| Sex at Dawn | |
|---|---|
First Harper Perennial paperback edition cover |
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| Author(s) | Christopher Ryan, Cacilda Jethá |
| Country | USA |
| Language | English |
| Subject(s) | Human sexuality, Anthropology |
| Publisher | Harper |
| Publication date | June 29, 2010 |
| Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
| Pages | 384 |
| ISBN | 978-0-06-170780-3 |
| LC Classification | HQ12 .R93 2010 |
Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality is a book co-authored by Christopher Ryan, PhD and Cacilda Jethá, MD (Portuguese pronunciation: [kɐˈsiɫðɐ ʒɨˈta]), first published in 2010 by the Harper imprint of HarperCollins. For the paperback, published July 5, 2011, the book's subtitle was changed to "How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships." Sex at Dawn has also been published in Korea, Finland, Australia and New Zealand (Scribe, August 2, 2010). Publication is pending in Japan, Spain, China, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Romania, and Albania.
Contents |
The authors argue that human beings evolved in egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands in which sexual interaction was a shared resource, much like food, child care, group defense, and so on. In this, they agree to a degree with the work of Lewis H. Morgan who proposed in the 19th century that pre-agricultural humans lived in "primal hordes" in which property and paternity was communal. Though Darwin disagreed with Morgan's thesis, believing "pre-civilized" humans to have been polygynous (like gorillas), he respected Morgan's scholarship greatly.
They believe that much of evolutionary psychology has been conducted with a bias regarding human sexuality. They believe that the public and many researchers are guilty of the "Flintstonization" of hunter-gatherer society; that is to say projecting modern assumptions and beliefs onto earlier societies. Thus they believe there has been a bias to assuming that our species is primarily monogamous despite evidence to the contrary. They believe for example, that our sexual dimorphism, testicle size, female copulatory vocalization, appetite for sexual novelty, various cultural practices, and hidden female ovulation, among other factors strongly suggest a non-monogamous, non-polygynous history. Thus, the authors argue, mate selection was not the subject of much intragroup competition in pre-agricultural humans as sex was neither scarce nor commodified, rather sperm competition was a more important paternity factor than sexual selection. This behaviour survives in existant hunter-forager groups that practice communal paternity.
One month after publication, Sex at Dawn entered The New York Times best-seller list.[1] The book received enthusiastic praise from syndicated sex-advice columnist Dan Savage, who wrote: "Sex At Dawn is the single most important book about human sexuality since Alfred Kinsey unleashed Sexual Behavior in the Human Male on the American public in 1948."[2][3] Savage wasn't alone in his high praise for the book. Newsweek's Kate Daily wrote, "This book takes a swing at pretty much every big idea on human nature: that poverty is an inevitable consequence of life on earth, that mankind is by nature brutish, and, most important, that humans evolved to be monogamous. ... [Sex at Dawn] sets out to destroy almost each and every notion of the discipline, turning the field on its head and taking down a few big names in science in the process. ... Funny, witty, and light ... the book is a scandal in the best sense, one that will have you reading the best parts aloud and reassessing your ideas about humanity's basic urges well after the book is done."[4] The book was one of NPR’s Favorite Books of 2010,[5] won the 2011 SSTAR Consumer Book Award (Society for Sex Therapy & Research),[6] and was chosen as a Best Book of 2010 by Audible.com.[7]