And then, 150,000 years ago, along came Homo sapiens. At the start of the sapients’ adventure, some novel toolmaking techniques appear in the archeological record. But despite the sapients’ having acquired a three-pint brain, the pace of innovation advanced with the speed of spreading molasses. And then, rather suddenly, sapients crossed some sort of an invisible barrier forty thousand years ago. Art, tombs, and artifacts began to appear in profusion. The pace of novelty accelerated with the agricultural revolution ten thousand years ago and went into hyperdrive in the last century. At present, it has switched to a breathtaking perpendicular ascent. The amazing shift in the celerity with which humans embraced innovation has necessitated converting the 2.5-million-year-old curve from a geometric representation to a logarithmic scale for the last 1.5 percent of its length. In an hour-long film chronicling the hominid toolmaking epoch, the industrial age of the machine would flash by in the last few seconds.
Whenever a measurement curve switches from an incrementally slowly rising horizontal one to a steeply ascending vertical one, conditions are favorable for a major transformation. Typically, this is the moment when the object being measured or observed changes from one state into another.* This alteration in states occurs in a relative instant, without any transitional gradations. In physics this process is called a phase change; in biology, metamorphosis; and in evolution, punctuated change.
Technological innovation has advanced so rapidly in our lifetime that it has become the primary environmental stimulus responsible for refashioning the animal that began life as Homo and Gyna sapiens. Linguist Derek Bickerton noted “the two most shocking facts of human evolution: that our ancestors stagnated so long despite their ever-growing brains and that human culture grew exponentially only after the brain had ceased to grow.”12 Using newly discovered technology, humans have brought about intended and unintended changes in both their external surroundings and each individual’s internal milieu. Warnings about the impact of the negative consequences have been widely disseminated and have induced appropriate levels of anxiety in thoughtful people; the positive consequences, however, possess the power to transform us as a species. This metamorphosis will affect all aspects of the human condition. In the following discussion, I wish to focus on the realignment of the relationships between men and women as a result of the impact of technological innovation.
For most women in the First World, the threat of maternal mortality and iron-deficiency anemia, the two key factors that I have proposed molded the interactions of ancestral Homo and Gyna sapiens, verge on irrelevancy. Advances in obstetrics, including asepsis, anesthesia, and blood replacement, have made the passage of the big head through the small opening such a routine event that women have all but forgotten just how dangerous sex with its common consequence, pregnancy, was in the past. Cesarean sections are imperceptibly boosting the intelligence of our species as babies possessed of such large brains that they would have killed their mothers (and themselves) are now routinely surviving delivery and passing on their big-brain genes.†
Effective birth control has brought the decision to become pregnant and carry a child to term more firmly under the personal control of most women living in technologically advanced societies. Prenatal testing for birth defects, widespread vaccinations, and neonatal care have drastically reduced infant mortality.
Changes in the structure of modern societies, economics, and food distribution, combined with advances in nutrition, have markedly reduced a woman’s dependence on a man to supplement her diet with iron, vitamins, essential amino acids, and essential fatty acids. Recent discoveries in reproductive physiology and gene therapy stagger the imagination and challenge bioethicists with their realities and possibilities. And medical advances continue to extend our life span, enhancing the quality of old age. Increasing numbers of us live up to the potential that was encoded into each of our chromosomes at the moment of our conception. There can be little doubt that all these drastic alterations in our environment are collectively functioning as transformative agents fueling the human species’ metamorphosis.
The long-lived intergalactic anthropologists present at the birth of our species express wonderment at the changes they observe happening right before their eyes. Remembering the demise of the Unknown Mother 150,000 years earlier, they can recall the many dire prognostications most members of the expedition floated over the future prospects of the hominid line. And there would be, most likely, not a few pessimists among them who would indulge in similar bouts of hand-wringing as they watch African Eve’s descendants muck up the planet they inherited.
The more perceptive aliens, however, would discern the outlines of an emergent brave new species that was undergoing an unheralded form of metamorphosis. They would excitedly notify the mother ship that they were witnessing the birth throes of something that none of them could have anticipated. They would report that the old reliable parameters of physical attributes, such as brain size or bone length, were inadequate to distinguish the new species from the old, but one distinctive marker was the dramatic changes in the way some men and women had begun to relate to each other. Sapients, it was clear to the observers, were experiencing a period of punctuated change.
Humbled, perhaps, by the knowledge of how wrong they were when predicting African Eve’s survival chances 150,000 years earlier, the aliens would most likely add the qualifier that their report on the mating patterns of this new species was a work-in-progress. They promise to keep sending regular updates. They hedge their bets, because the transformation they are observing is entirely without precedent when compared with anything that has occurred in the previous 3.8 billion years of life on Planet Earth.
Knowledge of time, death, and paternity molded men into husbands and fathers. To a lesser extent, these insights reinforced women’s roles as wives and mothers. In humans, the capacity to love, which is amply present in both sexes, exceeds in intensity and duration that of any species.
Epilogue
I felt compelled to write this book because, after the publication of my earlier work, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image, I had the feeling that I had incompletely answered the question I had originally posed. To wit: Why was global society so shot through with misogyny and patriarchy? Although I remain proud of my earlier work and stand by its premises and conclusions, something seemed missing.
