Sex ties people together and is as likely to be a part of a greater social web as confined to two people, if I am interpreting this snippet of archaeologist Timothy Taylor’s research correctly.
Study: Prehistoric Man Had Sex for Fun
Practices ranging from bondage to group sex, transvestism and the use of sex toys were widespread in primitive societies as a way of building up cultural ties.According to the study, a 30,000-year-old statue of a naked woman - the Venus of Willendorf - and an equally ancient stone phallus found in a German cave, provide the earliest direct evidence that sex was about far more than babies.
Timothy Taylor, reader in archeology at Bradford University, reviewed evidence from dozens of archeological finds and scientific studies for his research.
“The widespread lay belief that sex in the past was predominantly heterosexual and reproductive can be challenged,” said Taylor.
Judging from the comments, he’s already frightening and angering a lot of people. I haven’t read the whole book and therefore am not going to judge his science or analysis just from a newspaper press release.
However.
Do you really think we only invented polyamory, BDSM, cross-dressing or whatever other “alternative” sexual practice within the past few hundred years? Or when we invented internet porn? Ha.
I posit that there is no such thing as “alternative” sex, that it’s all been done before, for millennia. Now, we have gotten a lot more adept at recording our sexual adventures for posterity and sharing them with a global population. And we do keep finding new and interesting and mind-boggling ways to extend our sexual capabilities — but the imagination, creativity, eroticism, physical acts? Our ancestors laugh at our surprise.
On the other hand, it’s kind of fun to think that you’ve discovered something sexual that no one else knows about. Or have a love unlike any the world has ever seen.
I suppose someone had to be the first to try [your sexual act here]. But I’ll betcha it was a long time ago.
5 responses so far ↓
1 peajayess // May 1, 2007 at 2:20 am
Very interesting!
I basically agree with you, but I’d beg to differ on the notion that some play, such as stimulation by Violet Wands, has all been done before for millennia
http://www.violetwand.org/violet_wands_tens_units.htm
2 cyberkyst // May 1, 2007 at 8:02 am
I agree with you completely. All these things existed in one form or another way before our so-called modern age. Sure the tech is better, cleaner, safer (in the right hands), but the concepts? They were already for the most part in existence.
I think the idea that monogamy and missionary position weren’t always the norm, that we have somehow deviated away from what our predecessors had done will be quite revolutionary (with the added bit of controversy from the ‘moral’ right).
Personally, I find it very enlightening. Shouldn’t we just ask the Geico cavemen?
3 regina lynn // May 1, 2007 at 9:46 am
Oh, I dunno. Electricity existed before we learned how to harness it as well as we do now … *EG*
4 DapperAnarchist // May 2, 2007 at 2:44 pm
Hey, millions of couples still look to the Kama Sutra for inspiration… How old is that book? The idea of a stone-age strap-on amuses me…
5 moo // May 2, 2007 at 8:12 pm
I love how this research is helping to unravel the myth that humans treat sex all that differently from other beings. In fact, the quickie you recently posted, Regina, had such a baseless assertion:
“Animals treat sex as a way to give life to new generations and a method to establish order within a rank. People have learnt to solve these problems in a different way: they like artificial impregnation as a reproduction method and highly esteem the Forbes ranking. Humans have sex rather for pleasure.”
I abhor when writers make such statements and treat them as self-evident, especially just because it’s popular opinion. Even without the research into human and animal sexual behavior, who can honestly say that sex plays no role in our social stature (”order within a rank”)? One can rise to fame (infamously, perhaps) by having sex with the right person, and it can lower a person’s stature too. In many ways, we structure our entire society around sex… marriage and families are two prime examples.
And that last statement makes the surprisingly common implication that animals do not have sex for pleasure. Because I’m sure that sex suddenly had its totally blissful experience tacked on just for the benefit of us, we -almighty- descendants of the simians. *eyeroll* True, it is indeed instinct that propels animals to mate. But is it not also instinct that makes humans feel their sexual desires so strongly? That makes us yearn to feel that pleasure?
I know I may appear a little overconcered about such a seemingly trivial misconception. But it’s just irksome to see constant statements of how animals are ultimately inferior to humans in nearly every way, when we silly humans haven’t even really bothered to check our assertions. I don’t understand the need for people to separate themselves from nature, from the animal word that we descended from and are, for all intents and purposes, still a part of. It just seems destructive, in how we culturally start to become embarrassed of our animal characteristics (hey, like sex!), expecting them to fit instead into the arbitrary ‘civilized’ ideas we create for them. And how it separates humans from the idea of the natural world, giving us the belief that we can live above or without it.