Sex at Dawn

A Primate Meets His Match

In 1988, in the botanical gardens of Penang, Malaysia, Christopher Ryan learned something about himself that no book had taught him. He and his girlfriend were feeding peanuts to a troop of monkeys when a large, arrogant-looking male decided he wanted more than his share. Ryan tossed a branch to warn it off. The monkey charged. Before Ryan could think, his body took over. He dropped into a crouch, bared his teeth, and let out a shriek that came from somewhere far older than language. The monkey backed down. So did Ryan, rattled. He had just watched his civilized self get shoved aside by an animal that had been waiting inside him the whole time.

That moment sets the tone for everything that follows. Katharine Hepburn's character in *The African Queen* announces that "nature is what we are put in this world to rise above." *Sex at Dawn* takes the opposite view. We are apes. Not descended from apes with a thin coat of culture painted over the top, but one of five surviving species of great ape, carrying our evolutionary history in our bodies and our wanting whether we admit it or not. Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá set out to ask a simple, explosive question. What was human sexuality actually like before agriculture, before religion, before private property rewrote all the rules? And why does the official answer feel so wrong to so many of the people living inside it?

The answer they build, brick by careful brick, is this. Human beings are not naturally monogamous. For the few million years before farming began, our ancestors lived in small, fiercely egalitarian bands where almost everything was shared, including sex. Monogamy, the nuclear family, and the idea that a wife belongs to a husband are recent inventions, roughly ten thousand years old. We are running ancient software on a world that demands something else, and the friction between the two shows up everywhere: in our divorce rates, our affairs, our boredom, and the strange sadness of couples who love each other deeply but stopped wanting each other years ago.