To review briefly: In AVG, I questioned the nature of the historical event that could have been so immense and so pervasive that it changed the sex of God. Indisputable evidence exists in the often meticulous, sometimes fragmentary, record of the ancient world that there had been a historical time when both men and women venerated a female deity. Rome, Egypt, Japan, China, India, Greece, and Mesopotamia provide ample evidence that a goddess once reigned supreme in the hearts of both sexes. In classical Athens, the male citizens voted whom they wanted as their patron deity. Athena won over Poseidon. The famous city we know as Athens might have been called Poseids had men been inclined to want a male deity rather than a female one to watch over them.
The period during which goddess worship occurred spans the beginning of recorded history, five thousand years ago (and most likely a much longer period before that, of which little can be confirmed despite many tantalizing clues). It seems to have lasted approximately two millennia. Women’s rights and prestige in culture appear to have paralleled the reign of goddess worship.
And then a wrenching change occurred. Particularly in the West, three monotheistic religions arose—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—each of which had as its core premise that there existed only a singular deity and He was indisputably male. All three Western religions emphatically insisted that goddesses did not exist. Eve, Mary, and Fatima were mortals, and although some may have worshipped them, these figures never possessed the power to resurrect the dead, a quite routine function for goddesses of old.
I hypothesized in that book that the invention of writing, particularly alphabetic
writing, reconfigured the brain of anyone who learned the new skill in such a way as to reinforce the masculine animus at the expense of the feminine anima. Reading and writing superseded speaking and listening, and strengthened the power of the already dominant left brain and right hand over the right brain and left hand.
This internal shift in neurocircuitry convulsed culture and manifested in the disappearance of goddesses, the suppression of women’s rights, and a general abhorrence of image information. Alphabetic sacred texts became glorified to the point where masses of people were willing to kill each other over minute doctrinal differences. And they still do. Zealots destroyed and/ or banned iconic information (principally perceived by the right hemisphere) beginning with graven images. They then extended their draconian prohibitions to include every form of representative art. Literate information, the written word, was elevated to an exalted position until it congealed into dogma. The Old Testament, New Testament, and the Koran became for their respective believers the final arbiters for sacred truth. In the beginning was the Word. Denying the pre-eminence of the images of Lascaux, Luxor, and Nineveh, the word superseded the image.
I had based the hypothesis of AVG on the media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism, “The medium is the message.” The process people use to absorb and generate information is a more important factor shaping culture than the content of the information that they are absorbing or generating.
Though AVG obviously struck a chord with many readers, judging by its popularity and many favorable reviews, there were those who criticized it, protesting that men’s malevolent attitudes toward women were more deeply rooted. I remain firmly convinced that the central thesis of AVG is essentially correct. Too many historical correlations existed for critics to dismiss my research as just a series of mere coincidences. Yet, at the same time, I felt a need to respond to these critics. They had a point: There are deeper currents feeding misogyny and patriarchy.
Another subject that has always intrigued me was the reasons we humans diverged so far away from the reproductive life cycles of the other three million sexually reproducing species. If it worked so well for so long, why did sapients abandon it for a system that seems, to so many thoughtful observers of the human condition, so dysfunctional? Curious about the roots of human sexuality, I felt compelled to trace the origins of misogyny and patriarchy back further than the beginning of recorded history. I suspected that there were subterranean primordial undercurrents feeding this malevolence that must have something to do with features unique to our species.
In a parallel mystery intriguing me, I puzzled over the reason why human females menstruated. I had long ago concluded, on the basis of what I had learned about it in my medical training, that it was a trait that seemed to defy common sense. No one has ever been able to demonstrate clearly a single incontestable benefit, and many have amplified the dreary list of the negative impacts it has on women’s health, outlook, and metabolism. If the other 3,999 mammals could get along just fine without having to experience a menses as vexatious as the human one, what on earth was it doing so stubbornly resisting ejection from the human gene pool?
These, then, were the various strands of thoughts gently cobwebbing my mind when I found myself forced to take an overnight drive through the Columbia River canyon, traveling between Eugene, Oregon, and Missoula, Montana. It was in the dead of night on an empty highway that I had the multiple insights that formed the woof and warp of this book.
Let me explain how I came to be in that magnificent, silent space at such a strange hour. AVG had recently been published, and I had embarked on the obligatory author’s tour. In the hectic pace of scheduling, I had inadvertently agreed to speak at the university in Eugene, Oregon, at 7:00 P.M. and also to keynote the Montana State Teachers Convention in Missoula, Montana, the following morning. Failing to recognize properly that I had left precious little time to get from Point A to Point B, I belatedly called my travel agent and naïvely asked her to arrange a late flight from Eugene to Missoula. She replied, somewhat incredulous at my ignorance of airline schedules and geography, that no connections existed that could possibly accommodate such an itinerary within my time constraints. Only after I consulted a map and surveyed the vast reach of Western emptiness in between those two cities did I fully appreciate the problem.
