At the beginning of man’s existence, over a million years ago, it seems that members of the human race procreated in the same random manner as almost all other animals do. A female and a male met by chance, and if both had a strong sexual drive, they copulated. After a short period of intimacy, the male wandered off to continue his usual activities-hunting and fighting. Several months later, the female perhaps noticed that she was pregnant. It is probable that for many millennia pregnancy was not associated with the sex act. Furthermore, in those ancient days (as in some of the more impoverished rural nations today), the condition of pregnancy probably did not diminish the daily activities of the female until the point of actual delivery. When labor pains began, the female assumed as comfortable a position as possible -wherever she happened to be-and gave birth to the infant. Perhaps within a day or two she was foraging for food as usual, with the additional burden of nursing and caring for the child. The father was totally uninvolved and didn’t know his own child.
After almost an eon, human beings (most likely the females of the species) learned that certain fruits and grains and vegetables could be cultivated and stored for the winter months. Small gardens were started, and shelters were built nearby. Probably the females tended the gardens and built the shelters. Gradually these females must have gathered together in groups, clustering their temporary homes near one another, and the first community developed. The male still was the hunter and the warrior, probably roaming wherever game was most plentiful during the spring and summer months, and during his wanderings copulating with any female he might happen to fancy. But the female, under the necessity of rearing children, accumulated the food to last through the winter, developed skill at turning animal hides into protective clothing, maintained fires, and created shelters. It is probable, therefore, at least in the northern countries that itinerant males migrated toward the communities of females sometime in the late autumn.
With warm weather, the males wandered off again, stopping at the abodes of females in a random fashion. Finally, in some groups, the association between sex and childbirth became known. But still the human species continued the random sexual pattern. It is likely that the first human social group consisted of women who learned to help each other during labor and take turns at minding the children.
Under this social system there was no concern about paternity.
Eventually, probably because of the invention of tools and the further development of agriculture, men began to spend more time around the camp and a simple social group evolved in which they played a fixed part. A primitive law, or taboo, slowly formed, which forbade mating in directly ascending and descending lines of consanguinity-in other words, the incest taboo developed. We find this taboo among peoples and races all over the world; it is probably the first socio-marital regulation imposed by man upon himself. The origins of the incest taboo have been discussed at length by anthropologists, but none have found undebatable answers. It is possible that after generations of loose social organization, man acquired some general understanding of heredity, but this is not an easy assumption since most diseases of proven genetic causation occur only about once in a population of ten thousand unless both parents carry the offending gene. It is not difficult, however, to see how an incest taboo would simplify and strengthen the social structure by allowing relatives to band together into a “clan,” whose members could trust each other and support each other in fights or other mutual endeavors. The ban against incest allowed males to avoid battles over their own sisters and mothers and to have a common link with other males (brothers-in-law). Since evidence indicates that polygamy and polyandry were common among primitive people, the early family units would have been different from those we know today and would have consisted of several women with a relatively close tie to one another and a looser tie to one or more men. Even today, in some African tribes, there is no word for “mother,” but the child uses the word “auntie” for a number of women. An older man, perhaps his actual grandfather, is the male whom the child respects, and “father” as such does not exist. These ties reflect the fact that the younger men are mobile, while older men and the women stay at camp.
There is evidence that man existed for many thousands of years without clothing; the need for warmth was another factor which slowly led to the development of settled communities. In order to keep warm, he had traditionally been forced to migrate with the seasons. Some groups, such as the Australian Bushmen, eventually located an agreeable climate and a large land mass suitable for foraging, and they were able to establish permanent settlements. Evidence derived from studies of the Bushmen indicates that a particular kind of social organization was probably necessary for the migration and survival of the human race in early times. The men had to forage for game and yet find a camp when the hunt was over or women could not become impregnated and perpetuate the race. The long period of gestation in the human animal made possible the absence of men for considerable periods of time without a resulting decline in the birth rate.
