their kids, were the adolescents and those subordinate males who appeared to spend their time at the edge of the baboon social world.

Because this pecking order was so obvious among male baboons (who are twice as big as females), and perhaps because early observers of baboon behavior were all men, it was thought that female baboons were social subordinates, that this male hierarchy provided a primitive family structure—a matrix of protectors, sentries, and explorers around whom all social life revolved.

Anthropologists found the same hierarchy among our closer relatives, the chimps and gorillas. Unlike male monkeys, however, who establish dominance by confrontation, the apes often use only display to show their rank. The amount of attention apes get, and from whom they get it, seems to establish who’s who. For example, a prime male chimp at Gombe once affirmed his rank by screaming, flinging sticks, and hurling an old gasoline drum around the woods. The racket got every chimp’s attention for over half an hour and convinced them that the noisy male was indeed the boss. Gorillas pound their chests, roar, and stage mock charges at their underlings. Human males seem to have hierarchies too—often showing rank with such abstract mediums as money.

It is axiomatic in the world of science that what you look for you find, and with time it became clear to many scholars that in all primate societies males dominated females—both sexually and socially. On these studies, Fox and Tiger pinned their evidence for early patriarchal kinship groups.

This is a specious argument. Dominance and kinship are not necessarily related concepts. Moreover, recent evidence suggests that neither matriarchy nor patriarchy—both complex kinship terms—should be applied to early social groups. But in the early 1970s, Fox and Tiger’s theory served to maintain male-female stereotypes and to support the concept of male-oriented first families.

Since then, more facts have come to light. However, and it now appears that kinship may have evolved from females. A new understanding began in 1976 when Shirley Strum entered the 48,000-acre Kekopey cattle ranch near Gilgil, Kenya, to observe baboons. At night these large monkeys sleep in the towering cliffs that mark this part of the East African rift. During the day they roam its savannah uplands. For months Strum tagged along with a troop of sixty-one baboons—nicknamed the Pumphouse Gang—until finally, the animals accepted her as an odd but tolerated member.

Within a few days of her appearance at the edge of the troop another newcomer arrived—a big, healthy, young male she came to call Ray. Educated in the anthropological concept of the dominant patriarchal male, Strum expected him to strut to the center of the troop and challenge the most dominant male, or better yet, stride over to the nearest female and demand that she groom his sleek coat.

But Ray didn’t do anything of the sort. Like Dr. Strum, he sat at the edge of the group trying to look friendly and unobtrusive.

After several days, he made friends with a female called Naomi, then with other females of the troop, and finally—through them—he was accepted as a member of the Pumphouse Gang. Then, and only then, did he begin to struggle with the males to establish his rank among them.

During her stay, Strum watched more and more males leave the group, and to her surprise, several unfamiliar faces appeared at the fringes of the Pumphouse Gang. None were admitted without the consent of the adult females of the troop. With time she noticed that the males of the troop rarely made friends with one another. They fought constantly, and they often changed ranks or left the troop. This was hardly the stable core of dominant males so long described in the literature.

The females, on the contrary, were well organized in an elaborate pecking order. Each knew her place, her friends, her duties. So here was the matrix of baboon social life—tiny family groups of mothers and their offspring interacting among themselves to form the stable core of this baboon troop. While the males of all ages came and went, fought, loved, sulked, escorted the females around, acted as guard dogs, they gained entrance into everyday affairs only when the females accepted them.

It now appears that females run the social scene among our closer relatives as well. Like the baboon male, the orang male leaves his mother and his siblings at puberty to roam the surrounding jungles of Sumatra and Java. With luck, guile, and strength, he will become lord and master of a large territory where he will spend his days trying to keep other males from trespassing on his turf. And when not busy bellowing or confronting straying males, he will wander through his lands, coaxing females to mate with him. Among orangs, only females with young travel in stable family units, sometimes joining other females to travel for a while in cooperative multifamily groups.

Females are also the center of social life among gorillas. A dominant silverback male leads his five or so ladies about the mountain paths of East Africa and defends their young. But like all males, he left his mother’s group in adolescence, traveled alone or with other males, and finally acquired his harem only by driving off its former leader. Many of his peers will wander as bachelors forever, dropping in on harems now and then for sex and company. Only the females stick together in strong, stable multifamily units.

