Journal of Psychology & Human Sexuality

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The Origins of Human Sexual

Culture
a
Timothy F. Taylor PhD, FSA
a
Department of Archaeological Sciences , University
of Bradford , United Kingdom
Published online: 22 Oct 2008.
To cite this article: Timothy F. Taylor PhD, FSA (2007) The Origins of Human Sexual
Culture, Journal of Psychology & Human Sexuality, 18:2-3, 69-105, DOI: 10.1300/
J056v18n02_03
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The Origins of Human Sexual Culture:

Sex, Gender and Social Control
Timothy F. Taylor, PhD, FSA
SUMMARY. There is a series of common assumptions about prehis-

toric sex, associated with the prejudice that it must have been more natu-
ral because it happened closer to our evolutionary origins. The
development of primate studies reveals a high degree of social variation
between and within primate species, along with evidence for the practice
of non-reproductive sex both recreationally and for expressing domi-
nance relations. Yet, hypotheses about the behavior of human ancestors
and early modern humans have been hampered by a lack of an integrated
methodology. Although there is no single trajectory for either the elabo-
ration or restriction of sexual behaviors after the emergence of culture, I
argue here that it is possible to identify key turning points with more or
less universal validity. These points include the reasons for and implica-
tions of brain size increase at the time of the emergence of genus Homo,
the crystallization of impersonal gender by mid-Upper Paleolithic Ice
Timothy F. Taylor is Reader in Archaeology, Department of Archaeological Sci-

ences, University of Bradford, United Kingdom (E-mail: t.f.taylor@bradford.ac.uk).
The author would like to thank Anton Kern, Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna, for
the opportunity to examine the Venus of Willendorf; Nickolas Conard and Maria
Malina, Institute of Prehistory, Tübingen, for permission to show the Hohle Fels phal-
lus; and, variously, for more general help, discussion and constructive criticism, Paul
Bahn, Rondi Brower, Christopher Chippindale, Stan Houghton, Michael Kauth, Paul
King, Paul Pettitt, Gerhard Trnka, and Sarah Wright.
[Haworth co-indexing entry note]: “The Origins of Human Sexual Culture: Sex, Gender and Social Con-
trol.” Taylor, Timothy F. Co-published simultaneously in Journal of Psychology & Human Sexuality (The
Haworth Press, Inc.) Vol. 18, No. 2/3, 2006, pp. 69-105; and: Handbook of the Evolution of Human Sexuality
(ed: Michael R. Kauth) The Haworth Press, Inc., 2006, pp. 69-105. Single or multiple copies of this article are
available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service [1-800-HAWORTH, 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
(EST). E-mail address: docdelivery@haworthpress.com].
Available online at http://jphs.haworthpress.com
© 2006 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1300/J056v18n02_03 69
70 HANDBOOK OF THE EVOLUTION OF HUMAN SEXUALITY
Age societies, the early development of systems of control over both fer-
tility and the projection and alteration of sexual identity, and the inferred
emergence of homonegativity in early, reproduction-oriented farming
societies. Further, archaeological data allows naturalist assumptions to
be effectively refuted. doi:10.1300/J056v18n02_03 [Article copies avail-
able for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH.
E-mail address: <docdelivery@ haworthpress.com> Website: <http://www.
HaworthPress.com> © 2006 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]
KEYWORDS. Culture, hominin, evolution, prehistory, sex, gender, so-

cial control, Ice Age art
BRIDGING BETWEEN BIOLOGY AND CULTURE

Breastless, hairy, and unclothed, our primate ancestors probably
nested in trees and only occasionally moved on hind limbs. The female
had nipples but no breasts, and the male’s penis was hardly visible even
when erect. These creatures vocalized, but their brains were too small
for conversation. Some became modern gibbons, but some 10 million
years ago (10 Ma) a different line took the remarkable evolutionary turn
of becoming human.
Fast forward to 25,000 years ago, and the modern human species [in
existence since 150,000 BP (Before Present)] began to produce durable
figurative art. Cave paintings and stone and ivory figurines allow us to
glimpse how our direct ancestors saw themselves, or how they wanted to
be seen. There are fleshy females with naked skin, large breasts, carefully
coiffured hair, items of sexualized clothing, and, in one instance, a dis-
tinct clitoris set above delicate labia carved onto what may be intended to
represent a shaved mons pubis (Figures 1 and 2). Cave walls carry
etched and scratched vulvas, rough “V”s with a central division. Males,
in part disguised as wild animals, have bold erections in cave art and are
associated culturally with phallic objects in the form of carved,
dildo-sized “batons” with detailed glans and sometimes veining (Figure
3). These images and objects, together with a multitude of tools and
symbols less easy to recognize and interpret, created a world pervaded
in both life and death by sexual divisions.
How our ancestors developed from ape to human and what happened
subsequently, down to the dawn of writing and life in cities some 5,000
years ago, is unclear. It would be easy to abandon an attempt to explain
the nature of these transitions and the stages by which they occurred as a
wholly speculative activity. However, we have more secure knowledge
Timothy F. Taylor 71
FIGURE 1. Limestone statuette, the Venus of Willendorf, Austria, Upper

Palaeolithic (photo: author).
than we have had previously, in particular because of progress in inter-

disciplinary scholarship in the past two or three decades. Inputs from
evolutionary studies, psychology, comparative anthropology, ethno-
graphic case studies, and the development of gender theory have aided
interpretation of the empirical data of archaeological and palaeonto-
logical discoveries, and the insights that these data have afforded have
modified our understanding of the origins and status of our modern
classificatory and interpretive schemes. In short, modern thinking on
human sexuality is itself an end-product of the biological evolution and
cultural elaboration of sexual attraction in humans and, thus, stands in a
reflexive relationship to its own subject matter. Here I challenge a series
of common assumptions about premodern sex, including:
FIGURE 2. The Venus of Willendorf, close-up of pelvic region (photo: author).

Assumption 1: Heterosexual reproductive sex was the dominant if not

sole sexual activity of our ancestors–i.e., there was no effective
prehistoric contraception, and sexual behavior followed a “natu-
ral” pattern of male-female dyadic association.
Assumption 2: There is a cross cultural tendency towards the sequestra-
tion of sexual behavior–i.e., sex acts are naturally shameful, and
humans have always sought privacy for them.
Assumption 3: Sexual imagery is either lewd and dysfunctional or sig-
nificant solely in cosmological or ritual terms–i.e., sexual images
are either pornographic or religious.
Assumption 4: The essential differences between humans are purely bi-
ological, and the term gender is a social science euphemism used
to needlessly complicate the underlying facts.
FIGURE 3. Hohle Fels stone tool/phallus, Germany, Upper Palaeolithic (photo:

Juraj Liptak, with permission).
In order to examine and challenge these and other assumptions, it is

necessary to bridge a number of distinct disciplinary areas, each with its
own terminological conventions and methodological assumptions. The
presentation of a synoptic view always runs the risk of being hit by
traffic from several directions, spectacularly in the case of my recent
book, The Prehistory of Sex (Taylor, 1996a), which was seen by
some evolutionary psychologists as a radical presentation of social
constructivist (even relativist) views (Burr, 1996; Tudge, 1996),
while at least one gender theorist considered it equally naïvely
biologically deterministic (Marshall, 1996; cf. Taylor, 1996b). Al-
though it was generally welcomed by archaeologists (Renfrew, 1996;
Dobres, 1997; Meskell, 1997), historians (Starkey, 1996), and sex thera-
pists (Rodrigo 1997), the impossibly polarized responses indicate that
studying the sexual dimension of past cultures by way of interpreting an-
cient remains is a problematic exercise (cf. Bahn, 1986; Schmidt &
Voss, 2000; Sorensen, 2000; Hays-Gilpin, 2004). To the problems of
(mis)perceived agendas may be added the more fundamental difficulty
of establishing the relevant data base as significant and important. As
Ross Samson (2001) writes in the foreword to the collected volume, In-
decent Exposure: Sexuality, Society and the Archaeological Record, “It
seems likely that overt references to sex [in translations of historical
documents] have been purposefully sanitised by past scholars. . . . Sur-
prisingly, none of the authors here discusses prudery as a distorting fac-
tor in the study of past sexualities, although it is possibly the single most
important” (p. xii). It remains true that the family-friendly policies of
many museums, sometimes coupled with concerns about censoring
what adults (especially women) may see, keep graphically sexual an-
cient artworks and objects out of sight. The deliberate defacement of ar-
tifacts in the Victorian period, such as the removal from many ancient
Egyptian statues of the erect penises (that had once been greased and
symbolically masturbated by temple priestesses to ensure the return of
the annual Nile flood), typically remain not only unrepaired but unmen-
tioned.
Beyond a prospectus of human sexual culture across a range of pre-
historic and historic societies worldwide, I also aim here to illustrate
how the separation between sex and gender could plausibly have come
into being, and what may be its continuing significance for attempts at
“objective” or scientific treatments of the evolution of sexual attraction.
Epistemological Issues
The evolution of human sexual culture presents particular problems

