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Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality

Book by Cacilda Jethá · 3 quotes · Anthropology, Chimpanzees, Evolutionary Psychology

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Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality Quotes

“Marriage," "mating," and "love" are socially constructed phenomena that have little or no transferable meaning outside any given culture. The examples we've noted of rampant ritualized group sex, mate-swapping, unrestrained casual affairs, and socially sanctioned sequential sex were all reported in cultures that anthropologists insist are monogamous simply because they've determined that something they call "marriage" takes place there. No wonder so many insist that marriage, monogamy, and the nuclear family are human universals. With such all-encompassing interpretations of the concepts, even the prairie vole, who "sleeps with anyone," would qualify.”

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Book:Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality
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“Anthropologist Donald Symons is as amazed as we are at frequent attempts to argue that monogamous gibbons could serve as viable models for human sexuality, writing, "Talk of why (or whether) humans pair bond like gibbons strikes me as belonging to the same realm of discourse as talk of why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings.”

ScienceEvolutionary PsychologyMonogamy
Book:Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality
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