Sex at Dawn
by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, Scribe Publications, $35
What a title. The subtitle - The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality - tells us it's not the time of day, but the dawn of civilisation the authors are expounding on.
This is a provocative book, and a thought-provoking one.
It challenges many popular theories, flatly contradicts others, and contends that - brilliant though Darwin was - his ideas on sex and procreation were a bit askew.
Readers will form their own opinions, although the authors are persuasive polemicists.
The general thrust of the book is that mankind's promiscuous past explains why many people find long-term fidelity difficult, why sexual passion tends to fade as love deepens, why many men risk everything for an affair, and why homosexuality persists in the face of standard evolutionary logic.
They show how agriculture led to the concept of ownership of land, and then to the "ownership" of women by men (so men were certain their heirs were in fact theirs).
In short, this is a book which will polarise and incite some fascinating debates.
