Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

by Cat Bohannon

Picture a group of ancient hominins. Really ancient ones, maybe even before Australopithecus. There they are, having sex, making babies. They’re probably being as promiscuous as chimps, and the fathers aren’t sure who their children are. Then picture a female deciding to be sexually exclusive with a male in exchange for food. That guy better be huge. Because now he doesn’t just have to guard his mate. He has to make sure his kid doesn’t get slaughtered by a rival, because all the other males in the troop know that the kid is his. Not theirs. In other words, when it comes to physiology, if there had been early hominin monogamy—pre-language, pre-culture—it should have turned these hominins into gorillas. Because every single one of our male ancestors had the obvious potential to be a rampant baby killer. That means cooperative culture had to come before monogamy started. You had to have other cultural checks in place before measures to create paternal certainty made sense. You had to have bands of ancient hominins who were interdependent and had created clear and dire consequences for any behavior that threatened children. What you basically needed was a matriarchy.