that are not addressed either in the field of primate sex and reproduction,
nor in contemporary, or even historic, studies and accounts. These are
problems of uniformitarianism, ontological uniqueness, and represent-
ativity. Uniformitarianism is the principle, widely applied in geology and
palaeoecology, of using currently observable processes to explain past
phenomena. It, thus, assumes identity of subject (e.g., granite will al-
ways behave like granite; herbivores will always require x bio-mass to
maintain y body weight). Ontological uniqueness signals, by contrast,
that evolved systems have emerged from a once-only trajectory. That is
to say, what is characteristic of humans today may not have been
characteristic in the past and may not remain so in the future. This
idea undermines identity of subject with the practical implication that
behaviors taken from modern observations of ourselves cannot be un-
critically back-projected to explain apparent cultural patterns in the
past, because it is the past that gave rise to the present. We study the past
not to mirror ourselves but to reveal the stages by which we have be-
come us. One approach to the problem of behavioral inference has been
to use ethnographic studies to complement the archaeological record,
not just to broaden the range of plausible potential behavior, but be-
cause tribal peoples are often assumed to be social “fossils,” somehow
left over from an earlier age.
Although ethnographic studies can broaden our conception of what it
is to be human (see below), it must not be forgotten that tribal societies
do not display timeless cultural difference; they have had their own
complex histories that ended in contacts with Western values. These
values arrived as part of trade and exploitation (the “development of un-

derdevelopment”: Wallerstein, 2004) and were often cemented through

missionary activity; anthropological observation, with its own potential
for shifts in value systems, typically came in the wake of trade. The ob-
serving anthropologist comes from within a value system and has to
translate observations into the value-laden language of the target audi-
ence of academics. Thus, the influential French structuralist anthropol-
ogist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, while studying the Amazonian Indian
Bororo tribe, one day wrote in his field notes that “the entire village left
the next day in about thirty canoes, leaving us alone in the abandoned
houses . . .”–a statement that is unremarkable enough until one reaches
the end of the sentence–“with the women and children” (citation from
Eichler & Lapointe, 1985, p. 11). Most studies of so-called “egalitarian”
societies have been predicated on egalitarian relations between certain
adult men, rather than on an analysis of gender relations, child-adult re-
lations, or relations with slaves (Taylor, 2005). Although the issue of
male bias in anthropology has by now been long recognized (e.g.,
Slocum, 1975), it remains a problem in dealing with historic
ethnographies, as does more broadly the lack of historical appreciation
of the effects of contact situations.
An approach to the problem of behavioral inference in prehistoric hu-
mans that perhaps balances some of the biases that may be present in the
ethnographic record is to use observations of non-human primates. The
behavior of these animals is considered to have changed only slowly
over time and, therefore, to have a greater uniformitarian validity; fur-
ther, a new generation of scholarship has been able to demonstrate a far
greater diversity in social organization, reproductive behaviors, and
non-reproductive sexual behaviors than had previously been suspected
(Boesch, Hohmann, & Marchant, 2002; de Waal & Tyack 2003; Wylie,
1997; Fedigan, 1997; Bagemihl, 1999; Vasey, this volume with further
references; cf. Haraway, 1989). Perhaps the sex lives of our remote an-
cestors can be “patched in” from a mosaic of anthropological and
primatological sources. The danger is that we end up like Mr. Pott’s
critic in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, whose claimed knowledge of Chi-
nese metaphysics was obtained by reading in his encyclopedia under
“China” and under “Metaphysics” and who then “combined his
information” (Dickens, 1867).
To give a concrete archaeological example: if we find a small group
of skeletons buried with grave goods dating to the mid Upper
Paleolithic at, say, 26,500 BP, we may be inclined to say that this repre-
sents “a family group” without reflecting that family is a by no means a
universally well-defined category, even in the modern world. Even

more implicitly, we will have unreflectively assumed a funerary context

because the bodies were found buried. In fact, as I have argued (Taylor,
2002), such burials may represent the choreographed ritual killing of
aberrant (inferably sexually aberrant) individuals. What we thought
were grave goods may be amulets or magical objects placed with the in-
tention of amusing and, thus, deflecting the souls of the transgressive
dead from ever returning. But whatever interpretation is accepted, it
should be clear that archaeological data are theorized.
This example also illustrates the final problem of representation and
data bias. Archaeological discoveries present us with fortuitously pre-
served fragments of past cultural systems from which we re-inflate
wholes; but how can we judge how central or, conversely, peripheral the
phenomena we observe really were? This question is especially relevant
to prehistoric iconography when we observe, for example, Bronze Age
human-donkey sex or a man on skis attempting copulation with an elk
(Figures 4 and 5).
Because archaeological data are heavily theorized, they are particu-
larly susceptible to contemporary interpretive bias. As the study of hu-
man sexual behavior has also been shown to have suffered greatly from
this (Rusbridger, 1986; Bullough, 1994; Oosterhuis, 2000), any attempt
FIGURE 4. Rock engraving, Camonica valley, Italian Alps, Bronze Age petro-
glyph (rock engraving) (tracing by Christopher Chippindale: Taylor, 1996, p. 174,
Fig. 7.5, with permission).
FIGURE 5. Angara River valley, Siberia, Bronze Age petroglyph (rock engrav-
ing) (tracing: Taylor, 1996, p. 174, Fig. 7.5, with permission).
at a reconstruction of human sexual culture is fraught with difficulty.

However, there are some obvious ways in which empirical archaeologi-
cal data can confute particular modern suppositions and prejudices. In
particular, the widespread lay belief that sex in the past was predomi-
nantly heterosexual and reproductive (because heterosexuality is some-
how closer to nature, where such values are thought–also wrongly–to be
purely expressed) can be challenged.
For the record then, the visual, artifactual, and textual records of pre-
historic cultures, traditional cultures, and early civilizations worldwide
leave no doubt that animal sex, masturbation, oral sex, anal sex, contra-
ception, sex toys, male and female homosexuality (including marriage
partnerships) were culturally recognized, whether approved or decried.
As well, culturally-produced transexuality, transvestism, the erotic use
of physical simulacra, group sex, and open sexual performances were
all known, as were, unsurprisingly, bondage, ritual sex, sexual abuse of
children, adult rape, sex slavery, prostitution, sexual punishments for
transgressions, and sexualized ritual killing (Taylor, 1996a, 2002, 2006;
van Vilsteren & Wiess, 2003).
Sex and Hominin Evolution
In 1871, Charles Darwin predicted that the evolutionary origins of

humans lie in Africa. This was based on his belief that humans belonged
to what is now the superfamily Hominoidea, the tailless primates that
include the lesser apes such as the gibbons, the great apes, and the chim-
panzees, our closest living relatives. Because these great apes were
most numerous in Africa (i.e., the gorilla and the various chimpanzee
types) and the African species were more like us than the sole be-
yond-Africa great ape (the orangutan), Darwin argued that the continent
had to be the locus of evolution. Subsequent palaeontological work has
revealed a complex adaptive radiation of upright-walking ape species
from Africa, of which modern humans are the sole extant example.
Looking at the currently accepted taxonomy in time perspective, it is
useful to note that the Old World Monkeys (cereopithecidae), to which
Japanese macaques belong (see Vasey, this volume), diverged from the
hominoidea at close to 23 Ma. Subsequently (and the points are hard to
date), this superfamily split. But, there are a number of competing
phylogenetic schemes and no current overall agreement about the taxo-
nomic levels. Nevertheless, it is clear that what was to become the hu-
man line diverged first from the lesser apes, such as gibbons, and then
from the orangutan line. At between 8-6 Ma, the grouping that includes
humans and all species of African great apes (chimpanzee and gorilla)
split. In one scheme, the grouping that includes humans and all their di-
rect ancestors and related genera and species forms the hominin “tribe”
(in the terms of biological taxonomy rather than social anthropology).
In other schemes, chimpanzees and bonobos remain grouped with hu-
mans in the subtribe hominina. In general, the term hominin is now pre-
ferred as a group label for the various fully bipedal species and replaces
the more familiar hominid of previous texts.
Hominins include at least three genera: Australopithecinus, Paran-
thropus, and Homo. These groups can loosely be termed “humans,” not
forgetting that the cranial index in the smallest species reflects a
chimp-sized brain. Skeletal reconstructions demonstrate that upright
walking began before 4 Ma with Ardipithecus ramidus. However, this
fossil is preceded by at least three others that represent either competi-
tive contemporaries or stages in a single evolution: Orrorin tugenensis,
Sahelanthropus tchadensis, and Ardipithecus kadabba, the latter dated to
5.2 Ma. What is now clear is that, following divergence from the chimpan-
zee line, human ancestors emerged in a rapid adaptive radiation. Direct in-
dex evidence for walking comes from the famous 3.5 million year old
Laetoli footprint sequence, usually attributed to Australopithecus
afarensis but now known to be also contemporary with the existence
of a rival hominin, Kenyanthropus platyops. After 2.6 Ma, Australo-
pithecus garhi and Homo rudolfensis emerged, along with a species or set
of related species known as Homo habilis (collectively, the habilenes).
The first chipped stone tools date to this period. The species (singular or
plural) that made and used them is unknown.

