The Prehistory of Sex: Four Million Years of Human Sexual Culture. By Timothy Taylor. New York: Bantam Books, 1996. 353 pp. $23.95.

Reviewed by Margaret Black

Talking about human sexuality always seems to generate more passion and heat than sheer reproductive coupling could possibly warrant. Nowadays arguments ignite over whether men and women are really polar opposites biologically, and discussions of gender, or the social elaborations of biological sexual differences, can go thermonuclear. We question what part of human sexuality is "natural," programmed genetically from the first union of sperm and ovum. But we also know that we can alter or deny biology. We try to figure out what part of sexuality our society constructs, and which we can therefore, presumably, change. If evolution programs us solely for making babies, then why have humans always engaged in recreational sex? Fetuses have been photographed masturbating in the womb.

In The Prehistory of Sex, Timothy Taylor, a British archaeologist, launches us on an irreverent, amusing, and thoroughly researched exploration of our sexual past. The story opens four million years ago, when our progenitors first climbed down from the trees and learned to walk upright. In the process they lost their body hair, increased their brain size, and developed visible breasts, fatty buttocks, and large penises, like we have today.

Five years ago, an extraordinarily well-preserved Stone Age corpse was discovered in the snows of the Alps. Almost immediately, Taylor tells us, wild rumors about the sexual life of the Iceman, or Otzi as investigators named him, began to circulate—he was a castrated priest; a man he cuckolded had cut off his penis; he was homosexual, with sperm still in his rectum. Hearing that Otzi still had viable sperm, women sought to be impregnated by him. Actually Otzi had a penis. No one looked for sperm in his rectum. And the viability of his sperm remains untested. However, none of this tells you anything about what Otzi thought of himself sexually.

With Otzi we have in a nutshell the problem of discussing prehistoric sex. And we also have all the crazy reactions that sexual discussion can generate. Physical material constitutes the "facts" of the archaeological record. In Otzi's case it's human remains, but it could be an artifact, a whole site where humans left traces, animal and botanical evidence, or even ecofacts—the melting of the glaciers, the disappearance of mastodons. Unfortunately, lurking in this garden of information is the serpent of interpretation.

We have trouble understanding even the physical facts. Determining sex from bones, for instance, depends in part upon statistical norms of bone size, but also upon our expectations about what people—tall, big-boned ones or short slender ones—were living in that area at that time. In addition, any preconceptions we have about social activities—who, say, uses a grinding stone or who goes hunting—will also affect what sex we think a skeleton is. We know, moreover, that a significant number of people are born hermaphroditic, with the genitalia of both sexes. A smaller number have a variety of mixed sexual genetic codes and the apparent birth sex of yet others changes at puberty. To make matters yet more difficult, archaic human remains are widely scattered in time and location.

But interpretation is the biggest hurdle, even if sometimes we have to wonder why. For decades experts were unable to figure out the meaning of old Roman brothel tokens. One side showed a sexual position, the other a number. No one seemed able to deduce a relationship between the two sides of the coin until a researcher checked out the going rates for similar activities in a contemporary Warsaw brothel. Fortunately the relative costs of sexual entertainments haven't changed in two millennia.

Sexual attraction was absolutely essential from the start. Taylor subscribes to the theory that individual sexual selections made by both males and females accelerated the evolutionary transformation from primate to human. And when we began to speak, we humans finally acquired the tool for making culture, including all the changing permutations of gender distinctions. Taylor asserts that both men and women used the early grunts of speech to fake orgasm—you have to love an writer with such a mind.

All human groups, he insists, understand a connection between semen and babies. And even though we can't see ovulation in human females, other well-known clues of odor and discharge made nonreproductive sex quite possible for prehistoric humans. Moreover, hunter-gatherer women in particular understood that plants and other substances—horse urine gets in here –can prevent conception or abort a fetus. Early writers such as Hippocrates, Herodotus, and Ovid attest to their knowledge.

Artistically wrought artifacts from 25,000 years ago detail humans' absorbing interest in all sorts of sexual activity, and such evidence proliferated as the population expanded. By 5,000 years ago our earliest written records document practically every sexual practice we know of today. Surely the most boastful drawing on record is that of a tiny male skier trying to have intercourse with a gigantic moose. Perhaps, as Taylor freely admits, the depiction is symbolic.

Taylor takes issue with many interpretations of archaeological sexual evidence. He dismisses a variety of theories (Darwin's among others) that "man, the hunter" was responsible for human evolution, particularly human intelligence, and that he dragged poor stupid woman along simply because he had to. Taylor also rejects Elaine Morgan's aquatic theory of woman-centered evolution. He disagrees with the extrapolation of a matriarchal society from the "Venus of Willendorf"-type images, seeing them as passive objects rather than active goddesses. And the Neolithic farming revolution, despite its celebration of "Mother Earth," put women at a severe cultural disadvantage from which they are only beginning to recover.

The variety and extent of sexual evidence that Taylor makes available is a tremendous gift to ordinary readers. A pervasive prudery has restricted popular access to this information and kept the actual artifacts under lock and key. In addition, Taylor persistently reminds us that our preconceptions and preferences transform what we believe we are seeing. He tells, for example, of a short sword that was uncovered in the course of excavating a skeleton. When it was discovered incontrovertibly that the skeleton was female, the object became a weaving baton and has remained so ever since.

Some of Taylor's theories will doubtless try the patience of certain readers (Stonehenge is the production of humans denied breastfeeding on demand?), and the date when most women lost familiarity with botanical contraceptives seems to slide around quite dramatically. Taylor freely admits that his is not a global study. After an initial consideration of the spread of humans out from Africa, which he regards as our species' place of origin, he limits himself to the human populations of the Near East and Europe, though he does occasionally draw from India.

The book is filled with fascinating photos and illustrations, and it would be hard to find more engaging, good-humored, and reasonable writing. For those who love debates about the nature of men and women, this book is a must. But I recommend it for everyone—it’s terrific.