Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free

by Wednesday Martin

There is growing consensus among anthropologists that we evolved not as monogamous dyads but as cooperative breeders. In this way of life, loose bands of men and women raised young collectively, and very likely mated with multiple partners as well. Such an arrangement conferred many benefits. Multiple mating established and continually reinforced social bonds, so there were low levels of conflict. Enhanced cooperation meant all were more likely to look after one another and their young, thus improving each individual’s reproductive fitness (the odds that their offspring would go on to produce offspring). There’s ample supporting evidence of this theory among present-day hunter-gatherers and foragers, many of whom raise their young cooperatively and whose mating patterns are less strictly monogamous than our own, as well as in historical documents about aboriginal peoples everywhere from North America to the South Pacific.