The sheer exuberant variation of the hominin fossil record as it is now
being revealed causes some problems, but also allows some general in-
ferences to be made. One of the most difficult problems is that of sexual
dimorphism as expressed skeletally: that is, whether different looking
fossil specimens represent different species or different sexes with dif-
ferent body mass and/or levels of robusticity within the same species
(Zihlman, 1985; Hager, 1991, 1996, 1997). Species differences are usu-
ally preferred, not (one hopes) because scholars enjoy naming new spe-
cies, but because there is a clear on-going trend towards reduced sexual
dimorphism in later hominins. Male gorillas may have three times the
body weight of adult females, but modern human males and females
overlap considerably in body mass. Hominin evolution is also charac-
terized by a dramatic reduction in male canines, indicating that biologi-
cally-based dominance display became in some way disadvantageous.
A general inference about the adaptive radiation of hominins is the exis-
tence for most of human evolution of alternative upright-walking and
presumably tool-using hominins in the same environment, which en-
tailed both interspecies competition and the need for well-developed
specific mate recognition systems (SMRSs: Paterson, 1985).
SMRSs are common in groups of closely related species and broadly
involve visual signaling and imprinting. There may have been differen-
tial body-hair loss in hominins as a result of SMRSs, and the develop-
ment of breasts in ancestral human females may have been part of this.
The best explanation for the development of breasts is in terms of the
creation of a super-stimulus–in this case, a permanent version of the in-
flamed estrus skin is seen on the rump area. The latter was largely hid-
den by upright walking and by the consequent development of the
buttock muscle. Indeed, buttocks may have first become hairless and
more rounded to compensate for this loss of estrus skin. In turn, the but-
tocks were mimicked at a level more suitable for attracting attention in
upright face-to-face courtship contexts that, we must infer, became
increasingly verbal after 2 Ma.
Although modified stone tools date back 2.6 Ma, it is certain that up-
right walking apes modified natural objects for tools long before this, as
the other great apes also do. It is also likely that early humans utilized
many other items as tools than those which survive for archaeological
recovery. Recent documentation of gorillas using sticks to gauge water
depth at stream crossings impressively illustrates that a degree of ab-
stract or analogical reasoning is not unique to the modern human spe-
cies. This finding has also prompted scholars such as de Waal to speak
of primate “culture” as a phenomenon similar to human culture but of

more restricted range. Social anthropologists and the majority of ar-
chaeologists resist this idea and distinguish between the transmission of
traits through learning, common to many higher mammals, and the
self-identification of an on-going community through the possession
and maintenance of norms by systems of signs (both word and things).
Selecting Neoteny
Although the freeing of hands from locomotion is often considered to

have been a pre-adaptation for the development of culture, upright
walking also imposed a profound constraint on the development of in-
telligence. This is because a pelvis that can habitually bear an upright
body is one that must, on bio-mechanical grounds, be as narrow as pos-
sible, a requirement that constrains the width of the birth canal and,
therefore, places an upper limit on fetal head size at full term. The evo-
lution of upright walking should have frozen brain size at the chimpan-
zee level. Indeed, natural selection pressures in the form of birth
complications would have favored a size reduction over time. In reality,
as we are now intelligent enough to have discovered, the emergence of
genus Homo was correlated with and followed by steady incremental
brain capacity increases. The resolution of this paradox requires us to
bring culture on stage–its first appearance in its characteristic role as the
great subverter of biology.
As the pelvis could not be expanded while retaining bipedalism,
birth, under the selective pressures that acted to increase brain size,
gradually became less easy for females of early genus Homo. It makes
sense to argue for a cultural intervention at the point when genus Homo
first emerges and our brain size began its neotenically-underwritten size
expansion. Predicated on parallels such as the use of leaves to carry wa-
ter by chimpanzees, the concept of the use of animal hide or twisted
vines, cut with the newly-developed chipped stone tool technology, to
form a simple infant-carrying sling–one of the most ubiquitous artifacts
in traditional cultures worldwide–is likely have been the key innovation
that solved the bipedalism-intelligence paradox. A sling allows the
transportation of a young child who, even if it were not helpless, would
find it increasingly hard to grip onto an upright and possibly hair-de-
nuded parent in the same way that chimp infants cling to their mother.
Once the sling becomes a habitual aid there is an escalator effect, for it
matters little now how helpless the child is at birth or, within some lim-
its, for how long. The way becomes clear for the emergence of a
neotenic trend in which children can be born developmentally ever ear-

lier. This is the modern human pattern of underdevelopment at birth
followed by really massive extra-uterine cranial growth in the first two
years.
The effects and implications of this development–no matter what the
driving mechanisms–were profound. The physically unfolding brain ar-
chitecture came increasingly under direct cultural influences, thus, pro-
ducing a feedback loop in which learning how to learn was central.
Higher cognitive abilities developed almost as if innate and allowed
what we consider most distinctive about human intelligence–critical
self-consciousness–to emerge. [There are various descriptions and ac-
counts of this phenomenon/phenomena (e.g., Humphrey & Dennett,
1991; Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992; Damasio, 2000).] It has been
argued that brain size increases are energetically costly, especially for
an ape, which being upright now has a much shorter digestive tract, and
are less likely to have been the result of natural selection than of sexual
selection (e.g., the Peacock’s tail idea: Ridley, 1993; cf. Trivers, 1972;
Miller, 2000). Alternative explanations, however, include parental se-
lection for verbal ability (Locke & Bogin, 2006) and selection for the
possession of conscious abilities as an emergent value in themselves (as
intimated by O’Hear, 1997).
This culture-nature interaction hypothesis cuts the ground from un-
der previous theories, such as that of Owen Lovejoy who held that for
humans to evolve, monogamous pair-bonding must have been neces-
sary. Each helpless child-encumbered female needed to be provisioned
by her very own male, for whom she reciprocally raised genes to the
next generation (Lovejoy, 1981). This theory has already been criti-
cized on many other grounds, not least that monogamy is not the most
common form of human reproductive association in the ethnographic
record and is far outnumbered by polygamous systems of various kinds;
therefore, monogamy can hardly be presented as the default archaic
form (Zihlman & Tanner, 1978; Zihlman, 1997).
It is notable in classical ethnography that Tacitus (1973) in his
Germania (Ch. 18) is very struck by the German tribe’s monogamy,
which he presents as uniquely strange and requiring cruel and brutal pe-
nal sanctions for its maintenance (in particular, shaving the heads of
transgressive women who are then pinned down alive into peat bogs
using willow hurdles, a practice supported by a remarkable series of
archaeological discoveries; Taylor, 2002). This example from later
prehistory has relevance not just for the monogamy hypothesis but be-
cause inter-personal violence in the form of scalping, for instance, is

known to extend back over two million years in the case of the cut-
marked Australopithecine cranium known as Stw-53 from Sterkfontein,
South Africa (Taylor, 2002). This and similarly cut- marked and butch-
ered archaic Homo specimens from Bodo in Ethiopia and Atapuerca in
Spain leave no doubt that the development of behavioral norms within
competing hominin groups could be enforced with lethal sanctions.
Whatever the evolutionary forces at work, by 1.8 Ma, Homo ergaster
existed in Africa with a stature similar to that of modern humans and a
brain showing signs of lateralization, whose volume was around
two-thirds of the modern average. Following the migratory path of the
ancestors of orangutan millions of years earlier, Homo ergaster spread
as did H. erectus from around 1.5 Ma into Eurasia (famously as Java
Man), while those who remained in Africa continued their evolution
alongside a genus of plant-eating hominin, Paranthropus robustus and
Paranthropus boisei (once fondly known as Nutcracker Man; both spe-
cies presumed to descend from P. aethopithecus, a contemporary of A.
garhi, a putative direct ancestor to Homo, at 2.6 Ma). African humans
continued to develop in brain size, and around half a million years ago
H. antecessor the last certain direct ancestor of both H. sapiens (proxi-
mally descended via H. heidelbergensis) and H. neanderthalensis
emerged. Although the precise chronology and replacement mecha-
nisms remain disputed, between 300,000 and 100,000 years ago, Homo
erectus populations in Eurasia vanished and were supplanted by hu-
mans with modern human brain volume. The colonization of Europe
was achieved by the cold-adapted Neanderthals, who were themselves
replaced in the period 40,000-25,000 BP by anatomically modern
sapiens (AMS) of the Cro-Magnon type.
What behavioral residue we have inherited from this evolution in
which we emerged as the only surviving species of hominin is unclear.
Plausibly this inheritance may include a tendency to racism and geno-
cide and the employment of parental selection and social sanction to
create and maintain discrete aesthetics of human appearance as the
prime designata of ethnic identity. [Darwin disturbingly wrote in an
1887 correspondence that he envisioned a time in the not too distant fu-
ture when “an endless number of the lower races will have been elimi-
nated by the higher civilized races throughout the world” (cited in
O’Hear, 1997, p. 135).]
GENDER SYSTEMS IN COMPARATIVE

ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
Reference to SMRSs implies that a heterosexual and reproductive

agenda was driving the emergence of what later became human physi-
cal aesthetics and erotic stimulus. But, it should not be forgotten that the
increasing culture-proneness of hominins means that, generation after
generation, social behavior became progressively less innate and ever
more was acquired, through imprinting and enculturation processes. As
clothing developed and became a habitual cover in higher latitudes, so
clothing conventions, if sex-specific, would have been suitable loci for
SMRS signaling. Given the near absence of stature dimorphism, once
modern humans emerged, SMRSs could be subverted by transvestism.
It is worth mentioning that Walter Williams (1986), in his now classic
treatment of sexual diversity among indigenous North American peo-
ples, noted a world-wide tendency for intolerance of homosexual bond-
ing in both males and females, so long as the partners dress alike; a
heterosexual partnership in which the female and male dressed simi-
larly would be unacceptably homogendered (see Reeder, 2000, for a
possible exception from Ancient Egypt). As Williams claimed, what is
widely condoned in small-scale human societies are heterogendered
pairings, irrespective of genital sex.
However, use of this terminology is still etic, or external, and falls
short of the precise meaning and experiences that may be constructed
within indigenous societies, the emic content. Hints of this effect can be
seen in early accounts, such as the narrative of John Tanner, who was
enslaved by the Shawnee at the age of nine in 1789 and lived subsequent
to his disappearance in 1847 among the Ojibwa (Tanner, 1994). Tanner
described the arrival of the son of a chief at the lodge of his Ojibwa ex-
tended family. This person called Ozaw-wen-dib (The Yellow Head) is,
he said, “one of those who make themselves women, and are called
women by the Indians” (Tanner, 1994, p. 88). Tanner says that “there
are several of this sort among most, if not all the Indian tribes. They are
commonly called A-go-kwa, a word which is expressive of their condi-
tion” (Tanner, 1994, p. 88f). Ozaw-wen-dib was around fifty and had
lived with many husbands; after having her persistent sexual advances
resisted by Tanner, she turned her attention to Tanner’s father-in-law,
Wa-ge-tote. Tanner writes, “Wa-ge-tote, who had two wives, married
her. This introduction of a new inmate into the family of Wa-ge-tote oc-
casioned some laughter, and produced some ludicrous incidents, but
was attended with less uneasiness and quarrelling than would have been
the bringing in of a new wife of the female sex” (Tanner, 1994, p. 89f).
In her introduction to the most recent (and incomplete) edition of
Tanner’s narrative, Louise Erdrich (see Tanner, 1994, introduction) as-
sumes Agokwa is simply a transvestite. However, Tanner’s passing
comment concerning “a condition” rather than “a practice” is consonant
with the creation of berdaches or “two-spirited” people, especially in
Plains Indians groups in which, for example, a prepubescent male youth
would be made to ride bareback until his testes were irrevocably dam-
aged; subsequent hormonal changes in his development coupled with
obligatory cross-dressing prepared him for a ritual intersex role (Wil-
liams, 1986; Taylor, 1996a). How much identification as two-spirited
depended on an emergent personal (sexual) orientation based on ge-
netic predisposition or formative but non-directed environmental in-
puts, and how much was a culturally structured imposition, may have
varied widely (cf. Trexler, 2002). However, there is evidence for a
comparable practice among Eurasian Iron Age societies, such as the
mounted nomads, the Scythians of the Black Sea steppe. Two
fifth-century BCE authors, Hippocrates and Herodotus, described
male-to-female cross-dressing soothsayers or magicians called
Enarees, who also suffered from a condition. This condition may have
arisen accidentally, as a result of life in the saddle. However, the Ro-
man author Ovid, banished to the Black Sea a few centuries later,
made special note of the feminizing power of a substance derived from
pregnant mares–either their urine or their ejaculate (Taylor, 1996a).
Drinking urine from horses is a known cavalry practice to sterilize and
filter water from sources that may have been contaminated. Urine from
pregnant mares is also rich in feminizing conjugated estriols, marketed
today in both horse-derived (trade name Premarin) and in synthetic
forms to male-to-female transsexuals.
The Cultural Subversion of Biology
Use of the natural environment to regulate and modify sexual cycles

and sexual behavior is not unique to humans, although humans have de-
veloped this ability to the greatest extent. Following the loss of classical
and especially women’s knowledge about contraceptive methods and
practices, from the late 1600s onward, there was a tendency for the
academy to believe that human population levels were regulated by a
combination of mortality and sexual abstinence, the mechanisms most
famously codified by Malthus. Thus, one of the founding fathers of
modern social anthropology, Bronislaw Malinowski, in his Sexual Life

of Savages in North-Western Melanesia, refused to believe what local

colonials told him about the existence of advanced physical and
plant-based contraceptive methods among the tribal groups he studied,
despite clear evidence of high levels of sexual activity including hetero-
sexual coitus, low child mortality, and a relatively stable demographic
(Malinowski, 1929; Himes, 1970; Taylor, 1996a; Wylie, 1997). The
virtual ubiquity of effective contraceptive practice, often based on the
naturally occurring estrogens of many common plants, in traditional
hunter-forager societies has only begun to come into focus in the past
thirty years or so with the advent of a greater participation by female an-
thropologists (such knowledge is usually, but not always, secret
women’s knowledge), the development of ethnobotany as a discipline,
and techniques of bio-chemical analysis sensitive enough to determine
veracity (Anderson, 1993; Riddle, 1992).
One significant variation in contraceptive use may well be between
hunter-foragers and urban elites, on the one hand, and expansionist
peasant agriculturalists on the other. In Roman society, prosperous citi-
zens limited themselves, as Polybius says, to one or two children. Con-
traception ranged from cheap barrier methods to expensive and efficient
early-term abortifacients such as Queen Anne’s lace, Pennyroyal,
Silphium (driven extinct by Roman demand), myrrh, Artemisia, and
rue. Thus, Tacitus (1973) was surprised to find among the Germans that
both contraception and infanticide is shunned (Ch.19). It may also be
that peasant farmer societies are especially sensitive to non-reproduc-
tive behaviors and generally homophobic. The Old Testament, essen-
tially a codification of first farmer sentiments, is full of interdictions
against non-reproductive sex and deviance in all forms. Tacitus noted
that the Germans not only punish adulterous women by drowning in
bogs but treat “corpore infames”–those with disreputable lusts–in the
same way. The violently-killed, paired male bog bodies from Lindow
Moss in the United Kingdom and from Weerdinge in the Netherlands
have been speculated to be ritually-killed pairs of male lovers (Taylor,
2002).
The gender-crossing counterpart of the Enarees, the Amazons, were
said not to have children until they had scalped three of the enemy, but
neither Hippocrates or Herodotus who described the Amazon phenome-
non among the Scythian tribes in the fifth century BCE suggest that
these women remained virgins; rather, they implied that these are
healthy young women with strong appetites. Whether the Amazons
practiced oral or anal sex with their similarly accoutered, male confreres
as–in our terms–token homosexuals (a practice not unknown among

women who escaped to sea in the nineteenth century disguised as cabin

boys) or suited themselves in other ways, we simply do not know. Ar-
chaeologically, we can demonstrate the existence of Amazons, not just
through iconography (that arguably could depict a powerful myth,
which the Amazons also became), but also through the excavation of
burials containing gynoid (biologically female) skeletons with their
own (sometimes used and repaired, thus, not merely symbolic) warrior
panoply (Rolle, 1989). However, we have no direct archaeological evi-
dence for their sexual practices, either while serving as mail-clad war-
riors or for later in life when those who had survived warfare and
obtained enemy scalps gained admission into the very different gender
world of wagon-confined motherhood.
These Scythian cases and the earlier two-spirited example demon-
strate that both biological capacity (the allowances of the body) and
identity roles within a community can change during a typical life his-
tory. Obviously, overly reductive biological classifications that assert
the categorical and objective existence of just two types of person (e.g.,
“man” and “woman,” or “heterosexual” and “homosexual”), which one
either is or is not, ignore this important process of becoming and trans-
forming that is so typical of human beings. A classic anthropological
case study that further nuances the differences between sex and gender
and casts light on the way that ritualization allows practices that might
otherwise not be condoned at a recreational level to develop and persist
is that of the Hua, a hunter forager people of the Eastern New Guinea
highlands (Meigs, 1990; Peoples & Bailey, 2003).
Gender and Sex, Public and Private
The Hua recognize that people typically come into the world with
one or another set of genitalia: Vi for males and a’ for females. In addi-
tion, a prime female substance, the rich moist life-giving Nu or korogo,
is recognized, and its ability to transfer from females to males sets up a
gender dynamic. All young children and their mothers are figapa, be-
cause they live close to food preparation areas and drink moist breast
milk. While girls remain figapa, boys are subjected at puberty to a long
period of abstinence from the contaminating food prepared by their
mothers. In the forest with the warrior male kakora, boys learn to hunt.
They also participate in an initiation in which they ingest semen during
acts of same-sex oral sex. The ingestion of semen is believed to
masculinize the boys to the point where they become “hardened” and
can enter the kakora house where the secret flutes are kept. However, in
parallel to this sequence, figapa women who are post-menopausal and