Chimpanzees have long been considered the egalitarians of the primate world. They travel in groups, coming and going from central areas where the food is good and the social scene is entertaining. Often a young female wanders with the males, and it is not unusual to see her leave her natal group to join a new one. But chimpanzee groups are fluid and temporary. The only enduring social unit is that of the mother and her offspring—the family. So it now appears likely that the adult primate female is the family leader, and her relations with other females provide the matrix of primate social life.

And, anything but a shrinking violet, the primate mother determines who’s who in the next generation too. This was first noticed among a group of Japanese monkeys at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center. These monkeys had a well-established social hierarchy. Everyone knew his place. Several old females dominated younger ones. Some females dominated most of the males, and a few alpha males dominated everyone. It looked like nothing new. But curiously, the number one animal, Arrowhead, was an extremely small adult male. Moreover, he was missing not only the huge fangs characteristic of a leader but also one eye. Yet the others always gave him what he wanted. His very presence made them cower and withdraw. In fact, when he attacked much larger, stronger, younger males, they fled. How did Arrowhead become the boss?

Apparently, it had to do with his mother. In infancy, Arrowhead, like all primates, had followed his mother’s every move. In his case, his mother was a socially powerful and popular member of the troop, so he learned to be gregarious and self-confident around her influential courtiers and her dominant female friends. Furthermore, he learned to expect deference and respect from her inferiors. Then, in adolescence, when his rough-and-tumble play turned into fighting, his mother rushed to his defense. In seconds, she was fighting the mother of his contender, and eventually Arrowhead and his mother chased off the lesser opponents. After a few of these encounters—in all of which Arrowhead was supported by his mother—he came to assume his mother’s rank.

Evidently, submissiveness is learned from the mother too. This was clearly seen among the chimps at Gombe. Flo was a dominant, persuasive, sexy female who, in the prime of life, produced an alert infant girl. Like Flo, her daughter Fifi grew up to be an excellent mother, made lots of friends, attracted a coterie of suitors, and assumed the dominant role her mother had taught her. But a contemporary of Flo’s was a timid, shy, ineffectual creature who always followed rather than led. She whimpered submissively and cowered in the face of strong adult males and females. Her daughter grew up to be the same.

It now seems that the primate female plays such an important role in her children’s lives that she naturally inhibits incest too. Several revealing studies have made this evident. One study involved a group of five hundred rhesus monkeys on the island of Cayo Santiago, just east of Puerto Rico. After being introduced to this idyllic island of hilly jungles, rocky cliffs, and sandy coconut-palm beaches in 1938, the monkeys have flourished—roaming freely through the woods, swimming in the sea and forest pools, growing up under the auspices of their mothers and their mothers’ friends.

Anthropologists at Cayo Santiago wondered whether the adolescent rhesus males—who had left their natal group—ever copulated with their mothers when they encountered them. So in 1970, a project on incest began. The investigators found that only 1 percent of all copulations occurred between mothers and sons—and these happened only when the son had just reached puberty. Once a male had totally matured, he never tried to court his mother. In fact, he greeted her as an infant does. Some would try to suckle from their mothers, to crawl into their arms or onto their backs. They made infantile cooing sounds and followed their mothers the way they had as children.

The same was seen among free-ranging chimps and gorillas. At Gombe, Flo produced two strapping sons who became dominant members of the troop. But they never tried to copulate with her. Like rhesus males, they acted like children around her. Twice Goodall saw Flo copulate with every male in the group but her sons. Wild male gorillas of East Africa have never been seen to approach their mothers sexually either, though they will sometimes try to copulate with all the other females in the group.

Because primate mothers hold their families together, it seems they discourage incest between their children too. Though there are no long-term studies to prove it, an incident at Gombe leads one to believe that brother-sister incest is infrequent: It was during her first menses that Fifi, Flo’s daughter, was raped by her brother. She fought like mad, and the moment it was over she fled, furious and screaming. Though Fifi eventually copulated with every other male, she never again let her brother touch her.