I considered canceling one of the engagements, but both sponsoring organizations had distributed flyers and expressed dismay at any suggestion I might be a no-show. I decided that the only feasible way to cover the distance was to rent a comfortable car and hire a reliable driver to put in the ten hours required to cover the six hundred miles, so that I would arrive an hour before my talk in Missoula the next morning. I planned to sleep in the back seat and emerge reasonably rested just before my presentation. My driver, Steve Nolan, and I started out on our trip immediately after my talk at the university.
Although I had planned to sleep during the bulk of the drive, I was concerned that this long stretch might be too exhausting for Steve. Besides, I found trying to sleep in the back seat nearly impossible. At about 2:00 A.M.I switched places with him.
As I steered the car, gently wending my way alongside the river, a nearly full moon rose majestically over the canyon rim, suddenly flooding the landscape with illumination. Moonlight reflecting off the river allowed me to see more clearly the beautiful scenery I had been missing without the moon’s beneficence.
I had been driving in silence and was reflecting on the question-and-answer period that had followed my earlier talk at the university. I had been asked to explain how my theory of brain reconfiguration due to alphabet literacy could account for the presence of so many preliterate cultures in which men repressed women. As I switched back and forth between admiring the moon and grappling with the questioner’s criticism, the idea for this book quite suddenly popped up within my mind.
The great epiphany that waylaid me and laid claim to the greater part of my waking hours for the next few years was that menses was a necessary evolutionary trait in humans. Entraining a woman’s bleeding with the moon’s orbit taught humans how to tell time. The ability to range into the future was so tremendous an asset to our species that whatever the price we had to pay would be worth it. That one sex of the species, but not the other, bore the cost, was a detail that would shape all subsequent relations between the sexes.
Menses had to be copious enough to attract the attention of women, so that they would recognize its connection to the moon’s monthly periodicity. An unfortunate side effect, however, was the increased danger to the health of a woman and her offspring from the pernicious effects of iron loss. Now wide awake with creative possibilities, I continued to follow the meander of the river, while periodically glancing at the moon. My stream of consciousness about this subject began to swell into ideas that gradually took on the semblance of coherent flow.
Many readers of my earlier books have asked me to explain the process by which I arrive at the ideas that propel a relatively unformed concept through the tooling of refinement until it sits in your hand as a bound, illustrated, typeset, four-hundred-page book. A writer and his or her reader form an unusual couple. One does his or her work in isolation, without any input from the other, and then, years later, the other gets to evaluate whether or not the trees were worth the felling. Now that my task is over it is your turn to respond. Feel free to let me know what you think by visiting my Web site bulletin board, www.sextimepower.com, or contact me at [email protected]. Thank you for exploring the bulrushes to find the basket and then being willing to lavish so much of your time and attention on my child.
—Leonard Shlain
Notes
Preface: Iron/Sex
1.
Quoted in Pinker, 1997, p. 461.
2.
Gould, 1993.
3.
Blum, 1997, p. 101.
4.
Hrdy, 1999, p. 136.
5.
Kaplan, 1994, pp. 753–91.
&
nbsp; 6.
Van Valen, 1973, pp. 1–30.
Chapter 1: Unknown Mother/African Eve
1.
Santayana, 1988, p. 41.
2.
Washburn, 1973.
3.
Trevathan, 1987, p 108.
4.
Gould and Eldrege, 1993; Gould and Lewontin, 1979.
5.
First reported by Rebecca Cann, John Wilson, and their associates in 1987. These researchers exploded the field of evolutionary history by introducing molecular biology into it as an investigative tool (Cann, Stoneking, and Wilson, 1987, pp. 32–36). Disagreement continues between paleontologists and molecular biologists as to the precise date of birth of our species. Some place it 200,000 years ago; others claim it was a mere 100,000 years ago; the majority of opinion lies somewhere between at around 150,000 years (Stringer and Andrews, 1988, pp. 1263–68). Many other innovative researchers are adding to this burgeoning field. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, a linguist, has compared the genetic movements of populations and compared them with the ethnic makeup of the speakers (Cavalli-Sforza, 2000). He built upon the earlier work of Joseph Greenberg, who classified the world’s languages. The work of Douglas C. Wallace and his colleagues has also detailed the human family tree. Peter Underhill and Peter Oefner have traced the Y chromosome and constructed a detailed history of the human male (Underhill, Oefner, et al., 2000, pp. 358–61).
6.
Mitochondria are the tiny energy modules that exist outside the nucleus in the cell’s cytoplasm. Curiously, they have a DNA code different from the cell’s nuclear DNA. Scientists conjecture that the mitochondria are remnants of an archaic virus that invaded cells at the dawn of life on the planet and then found the neighborhood so inviting they stayed on and developed a symbiotic relationship with their host cells. The discovery of mitochondrial DNA was fortuitous in presenting molecular biologists with a tool to track the lineage of a species, because mitochondrial DNA, unlike nuclear DNA, does not alter with sexual reproduction. Charles Sibley and Jon Ahlquist began applying this new technology in 1980 to bird family trees, and then began applying the knowledge they had acquired about birds to the hominid family tree (Sibley and Ahlquist, 1984, pp. 99–121).
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