have had more than three children are so exhausted of moistness that
they too eventually become kakora (the flutes originally having been
made by their maternal ancestors), while older men, past their warrior
best, become refilled with the moistness that they were purged of at ini-
tiation, irrevocably so, and are excluded from the secret house back to
the ranks of the figapa. In etic terms, the society is divided into a polit-
ico-military and hunting executive of young male warriors and a selec-
tion of women elders and into a child-rearing and domestic production
sphere of children of both sexes, nursing mothers, and old men. What is
interesting in the Hua case, as with the Ojibwa of Tanner’s narrative, is
that genital sex, while recognized, is not wholly determinative of role;
the decisive and structuring division for social roles is best termed
genderal.
The fact that the Hua practice some sex in group contexts, especially
at initiation of Vi-possessing figapa in their korogo-purging transition
to kakora, is interesting in that the prudishness of a past generation of
anthropologists, not to mention the effect on native people’s behavior
based on the reaction of earlier white missionaries, has led to a general-
ized claim that humans “naturally” keep sex private. A particular case
that seems to combine this presumption of private sex with observer/an-
alyst bias was presented in 1994 by the anthropologist Ernestine Friedl.
In her article titled “Sex the Invisible,” Friedl, having reviewed all rele-
vant world-wide literature, concluded that the urge preferentially to
conduct sex exclusively in private is distinctively, characteristically,
and cross-culturally human. She stated, “(H)idden coitus may safely be
declared a near universal” (Friedl, 1994, p. 833).
Although Friedl wrote her article before the massive expansion of the
Internet, she was aware that sex as a performance in which more than
two individuals are present was a known phenomenon in advanced
Western cultures; however, she implied that it was untypical of natural
predispositions, being a limited, or perhaps decadent, dissent from the
Victorian values that persisted even beyond the 1960s. Friedl writes as
though these values, based on Western concepts of propriety and pollu-
tion formulated by public authorities who mobilized particular readings
of religious texts for political ends, did not profoundly affect the peo-
ples that anthropologists studied both before and during their visits. The
fact that these values affected what anthropologists were permitted to
see, and what indeed they might report to colleagues, was not given due
weight.
Nevertheless, early accounts of open sexuality and days of sexual li-

cense tend to come more from hunter-forager peoples than from agri-
culturalists. Indeed, a characteristic of agricultural societies is that they
constrain sex more to the domestic realm of the new indoors, not be-
cause this is private, but because it ensures better surveillance. Alma
Gottleib (1990) has reported that among the Beng subsistence farmers
of the Ivory Coast the absolutely definitive crime that must not be com-
mitted is “forest sex.” Those found guilty of this offense not infre-
quently include women who have been abducted and raped out of sight
and earshot. Gottleib (1990) noted, “As punishment, the couple is led to
the spot in the forest where they committed their act. They are accompa-
nied by old and middle-aged men of their own and often surrounding
villages. A Master of the Earth (a ritual leader who offers sacrifices to
the Earth) oversees the ritual punishment: the couple is made to repeat
the sex act while jeered on by the angry crowd, who burn and beat them
with switches and firebrands” (p. 124).
In prehistory, the spread of the first farming societies through Eurasia
was accompanied by deeply conservative, uniform house plans and
probably, as demonstrated for the first time at the Anatolian site of
Çatalhöyük, a strict gender division in dietary intake (Richards,
Molleson, Martin, Russell, & Pearson, 2003). These people, unlike the
early Holocene hunter-foragers they replaced, were sedentary planters
and stock-breeders whose cosmology centered on maximizing repro-
duction, guarding seed corn, expanding their populations, and develop-
ing inheritance lines for the accumulation of wealth. It is plausible to
associate these first farming societies with the rise of homonegativity
(but see Issues for Further Consideration below), providing the basis of
the restrictive codes of sexual conduct presented in the Old Testament
writings and being also historically ancestral to the German society that
Tacitus described as having strict reproductive laws and contraceptive
edicts. The characteristic longhouse of the early European Neolithic pe-
riod structure was ideal for monitoring sexual relations between hu-
mans; the stark wealth differential between men and women that comes
into focus at the start of the Bronze Age leaves little doubt about whose
sexual associations were principally being controlled.
At this point, gendered clothing may have become a powerful prop in
the “naturalization” of class and status distinctions with important im-
plications for the creation and maintenance of hierarchic structures.
This is because “gendered clothing lends clothing denoting other kinds
of status something of the force of nature. . . . Gender rules are extended
into sumptuary laws” (Taylor, 1996a, p. 225; see also Norris, 2004).
The “gender apartheid” discernible in the diets of women and men at

Çatalhöyük would have linked to sex-coded space and utensil use and
provided a template for other forms of social segregation in the future,
each normalized by an appeal to apparent natural order (Taylor, in
press).
Friedl did not consider the more subtle idea that privacy may itself be
a form of observation and control–locating the only legitimate place
where sex occurs and, thereby, allowing the monitoring of forms of as-
sociation by family, neighbors, or state authorities. In contemporary
Britain, it is perhaps not surprising that one of the most visible devel-
oping trends in sexual culture, gauging from printed and Internet clas-
sified advertisements, is the practice of “dogging.” Doggers meet in
car parks at night, often in country settings, to be watched having sex or
participate in anonymous group sex (www.ukdoggingsites.co.uk;
www.ukdoggingnflashers. com). Given that the British climate is not
naturally conducive to outdoor nudity, the popularity of this form of
modern “forest sex” could be ascribed in part to a lack of privacy in
overcrowded housing units as much as to the expression of a more
widespread taste for exhibitionism and public sex than Friedl allowed.
THE ICE AGE INVENTION OF GENDER
Having reviewed in turn the basics of sexual behavior in relation to

hominin evolution and the complexities of gender as reflected by
ethnographic studies, historical, and later prehistoric sources, I now
turn to an examination of a pivotal period in human cultural develop-
ment, the middle Upper Paleolithic, and focus on inference from
particulars.
The subtitle of The Prehistory of Sex (Taylor, 1996a)–Four Million
Years of Human Sexual Culture–was an attempt to combine both the
central time-frame for hominin evolution and the more recent Upper
Paleolithic creative explosion of preserved culture in its symbolic as-
pect. I took this approach because it seems to me that strong versions of
the sapient paradox, where modern human capacities arrive suddenly
rather than gradually, become less plausible the more we understand
about the sophistication, variety, and functional criticality of learned
behaviors, not only in apes but also in many species of higher verte-
brates. In this vein, it is important to recognize that the artifacts that sur-
vive for archaeological classification and museum display are the
smallest subset of surviving examples from materials classes with in-
herent survivability. Questions about the so-called figurative art that ap-
pears from some 30,000 years ago among the Upper Paleolithic or Ice
Age cultures of Europe are not necessarily so much about the emer-
gence of the capacity for decoration and figuration as they are about the
arrival of a need to produce artworks of staggering durability (how
much of today’s art will still be around in 30,000 years?). The presence
of ochre stubs (worn fragments of hydrated iron oxide) from South Af-
rican sites dating to over 100,000 years ago suggests the possibility that
body art-cosmetics, face painting and such–has a much longer but now
largely invisible history, while unambiguous evidence for engraved
decorative surfaces by 70,000 years ago has been revealed by recent
excavations at Blombos Cave (RSA).
As a useful example of close working in archaeological interpreta-
tion, the rest of this section presents an argument concerning the signifi-
cance of one of the most famous prehistoric artifacts, the Venus of
Willendorf (and contains in only slightly revised form, an argument re-
cently presented for a technical audience elsewhere: Taylor, 2006).
Discovered in 1908, the small limestone statuette from Willendorf II
is the most famous of that group of Middle Upper Paleolithic female fig-
urines, generically termed “Venuses.” The statuettes were carved from
limestone or mammoth ivory or formed in baked clay and distributed
widely from Siberia to France(Delporte, 1993; Neugebauer-Maresch,
1993). The Willendorf example, one of the earliest statuettes found, is
also one of the finest in technical and aesthetic terms. It is odd to note,
therefore, that the most obvious characteristic of this artwork–its face-
lessness–remains barely mentioned in the literature. The fact that the
clitoris is clearly depicted has also been ignored. It is possible to pro-
pose that the Venus’s head is cast downwards and that there would or
should be a face, demurely looking at the ground. But, the truth is that
she lacks a personal identity, while her generic sexual identity–as a fe-
male entity capable of erotic arousal–is not only signaled positively by
her clitoris but also emphasized negatively by her lack of eyes, nose,
mouth, and ears (see Figures 1 and 2). Remarkably, these two features,
lack of a face and the corresponding presence of detailed external geni-
talia, have not been seen as critically important by those archaeologists
who have attempted to uncover the meaning of the figurine and the type
of society that produced it.
This leads to a proposal for a new exegetic direction that starts from
the observable, undeniable, and deliberately intended play of presences
and absences in the aesthetic notation of the statuette. In terms of mean-
ing, the statuettes have been variously interpreted as Stone Age erotica,
images of motherhood, representations of a Great Mother Goddess, part