A revealing study of communal living on an Israeli kibbutz indicates that human children who grow up together do not normally mate either. Here infants were placed in peer groups, where they remained all day while their parents worked in the fields. Before the age of ten, these children often engaged in sexual play, but around this age, the boys and girls became inhibited and tense with one another. Then, in their teens, they developed strong brother-sister bonds. Curiously, almost none married. From 2,769 kibbutzim marriages, only 13 occurred between peers. And in all of these marriages, the mates had left their communal peer group before the age of six. Apparently, during a critical period in childhood, individuals usually lose forever all sexual desire for those around them.

It seems astonishing that primatologists have, until recently, missed seeing the tremendous influence that the female primate has on family life and on the social life of her community. Even more astounding is that by and large, they still think that males dominate females sexually as well as socially. In fact, most of us think this.

What is it in our personalities that makes us think of the primate male as the Casanova, the Don Juan, the seducer, and the female as the submissive, coy, shy, retiring recipient of sex? Granted, it looks that way in most primate sexual encounters. Even a small child witnessing the sex act will conclude that it is Daddy hurting Mommy, not the reverse. But need this have escalated to the prevailing theory that all males everywhere are the sexual predators, females the prey? And why do people say that the most aggressive male is the best Don Juan, that males at the top of the male-male hierarchy actually impregnate more women and have more children?

New evidence suggests that some female primates run not only their families but their love lives too—and they don’t always pick Mr. Number One. Among baboons of Amboseli National Park in Kenya, high-ranking females at the height of estrus made love with top-ranking males only half the time. The rest of the time they chose males they liked.

Male dominance doesn’t always aid mating ability among the apes either. Recently, African chimps at the height of estrus were seen sneaking to the edge of their range to mate in privacy for a few days. Some of these trysts were initiated by the female, and on all of these occasions, she chose a friend—not a high-ranking or aggressive male. Among gorillas, some females pick their lovers too. Though older females copulate only with the harem leader, younger ones often carry on with adolescent males directly under the nose of the dominant silverback. And sometimes they permanently leave the group to join the harem of a different male.

But how, if anthropologists and the rest of us have ignored primate sex, have we missed what goes on around us? Women everywhere track, court, dazzle, and capture men. They do it on beaches, in bars, at parties, in offices, on streets, on telephones, on mountain trails, in jungle gardens, and at desert waterholes every day and night—and I’m willing to bet they always have courted men.

Irven DeVore, an anthropologist at Harvard, is so convinced that women pick their lovers that he told Time magazine reporters, “Males are a vast breeding experiment run by females.” What he meant is that by choosing certain types of men, women in fact perpetuate certain genetic varieties in the next generation—those they like or want. And obviously, says DeVore, women approve of machismo. When a woman asked him when men would give up male chauvinism, he replied: “When women like you stop selecting high-success, strutting men like me.”

So some women and other female primates pick their mates. Female primates seem to cooperate with each other to form the matrix of social life. They also run their families, determine their children’s ranks, and inhibit incest. If the first human females were anything like their modern-day relatives, they did the same. Thus with all this support from primate studies, it seems fair enough to speculate on the beginnings of the human family and its expansion into a larger group of related kin:

When protohominids first emerged on the savannahs of Africa, children probably grew up with their mothers. Mother was the center of the infant’s world. She held the child, fed it, protected it, carried it on her back. As time went by, she showed the child how to gather vegetables, catch small animals, hunt for eggs, fish for termites, and make digging sticks and carrying bags. The child grew up under her tutelage—and that of her female friends.

Males came and left the group. Some stuck around and children grew to know them well. Sometimes they guarded the young when leopards prowled, and occasionally they might let an older child follow them in their foraging. But males never gave children food or comforted them when they were scared or sick. Mother did this. And through her attention to her children, they came to see mother as the leader of their tiny family group.

So the first family, that of early protohominids who had not yet learned to bond, was composed of a mother and her young. And because female primates tend to stay in the group in which they are born—as opposed to males, who more frequently change groups at adolescence—it is not unreasonable to picture a group of protohominid sisters roaming the savannahs of Africa as early as 10 million years ago, bringing up their infants together. For each family to have a name, like Mary-and-her-children, and each larger group a name like Mary-and-her-sisters-and-their-children, seems impossible without language. But everyone knew who was who.