Since the life-span of primitive man was probably less than thirty years (man’s life-span was approximately thirty-seven years in Roman days), it was advantageous to mate indiscriminately. A man could thus be the father of many children by a number of women, instead of waiting as much as twelve to eighteen months for one woman to become fecund again. (Probably less than half of the children survived infancy.) If twenty men went on a hunting and foraging expedition and only five returned, there were at least four women for each survivor to impregnate in the service of the tribe. Objects relating to fertility rites have been found by anthropologists among almost all primitive and nomadic people studied; thus, it seems likely that man took great interest in the survival of the race at an early date in his history.
Indiscriminate Mating
Today we may see indiscriminate mating as immoral and crude, but it was necessary for the preservation of the species under primitive conditions of life. The larger the gene pool from which an offspring emerged, the more likely he was to possess adaptive potentialities. When, by chance, “bad” genes (that is, those transmitting characteristics not favorable to survival in a particular environment) were inherited from mother or father, the offspring usually did not survive for long, so there was a tendency for these characteristics not to be perpetuated.
Another factor must have entered the picture at some point many thousands of years ago. Changing atmospheric and soil conditions made possible the advent of tall grasses; shelter and food became more available within a given geographical area, and with the domestication of animals and especially with the acquisition of control over fire, a “camp” could be maintained for relatively long periods of time.
Consider now in a speculative fashion the kind of organization which such circumstances might require. Women tied down by childbirth and child rearing would be likely to remain close to the camp. Men would hunt but return to the camp, either at nightfall (for protection and warmth) or after longer periods of hunting. Individuals would begin to have for their neighbors, though to a lesser extent, the kind of feeling that a mother has for her child. People would be regarded as belonging in one of two categories-those whom one knew and those whom one didn’t know. The latter probably were killed whenever possible, but gradually larger groups collected where the land would support them. And as their numbers increased, people found it necessary to develop tolerance for one another.
About this time, speech probably developed. The utterance of vocal noises appears to have evolved as one method available to primitive man for finding his camp and identifying his own kind. Thus, the rudiments of human speech probably derived from crude calls which identified the location of the camp and gradually came to indicate danger or success in hunting by varying inflections of tonality. Differences in vocalization also distinguished one tribe from another, and probably promoted a developing sense of clan membership.
As long as society remained primitive, the relationship between married male and female was a practical one: the family unit was a unit for physical survival. Almost everyone in it had to work long and hard. A male and a female who became partners and had children normally had greater chances for survival and more advantages than they would have had if they had stayed alone. The first young children were a survival liability, but as they grew up the original “couple” became a group-with all of its members participating in the survival activities. “Love” was not important. In primitive vocabularies there was no word for “love.”
It was not until the Middle Ages that the word “love” (in the sense in which it is used today) became current. Communities developed under the protection of the nobles in their great castles. The lady of a castle assumed the same prestigious position as her husband, the lord. Other people did the work, but the lady of the castle had leisure time to learn to read and practice the arts. Usually she was more educated than her husband, and if she had duties, they were light and principally administrative. Having so much spare time, she often became egocentric, and she began to adorn herself.
She also became bored.
When the Crusades began in the eleventh century, many of the nobles went off to war, leaving their wives at home. The men who did not go on the Crusades tried to amuse the ladies; they wooed them usually with extramarital sex in mind. During this period there arose the phenomenon of the troubadour, usually a noble, who went from castle to castle to entertain. These troubadours sang songs and ballads about “romance” to entertain the lady of the castle.
There is much literature that suggests that sex outside of marriage became the fashion with these ladies. Probably these married women were the aggressors and initiators in these sex activities. The women were bored. They were intellectually and artistically superior to their husbands, and probably resented the inferior, nonproductive position into which they had been forced by a male-dominated society. Extramarital passion was defined by them as “love.”
These ladies of the Middle Ages, in their excessive leisure, gathered into groups called Courts of Love, which defined the current rules and traditions of “love.”