of a fertility cult, time-factored images of reproductive cycles, repre-

sentations of medical conditions (including varieties of clinical obe-
sity), post-menopausal women who were too stocky to be fertility
symbols, images of a degenerate race, non-stereotyped depictions of
women at all ages, and as women’s own self-representations (self-por-
traiture)–not all mutually exclusive interpretations (Absolon, 1949;
Baring & Cashford 1991; Delporte 1993; Duhard, 1991; Harding, 1976;
Himmler referenced by McCann 1998; Marshack, 1991, 1996;
McDermott, 1996; Rice 1982). The biases and prejudices informing
these various interpretations have themselves been subjected to inter-
pretation (Conkey, 1997).
Recent work on Venus statuettes has drawn attention to their context,
especially at the northern Black Sea steppe sites; it has been suggested
that their deposition in pits indicates a domestic and, therefore, female
production-provenance (Soffer, Adovasio, & Hyland, 2000). This view
challenges earlier, usually tacit, assumptions that male artists were re-
sponsible for making the figurines, although it is not clear that this inter-
pretation is any more justified, coherent, or compelling as a line of
inference. Other recent approaches have stressed cognitive influence,
seeing the statuettes primarily as evidence for increasing mental
capacities within genus Homo (e.g., Mithen, 1996).
The 200 or so known statuettes were certainly made in what can be
termed a gender-sensitive environment. They are almost all unambigu-
ously female, with no clear male counterparts. There are pieces of a male
marionette, carved from separate pieces of ivory, from Brno. There is also
an ambiguous, possibly hermaphroditic, figurine from Grimaldi carved
out of a piece of hematite (with possible later parallels). In addition, a
range of phallic objects, mostly within the actual size range of erect pe-
nises, are known, although some are more schematized or possess vulvic
depictions. At any rate, the femaleness of the Venus statuettes, their gen-
eral regularity of size, and broad cultural-chronological coherence have
prompted most scholars to search for a single meaning. However, some
scholars have seen the statuettes as powerfully polyvalent, with a deliber-
ately open range of related references. Thus, Marshack (1991) wrote,
“The ‘Venus’ of Willendorf . . . was clearly richly and elaborately clothed
in inference and meaning. . . . She was, in fact, a referential library and a
multivalent, multipurpose symbol” (p. 29).
The most interesting interpretations of the figures deal directly with
the formal characteristics and formal variety of the objects and can be
divided into two types. The first makes anatomical comparisons with
known or assumed human norms (already referred to above); the second

considers the inherent content of the artifacts as art objects–the

approach I favor.
Why the Venus of Willendorf Has No Face
One previous interpretation that has attempted to explain why the

Venus of Willendorf has no face is that of McDermott (1996), who has
argued, on the basis of the large breasts and absence of feet, that the stat-
uette is a self-portrait, carved by a woman artist who was looking down
the length of her own body or who conceptualized the bodies of women
in this way. Thus, features like breasts and belly loom large, while dis-
tant features like feet are hardly noticeable, and the face (axiomatically
for the observer looking out of it) cannot be seen. Although I do not
agree with this interpretation, it is a constructive contribution, insofar as
it draws serious attention to the formal aspects of the artifact. What
McDermott argues for is a special kind of personal identity projected
through the figurine. I believe instead that another form of identity is be-
ing depicted, the opposite of personal identity but one having to do with
the assertion of a supra-personal gender category. My argument is as
follows.
The majority of the Venuses are faceless, and where a face is de-
picted, it is of a rudimentary sort. Other types of sculpture from the
same period demonstrate that portraiture was possible. Further,
McDermott’s argument for self-representation limited by visibility in
relation to the genital aspects of the Venus of Willendorf is difficult to
accept; if her belly obscured her view of her feet, it would also have ob-
scured her view of her vulva. McDermott’s explanation for Willendorf
does not consistently apply to other figurines and is weakened as a spe-
cific explanation of facelessness. It is more defensible to say, therefore,
that as a class, the Venuses have faces that are de-emphasized: either
highly schematic or, in the case of the Willendorf Venus, wholly absent.
What then is the Venus of Willendorf? She is not a mother, or at least
she is not obviously depicted as one. The cross-cultural canonical
mother depiction uses a suckling baby as its minimal notation, although
depictions of birthing are also known. The Willendorf Venus, under-
stood as flesh-and-blood reality, is a woman who has the potential for
childbearing. Indeed, in a glacial or peri-glacial context, she may be
considered to be as reproductively fit as possible, given considerable
body fat reserves. In connection with this interpretation, her external or-
gans of sexual generation are explicitly rendered. This is the first known
depiction of the clitoris in the entire history of art (and an abiding rarity
in non-pornographic representation into the present day). The appear-

ance of the external genitalia is made even more explicit by the lack of
pubic hair.
The overall nudity of the figure has not often been recognized as of
interest in itself, but is quite significant. This is the first representational
datum-point that we have for general bodily hairlessness in our species.
But, in the specific context of the statuette itself, hairlessness sets up an-
other contrast. We know from other middle Upper Paleolithic examples
that pubic hair was at times depicted, notably on abstracted vulva forms
on carved batons. And, we know that in respect of the Venus of
Willendorf herself pubic hair could have been depicted; the hair on her
head, apparently elaborately curled, is shown. Thus, at Willendorf, we
either have a depiction of a woman naturally devoid of pubic hair
(though sexually mature in other ways), or one who is shaved, or one
who is depicted for symbolic and perhaps pre-eminently semiotic or no-
tational reasons as being without pubic hair. This conclusion would fit
with the depiction of the clitoris itself, which is rendered as a small,
sharp indentation rather than as a projection. This way of creating a vi-
sual referent through shadow, contour, shape, and location (as opposed
to actual surface topography) was probably the only effective aesthetic
notation available to a carver in this demanding medium. It is worth
mentioning that the range of virtuosity displayed by Venuses varies
greatly and that the Willendorf Venus is of exceptional artistic and
technical quality.
I believe that the fact that the head has hair, but no face, and the geni-
tals have no hair, but display carefully carved labia and clitoris, is cen-
tral to a proper understanding of the original significance of the artifact.
What the statuette appears to suggest, in terms of its own notation, is
that individual identity as expressed in the personality of a face (again, a
cross-culturally understood canon) is unimportant. Sexual identity–her
“her-ness”–is paramount. The implication is that we are dealing with a
society in which the concept of “gender” was emerging for the first
time.
Of course, both males and females existed in Ice Age society and had
existed from long before. What we see in the Venus of Willendorf is a
cultural projection or abstraction of one of these classes, in a specific
context of cultural elaboration. No males are shown in this miniatur-
ized and portable form, reduced to a class of thing to be handled, ex-
changed, and deposited. Presented in a stereotyped way, the Venuses
have more in common with the generic animal representations of the
Upper Paleolithic than with the rare and usually specifically elaborated
and partly zoomorphic male human figures (in Cantabrian cave art, for
example). Maleness is signified in phallic objects of a wide range of size
and form, ranging from those with a vulva carved on their proximal
shaft end, through apparent “double dildo” shapes, and those with com-
plex self referential imagery, such as a lioness licking the urethral open-
ing of a penis engraved along the shaft length (Taylor, 1996a). The most
recent discovery from the site of Hohle Fels cave in southwest Germany
(Figure 3) dates to around 28,000 years ago and is a 20 cm long, 3 cm
wide phallus in polished stone with a clearly delineated glans penis
(Conard & Malina, 2005). Surface wear indicates that it was used, in
part, for retouching flint blades, while being a clear symbolic represen-
tation of erect male genitalia. The fact that the object could have been
used for sexual penetration is not at odds with technological interpreta-
tion, however, as it may have been thought that the power to penetrate
was a general magical quality. That is, an object with power to penetrate
in a sexual context might be seen as having the power to impart pene-
trating power to projectile points (Taylor in Lorenzi, 2005). Although
they reflect and represent body parts rather than a somatic whole, the
phallic batons can be argued to be “faceless” in a similar way to the fe-
male figurines. They present an idea of maleness that is at once func-
tional, as apparent tools with obvious potential uses in ritual, coercive,
or recreational sexual activities, and impersonal (i.e., used by more than
one person and transferred to others).
It may be that it was through the conventions of depiction–what came
to be shown in art and what became taboo–that a concept that we may
recognize as “gender” concretized itself, attendant upon, rather than
sensibly preceding, the physical processes of art creation with their own
internal logic. Thus, the intended artistic meaning(s) of the Venus statu-
ettes and the phalluses can (pace Hirsch, 1967) be separated from both
their significance, which may have grown and altered, and their impli-
cations, as seen within the framework of long-term socio-cultural pro-
cesses.
As an artifact, the Venus of Willendorf is considered “female.” Put
another way, the sculpture embodies an objectified understanding or
projection of the feminine. The Venus of Willendorf presents “woman”
as a species and not as a specific and empowered individual. Contrary to
reality, she is made changeless (the permanence of the art is both fortu-
itous and an inherent part of its meaning). This objectification, taken
with other indicators of social structure at this time, does not provide
much support for the idea that female equality (or superiority) existed in
this period. But, neither does the objectification support old-fashioned