Among the females of a group, hierarchies probably existed—some leaders, some followers. Girl children assumed mother's rank in adolescence. Young males, however, finding their mother, aunts, sisters, and cousins unsuitable as sex partners, probably departed at adolescence to seek status, adventure, and mates somewhere nearby. During their lives the males probably became familiar with several local matricentric groups. Some attached themselves to one, while others came and went between groups. These males probably had dominance hierarchies—attained and retained by display—but their position in any matrifocal group depended on their popularity with its ladies.

By the time Johanson’s Lucy appeared, however, almost 4 million years ago, females had lost their period of heat and males had begun to bond with them. Males had been incorporated into the family group. Yet these males, lacking an awareness of paternity, had an ancient tendency to desert their mates. So youngsters still associated their heritage with mother. But by now the seeds of kinship had been planted.

By the time these early hominids appeared, almost 4 million years ago, individuals were held together in a web of mutual responsibilities, duties, and debts. Mutual hunting and gathering activities had begun to foster obligations between males, between females, between families, and between groups of families. Now an adolescent male began to see that he had certain chores. He was expected to explore with other boys and report on what he saw, to bring back meat to his mother, to show deference and loyalty to his mother’s mate. A young girl had to care for her younger siblings—and the children of other females when they and her mother went out collecting. It was her duty to carry meat for her brothers and the older males, to make baskets and over-the-shoulder baby pouches in her spare time. A mated female was expected to share meat, vegetables, sex, and parental duties with her consort—as he was expected to share with her. Adult females felt obliged to protect one another’s children, share their knowledge, help one another around the camp. Adult males were expected to protect the group, provide meat, direct a hunt, and lead the group if they moved through the savannah together. Thus, within each social group individuals were beginning to behave in prescribed ways—according to categorical relationships such as father, mother, son, daughter, aunt, uncle, wife, husband.

Here is the beginning of kinship: a social arrangement—implicitly recognized by all—of who stands in what kin relationship to whom, who owes what to whom, and how individuals of particular kinship categories are expected to pay their social debts. Because everyone had begun to acquire duties, debts, and obligations, and to define the nature of these exchanges, the natural categories and concept of kinship had started to evolve in the tiny brains of Lucy and her friends.

With time, a whole set of rules regarding kinship would develop. One of the first was probably the incest taboo, the prohibition of marrying within the family. And for a good economic reason: Picture yourself as the adult female of a tiny family group 4 million years ago. You and your mate have a daughter. Together you raise her. Then, at adolescence, your “husband” starts mating with her. They produce three hungry, rambunctious infants in the next three years. Not only will this cause friction in the group, but you now have three grandchildren and no extra help. Your family has increased by three members— all infants—and no new adults have joined the group to help you and your family support your multiplying numbers.

Economically, you’re in a bind. Thus it is to everyone’s advantage that individuals who reach puberty either import mates from somewhere else or leave the family to find them. Those who stick around and produce new infants with a parent put an economic burden on everyone involved. This early men and women could not afford. What about siblings, though? They could mate with each other without economic consequences. Perhaps sometimes they did. But with the natural tendency to find one’s siblings sexually unattractive, it seems likely that an incest taboo was an easy one to enforce.

I cannot think of any one social rule that has received so much attention from people past and present as the incest taboo. This may be because it is universal to all human kinship systems, and in many societies it applies not only to a male’s mother and sister but to all females of the clan. Freud popularized the question with his theory of the Oedipus complex in 1913. In his version, early man roamed in a primal horde ruled by a tyrannical older male who kept all the women for himself. With time the frustrated younger men around him killed and ate their father, then mated with his females. Eventually, overcome with remorse, they hailed their father as family patriarch and instituted the incest taboo to prevent further atrocities.

A few still champion the idea. Others say instead that the taboo originated to discourage the disastrous effects of inbreeding. The serious effects of inbreeding occur much more slowly than is commonly thought, however, only after hundreds of generations. And far from fearing it, many human beings today hope to marry their first cousins—a practical marriage in many societies. So all things considered, the incest taboo seems to have stemmed from nothing more than practical economics and the childhood familiarity that makes siblings find one another unattractive as mates.