pornographic or fertility cult interpretations. Instead, the Venus statu-

ettes suggest a society that insisted, through a powerful visual symbol-
ism, that a person, if female, was primarily female and only secondarily
an individual. This supposition is congruent with other data that suggest
the existence of highly structured social groups in which non-confor-
mity was not tolerated. However, this view does not exclude the possi-
bility that there may have been equally rigid and corresponding means
for defining men as primarily male. (By contrast with the statuettes,
nearly all burials from this period are of males.)
CONCLUSION:
SEX AND SOCIAL CONTROL
The Venus of Willendorf has no face because at the time that she was
made the living women of whom she is a form of representation were
increasingly ordered as a unitary class. More clearly than any other arti-
fact, the facelessness of the Venus of Willendorf signals the start of the
construction of gender. Seen within a broader system of rich significa-
tion, interpretation of the Ice Age art objects presented here also indi-
cates the existence of critical self-consciousness, or the awareness that
we are the subjects of our own mental states, which we believe we have
the power to alter (the phenomenon known as “free will”). The art
shows an understanding that social conditioning is possible: the cre-
ation of habitus and the ability to shape a culture, including a sexual cul-
ture. This phenomenon was by no means wholly beneficial for all. A
more sinister counterpart to the Venus of Willendorf comes from the
Russian site of Kostienki and depicts a naked woman who is clearly
pregnant, with everted navel, her hands tightly bound together across
her bulging stomach.
The closest parallels for this image suggest some of the more dis-
tasteful byways of bondage and discipline pornography featuring bound
women near full term (“bound and ready to burst”). There is perhaps no
real anachronism here; the subordinating sentiment of a male psyche
jealously distressed by the procreative power of the female body is plau-
sibly identical across the millennia. Prudery or distaste should not allow
us to balk from facing the darker side of sex as a powerful means of cre-
ating submission, shame, and humiliation. In some ways this is the leg-
acy of brain enlargement itself. The bane of critical self-consciousness
is an awareness that others are aware of their own being and are also
trapped in their own nexus of neural reflexes. The societies of the mid-
dle Upper Paleolithic were the first to recognize that in the interplay be-
tween self-consciousness and sex/gender, a powerful mechanism of
social control might be shaped. That is to say, people in these societies
were able to or were even required to frame their own physicality in re-
lation to concrete cultural projections, such as female figurines and
phalluses. The rules for creating and manipulating such images, the ex-
istence (if not the precise nature) of which is manifested in the pattern-
ing of the archaeological contexts where such artifacts are found, imply
concomitant rules for living bodies and body parts.
Today the typical objects of human sexual attraction are other hu-
mans, but this is more than just a specific mate recognition system
(SMRS) issue. “Other humans” in this sense are socially-constituted,
gendered, and objectified (and in extreme cases of paraphilias may no
longer be living biological beings). Through culture, humans are also
able to make animals honorary humans, develop attractions to inani-
mate objects, and cultivate sexual attraction for themselves or for
sub-personae of multi-faceted personalities. Being social creatures,
however, and using sex as an instrument for power and control as well
as for basic genetic reproduction and the pursuit of pleasure, the al-
lowed or accepted forms of sexual attraction are often under strong
constraint or directional promotion.
The implications of this early evidence for the creation of a gendered
world are precisely that the ideas of “man” and “woman” are cultural
constructs. It is a commonplace of anthropology textbooks to define
gender as the social elaboration of biological sex, whereas, in fact, bio-
logical sex is an abstraction from our own development of a system of
gender. Of course, some may properly object that the possession of XX
or XY chromosomes (or any variant on this theme that may occur) is the
basic scientific guarantor of objectivity; but, sex chromosomes and
genes are even more invisible in practice than the Hua’s notion of
korogo as a moistness produced by those whose bodies possess a’, some
of whom give birth. This idea is not radical relativism or pure social
constructivism. It is a statement that our ideas about ourselves, while
not constructed wholly freely and while constrained by the limits of
bodily possibilities, are nevertheless constructed, and what we choose
to sexually stress, develop, and condone is as much a matter of cultural
and individual choice as it is biologically predestined. That is to say,
whilst there are plausible non-cultural factors, such as genetic and
endocrinal ones, that may predispose a person to same-sex sexual at-
traction and behavior (or to celibacy, solitariness, or attachments to in-
animate objects), actual behavior is always framed and given meaning

within a cultural context. This context is powerful enough at times to

overrule underlying biologically-based predispositions, while at other
times it may be overruled by them.
ISSUES FOR FURTHER CONSIDERATION
The word “culture” in the title of this text might suggest a social
constructivist position, running counter to the tenor of other contribu-
tions in this volume. However, I believe that neither biology nor culture
determine human sexual attraction and orientation. Instead, these two
analytical realms must be seen at one level as heuristic; we could say
(and it would be true) that “biology” is a cultural and historical concept,
being a lexical item denoting a present field of study among an ongoing
community of scholars. But we could also say that the findings of this
field of study, qua Science, transcend culture and lead to insights,
broadly labeled “Darwinian,” which stand in intimate correspondence
to the underlying truths of the living world for all times and places.
Genes act to constrain the dispositions of species and individuals
within them. Among humans, genes may at times play a determinative
role; at an extreme, congenital disease can circumscribe the physical
sexual opportunities for individuals, whose effective or instrumental
sexual orientation may be sharply limited. Ideationally, such a person is
freer to imagine possibilities than realize them. But this is true for al-
most everyone–the development of critical self-consciousness under
the conditions of enculturation for a symbolic, language-using, highly
social creature allow for the entertainment of a wide range of sexual
possibilities, only a subset of which will (indeed can) be acted on. This
does not mean, however, that all humans are equally free to fantasize
about sexual permutations. The direction of genetic constraint tends,
axiomatically, towards the privileging of heterosexual and reproduc-
tively-oriented sexual activity. If this were not so, we would not have
evolved as a species. Nevertheless, as extreme K-strategists, with heavy
parental investment in very few offspring, especially in view of our long
maximum lifespan potential, it is also clear that the amount of repro-
ductive sex required for a person to pass on their genes effectively is
minimal. Without culture, we cannot function. Further, culture requires
such effort to inculcate in the next generation that it is only in specific
historical circumstances (usually characterized by poverty of cultural
opportunity) that we shift towards an r-strategy and attempt to maxi-

mize live births per person.

Genes do not exhaust the biological contribution to sexual attraction;
they are a beginning, a template guiding but not determining the organ-
ism as it develops in response to the hormonal inter-uterine environ-
ment, exposure to pathogens, nutrition, and social circumstances, such
as birth order. In mammals, as Pavlov first established, biology pro-
duces an imprintable organism. This is why a social constructivist
model for sexual orientation is as implausible as a wholly genetic one.
We develop our affective responses within a reflexive culture. That is to
say (pace Butler, 1993), when a baby is held up in the maternity ward
and the obstestrician announces “it’s a girl,” this act is both a statement
about biological facts and a cultural assertion. The statement, correct or
not, already contains a significant bias in favor of recognizing two sexes
as the primary underpinnings in a social order. As we can imagine a dif-
ferent kind of culture where the first statement might typically be “it’s
alive” or “it has teeth,” so we can see that the primacy given to the out-
ward physical particulars of reproductive sex at birth is culturally
conditioned (although not, of course, invented).
There is not enough space here to elaborate on gender, sexual attrac-
tion, erotic preferences, and enculturation, intentional or otherwise. But
it must be accepted that a person can feel their sexuality to be out of their
own hands, even though their sexuality has been acquired rather than in-
herited, because the crucial nexus of genes and environment in the criti-
cally sensitive periods of early infant development serve to imprint
erotic responses that are hard-wired into the rapidly complexifying
brain. At its simplest, we have to consider the cultural extension of
SMRSs, from underlying bodies to overlying clothes. Tanner’s descrip-
tion of his father-in-law marrying the Agokwa is one of many instances
where the semblance of being an appropriate object of sexual attraction
is enough, with the mechanics of sexual congress and the impossibility
of biological reproduction sublimated by a cultural grammar. Perhaps
this cultural grammar allows a safe outlet for bisexual curiosity (or a de-
gree of polymorphic perversity), while maintaining the rigid gender di-
visions that, since at least the time of the middle Upper Palaeolithic
figurines and phalluses, have served useful socio-structural and
adaptive functions for the viability of societies as functioning wholes.
Humans are not only successful but complex.
While human physical and reproductive biology was essentially set
into its current parameters at the time that the modern level of
encephalization was reached, some 150,000 years ago, there is no
evidence for the continuation from then until now of a fixed pattern of
human sexual behavior. Certain basic physical possibilities for hetero-

sexual and homosexual acts have remained uniform, but the elaboration
of other activities and the perception of values and forms of sexual ac-
tivity and identity have depended on the emergence of culture and the
growth of technological civilization. For example, although primates are
perceived to trade sex for food, only humans have actual prostitution
sensu stricto–a practice cognitively enabled by the economic disem-
bedding that coinage itself brings into being during the first millennium
BC. Thus, the classicist, Richard Seaford (2004) writes that “commercial
prostitution is . . . an extreme case of the homogenisation and deperson-
alisation (rather than just the homogeneity and impersonality) character-
istic of money. . . . It may also have been actually facilitated by the advent
of money” (p. 156), part of the more general objectivized reduction of
people to things under market conditions. In this text, I have traced back
to the origins of such objectification in terms of the phalluses and fe-
male representations of the European Ice Age.
I have speculated that the emergence of farming societies in the Ho-
locene (broadly the last 10,000 years of the current interglacial period)
was tied up with a predominating reproductive agenda and, therefore,
with the institutionalization of social control, the emergence of more
permanent gender roles, and an inferred increase in homonegativity as
“unproductive” sexual behavior. However, contextualized in prehis-
toric symbolic terms, the principal valorized distinction may have been
not between homo- and heterosexual acts, but between penetrating and
being penetrated. Already in the Ice Age, we have seen the establish-
ment of an art form with objectified female bodies and disembodied but
in some sense functionally penetrative phalluses (Figures 1, 2, and 3).
Early farming societies gave yet greater value to penetration as it be-
came symbolically linked with plowing a furrow, sowing seed, and en-
gendering the earth itself for the first time as a female principle,
fertilizable and made to bear fruit (“Mother Earth,” into whose womb
the dead would be returned to await rebirth). The scene reproduced in
Figure 5, of a male, perhaps masked and on skis, in the act of sexually
penetrating an elk is not so much an affirmation of what we would call
bestiality, as it is an assertion of penetrative and reproductive power. In
such early farming societies, being penetrated–as a woman, animal, or
passive party in a male-male sexual encounter–was one thing and was
subordinate to the power to penetrate.
The global rise of social complexity, underpinned by gender systems
and the values attached to giving and receiving, meant that the multiplex
(many stranded) social relations typical of early prehistoric communi-

ties gave way to more monoplex, function-specific, relationships. Peo-

ple’s social roles became more specialized, and the scope of personae
was thereby constrained. In early human societies, it was not possible
to be identified as a “homosexual” or “lesbian,” just as one was not a
scribe, a weaver, or a cook. With the rise of craft specialization, sta-
tus distinctions and the naturalization of classificatory labels became
increasingly common (cf. Hubbard, 2003). The crystallization of
such fine-tuned distinction is complete in the early twentieth cen-
tury, with, for human sexuality, a plethora of terms applied to individ-
uals as if they were members of “real” physical categories, with
rubberites, leatherites, sadists, and masochists graphed across hypothe-
sized fields of personality “introversion” and “neurosis” (e.g., Howells,
1984; see also Sedgwick, 1990; Oosterhuis, 2000).
Cultural norms vary widely in ethnographically-studied peoples and
appear to have done so in prehistoric communities as well. Overall, it is
to be assumed that the more the archaeological record is investigated for
diversity in sexual culture in past communities, the more variance will
be revealed. Against the broad trends over time of population growth,
the shift from multiplex to monoplex relationships, and the increasing
canonization of social personae must be set the contrasts of contempo-
raneous cultures; at the time of the Venus figurines in Ice Age Europe,
no similar phenomenon reveals itself in Africa, Asia, or Australasia. All
human cultures require two things: conformity (inwardly enforced) and
uniqueness (outwardly projected). Thus, human societies train their
children to naturalize, cognitively speaking, their own culture and recoil
in horror from the culture of competitor groups. Latent flexibility in
sexual attraction and the range of possible sexual responses is, on this
reckoning, just another resource from which local norms can be
distilled to create a distinctive and coherent way of life.
Inter-culturally speaking, humans display the greatest range of be-
haviors of any animal. On the other hand, intra-cultural enforcement of
norms heavily circumscribes acceptable diversity in any given commu-
nity, and cultures typically employ lethal sanction to uphold and defend
(indeed create a sense of) culturally appropriate behavior. It is not sur-
prising then that what human cultures consider to be sex-appropriate be-
havior is often presented as having the force of nature because of the
profound conditioning within the especially potent context of human in-
fancy, despite the often arbitrary or contingent bases of such behavioral
norms. Within an ongoing community, normative behavior is taken to
be self-evidently healthy for the body politic and is defended as the only
proper form of behavior, despite (or even perhaps because of) blatant
non-conformity to those particular norms in an adjacent culture. Diver-

sity is, thus, seen as essentially, rather than contingently, deviant (in a
manner that scholars on the history of human sexuality will find
familiar).
Human sexual attraction is framed and modified by a range of fac-
tors. To study it in deep time perspective, we must track back and forth
between the insights of modern primatology, biological anthropology,
and ethnographic accounts of human variation, in order to structure our
inferences about prehistoric artifacts and ancient human remains. Each
disciplinary perspective has its filters and biases, but the archaeological
data are real and will not bear just any interpretation; logically exam-
ined, the findings of archaeology will continue to provide novel insights
that confound speculative histories.
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Taylor, T. (1996). The Prehistory of Sex: Four Million Years of Human Sexual Culture.
London: Fourth Estate.
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doi:10.1300/J056v18n02_03

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This article was downloaded by: [Flinders University of South Australia]

On: 06 January 2015, At: 21:26

Journal of Psychology & Human

The Origins of Human Sexual

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1300/J056v18n02_03

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The Origins of Human Sexual Culture:

SUMMARY. There is a series of common assumptions about prehis-

Timothy F. Taylor is Reader in Archaeology, Department of Archaeological Sci-

KEYWORDS. Culture, hominin, evolution, prehistory, sex, gender, so-

BRIDGING BETWEEN BIOLOGY AND CULTURE

FIGURE 1. Limestone statuette, the Venus of Willendorf, Austria, Upper

Palaeolithic (photo: author).

than we have had previously, in particular because of progress in inter-

FIGURE 2. The Venus of Willendorf, close-up of pelvic region (photo: author).

Assumption 1: Heterosexual reproductive sex was the dominant if not

FIGURE 3. Hohle Fels stone tool/phallus, Germany, Upper Palaeolithic (photo:

Juraj Liptak, with permission).

In order to examine and challenge these and other assumptions, it is

The evolution of human sexual culture presents particular problems

values arrived as part of trade and exploitation (the “development of un-

derdevelopment”: Wallerstein, 2004) and were often cemented through

universally well-defined category, even in the modern world. Even

more implicitly, we will have unreflectively assumed a funerary context

ing) (tracing: Taylor, 1996, p. 174, Fig. 7.5, with permission).

at a reconstruction of human sexual culture is fraught with difficulty.

Sex and Hominin Evolution

In 1871, Charles Darwin predicted that the evolutionary origins of

plural) that made and used them is unknown.

of primate “culture” as a phenomenon similar to human culture but of

Although the freeing of hands from locomotion is often considered to

neotenic trend in which children can be born developmentally ever ear-

cause inter-personal violence in the form of scalping, for instance, is

GENDER SYSTEMS IN COMPARATIVE

Reference to SMRSs implies that a heterosexual and reproductive

The Cultural Subversion of Biology

Use of the natural environment to regulate and modify sexual cycles

modern social anthropology, Bronislaw Malinowski, in his Sexual Life

of Savages in North-Western Melanesia, refused to believe what local

as–in our terms–token homosexuals (a practice not unknown among

women who escaped to sea in the nineteenth century disguised as cabin

Gender and Sex, Public and Private

parallel to this sequence, figapa women who are post-menopausal and

Nevertheless, early accounts of open sexuality and days of sexual li-

The “gender apartheid” discernible in the diets of women and men at

THE ICE AGE INVENTION OF GENDER

Having reviewed in turn the basics of sexual behavior in relation to

images of motherhood, representations of a Great Mother Goddess, part

of a fertility cult, time-factored images of reproductive cycles, repre-

known or assumed human norms (already referred to above); the second

considers the inherent content of the artifacts as art objects–the

Why the Venus of Willendorf Has No Face

One previous interpretation that has attempted to explain why the

in non-pornographic representation into the present day). The appear-

this period. But, neither does the objectification support old-fashioned

pornographic or fertility cult interpretations. Instead, the Venus statu-

animate objects), actual behavior is always framed and given meaning

within a cultural context. This context is powerful enough at times to

ISSUES FOR FURTHER CONSIDERATION

opportunity) that we shift towards an r-strategy and attempt to maxi-

mize live births per person.

human sexual behavior. Certain basic physical possibilities for hetero-

(many stranded) social relations typical of early prehistoric communi-