Another kinship rule that Lucy and her friends would probably institute was exogamy—or marrying out of the group of mother and her sisters. Like the incest taboo, exogamy had an advantage too—in this case, political alliance. For example, if you lived 4 million years ago and your daughter brought in a mate from a nearby group, then the members of that group would be partial to you and yours. If your daughter left your group for another, then you would have a bond with them too. Either way the exchange was made, “marrying out” strengthened alliances between local groups.

This could well have become essential to survival—even this early in human history. For without a system of alliances life would surely be rife with disputes over access to certain water holes, fruiting groves, and safe spots to spend the night. As Edward Tylor put it in 1889: “Among tribes of low culture there is but one means known of keeping up permanent alliances, and that means is inter-marriage.... Again and again in the world’s history savage tribes must have had plainly in their minds the simple practical alternative between marrying-out and being killed out.”

Today exogamy is a widespread kinship rule. In fact, anthropologists consider it so important that they believe it to be the foundation of all the complicated kinship systems we see around the world. For with whom you exchange mates, you exchange friendship.

Though Lucy and her friends could hardly be expected to have begun to marry according to systematic rules, they would soon begin. For with the beginning of bonding, men and women had acquired property—each other. Women had acquired men. Men had acquired women, sons, and daughters. So, along with incest and exogamy, they would need other rules to handle their new possessions.

One early rule probably was fidelity—for more good economic reasons. Fidelity cemented the bonded pair together and thus ensured the survival of their offspring. Furthermore, infidelity was impractical—particularly from the male’s point of view. He stood to be cuckolded, to expend his time and energy raising another man’s child. Thus, males were probably the first to impose sexual restrictions on their mates. For a female, infidelity would not be too disastrous as long as her husband stuck around to do familial chores. But if he wandered too long, she was deserted. This meant no child support. So females also sought to discourage infidelity. For these reasons, fidelity is probably an ancient rule—though a rule that both men and women often broke.

But I have gone too far. Surely Lucy and her friends had begun to see group members in terms of kin by 4 million years ago. They recognized their mother, her consort, and their siblings—the members of their natal family. They recognized the larger group of their mother, her sisters, their males, and the other children of the group—what would come to be called the band. Finally, because any one area had several mother-centered groups, they had probably begun to recognize themselves as part of an even larger social unit—what would someday be called the tribe.

It can be said with some certainty that the individuals in these social groups vaguely traced their descent from mother. That these early family groups were matrilocal (or resided in the territory of the female) is also possible. But it is likely that during the dry season, when a tiny family group struck off alone, a mated pair went to wherever the male knew the terrain (the patrilocal area). Why? Because this was the season when vegetables were difficult to find, and if they went to the water holes, the gullies, the cliffs, and the game trails that the male knew best, they had a better chance to get some meat.

When the weather permitted rendezvous with the larger group, however, it seems likely that the family went to where the female met her sisters—the matrilocal area. Here the female could collect vegetables in a terrain she knew well. Furthermore, since her mate had probably left his natal group in adolescence to join hers, it was here that he called home. And here that he had acquired rank and status among the males. Undoubtedly the female’s group resided near where the male had grown up, however, and so some couples may have lived in the male’s natal group instead. This might have happened most often when a male had achieved high status in his own group in early adolescence. Under such circumstances he probably would endeavor to entice a female to follow him back home.

Thus a young East African hominid girl of 4 million years ago saw herself as her mother’s daughter, as a member of the group that assembled every fall by the blue-green lake, and probably as a member of one of several friendly groups that wandered beneath the volcanic Mount Sadiman. Within her groups she worked and played; from among the other nearby groups she would find her mate.

She probably behaved in prescribed ways toward her father, uncles, brothers, cousins, and strangers. And in each relationship there were expectations, chores, duties, obligations, and understandings. But unquestionably she did not yet call her father by his kin name, nor her aunts, uncles, sisters, and cousins by categorical kinship terms. She had not yet begun consciously to reckon her descent either from her father or her mother. And she had heard of no complicated rules explaining whom she should marry.

But now that the seeds of kinship had been planted, the complicated rules and terms would soon evolve. All these people needed were words.