The Human Evolution of [Making] Love
An Anthropological Lens of The Divine Man-Woman Dyad
The information in this article has been gleaned from, but is not limited to the linked articles and the following books: Sex at Dawn, Mating in Captivity, The Third Chimpanzee, and The Moral Animal.
As a species, why do we mate the way we do?
Obviously different people have their own unique, what should we call it, style of making love, and this style can change and adapt over time (for better or for worse). But what if we zoom out a degree from the individual to the species and consider the average, or the limits, of our homo sapiens mating nature?
Taxonomically speaking, we humans are not excluded from the category of Great Apes that includes orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos. This being known, how then would we differ, say, from these closest genetic relatives? What makes human mating practices, well, human?
For example, male chimpanzees have been observed trading meat for sex, and bonobos have been documented looking into each other’s eyes and kissing with tongue while mating face-to-face missionary style. So, like, how unique are we really?
A Note on Evolution
It may seem paradoxical to some that the subtitle would suggest a combination of the concepts of anthropology and divinity all at once, for if we were truly divine creatures created by God, Source, The Great Mother, etc - then how could we possibly have evolved from mere “animals”?
This debate used to take up much of my time, (my indoctrination degree is a Bachelor of Arts in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology after all), and I could approach from various angles how evolution had to be the truth and was the obvious answer.
Now, I’m not so sure, and that doesn’t surprise me. Once I started learning about how many things we were lied to about, it is totally fair to conclude we were lied to about the biggest things we were taught as well.
I can’t say for certain anymore things that used to be major obvious facts like if we went to the moon, if the holocaust happened in the way they taught us it did, or if the Earth is round. Could evolution be as well a farce that is just one more attempt at separating us from our spiritual sacredness? Possibly, so I’m not ruling it out anymore. Now I know that I know with certainty almost nothing, and if evolution is all rubbish, so be it. However, no matter what is real or not real, I will not be excluding the creator from the conversation anymore.
Regardless of the true historicity of our questionable and miraculous origins as a species, the following version of the absolutely marvelous interconnectedness of our human bodies, relationship dynamics, mating habits, and natural birthing behaviors inspires me to not only take more care in the attention of the relationship I have with my wife, but it allows me to see my fellow humans, men and women alike, as true individuals each with great power and purpose.
Pass the Genes, Please
Where might one start on the journey to unpack the sexuality of ourselves and our primate cousins?
How about with the initial point of mating: reproduction.
Reproduction is the passing of one’s genes onto the next generation through our offspring. “Our genes” are not only our own, but the genes of every ancestor we have ever had. Being able to reproduce is to extend the lifespan of every one that came before us.
And just how many people came before us? Well, 2 generations is 4 grandparents, 5 generations is 32 grandparents, and 10 generations is 1,024 grandparents. That means in only the last 10 generations 2046 people mated to ultimately lead to your unique present existence.
Whoa.
Can you feel it?
In this context, some would call passing on the genes of your bloodline the most honorable thing you could do with your life, as those ancestors often fought tooth and nail, had to create resources out of dust, and find wisdom and cleverness through action to ensure their own and their children’s survival. They, like you, had a unique life experience worthy of biography, and their bloodline certainly does not want to end.
How do we know the bloodline doesn’t want to end? If you have impulse or craving for sex, and you definitely do if you are healthy and in a reproductive window, your bloodline is calling you, compelling you, demanding you even, to extend the legacy at least once more.
This creates an issue, though, because as even supply and demand dictates, there is a finite supply of partners to procreate with. Math alone will determine not everyone gets to procreate.
If procreation is of the most primal utmost importance and necessity, but not everyone gets to do it, then we have a competition on our hands. A fierce competition at that.
As males from the ape categories are reproductively viable for longer in their lives than females are, even a population with a 50/50 split in gender will always have more sexually reproductive males than females, thus creating the competition. As well, when females are pregnant or newly mothers they are off the market, further dividing the balance and reducing more potential female mates. To get technical and use scientific lingo, since sperm is specifically what the males are offering for reproduction, what we have is here is called sperm competition.
Size Does Matter - For the Species Anyway
Taking us humans and our 2 closest genetic relatives into consideration (gorillas, and chimpanzees), let’s break down how we each manage this sperm competition.
First, what kind of obvious differences might we see in the basic physiology of these different Great Apes in comparison to each other?
The categories we will analyze are overall body size in weight, testicle size, erect penis width and length, breast size, length of mating practice, menopause, lifespan, and concealed ovulation.
Concealed ovulation, also known as hidden estrus, is the opposite of visible estrus. Visible estrus is where the body of an adult female displays physical and apparent changes that signal she is ovulating, and thus at time in the cycle most likely to conceive. Think back to images you may have seen of monkeys or apes with an exaggerated and pink backside - and check out the following image of a chimpanzee in heat, aka ovulating.
You’ll also notice that human females do not show clear, outward signs of ovulation.
Of course, human ovulation is not a total mystery, and women in the know understand their cycle based on the cues their body does give them (cervical position, cervical mucus consistency, basal body temperature), but this is not obvious to the public.
In today’s era, this information is even lacking in private. Many women, and most men, have no idea how to track these cycles as women have for thousands of years. For invaluable information on this most essential aspect of basic human life consider reading The Fifth Vital Sign by Lisa Hendrickson-Jack. The book is absolutely mind blowing in its simplicity.
On to the comparisons…
Gorillas
Lifespan of 35-40 years with oldest known at 66.
Males: Largest body, smallest testicles, smallest erect penis (1.75”), and middle mating duration (1.5 mins).
Females: Largest body, smallest breasts, visible estrus. Menopause at latest: 40 years.
Chimpanzees
Lifespan of 35-40 years, with oldest known chimp allegedly 79.
Males: Smallest body, largest testicles, middle penis width, same penis length as humans (5.25”), and shortest mating duration (<10 seconds).
Females: Smallest body, middle sized breasts, visible estrus. Menopause at latest: 35-50yrs.
Humans
Lifespan: Hard to say as it is based on averaging fuzzy prehistoric evidence and post industrial revolution modern era extended lifespans, but I’m going with 60 years, with the oldest known human to be 122.
Males: Middle sized body, middle sized testicles, largest penis width, same length as chimps, and longest mating duration at some modern sources suggesting 5 minutes.
Females: Middle sized body, largest breasts, hidden estrus, aka concealed ovulation. Menopause at latest: 50 years.
Now that we know the size differences, let’s get back to sperm competition, the competition that determines which male will get the opportunity to pass his genes on.
Gorillas - Competing with their Strength
Gorillas are big, strong, and fierce. When they were first taken into captivity, people would look at their stature and teeth and assume they were carnivores, confused as the gorillas would nearly go hungry surrounded by slabs of provided raw meat.
Turns out, gorillas are primarily vegetarians. Their strong body and intimidating teeth are not so much for hunting, but for fighting each other while determining the alpha male.
The alpha male wins not only the respect (or fear) of the troop and the heavy responsibility of maintaining group cohesion while leading the groups daily travel and activities, he also earns a harem of the adult females. In the gorilla world, the alpha gets to mate almost exclusively with multiple females, if he can keep the other males away.
This is how the gorillas manage their sperm competition, with sheer fighting force and social status. Only the toughest and most respected male would have access to the females during their fertile window, securing his sperm to the eggs and passing the genes of strong and brave on to the next generation.
Chimps - Competing with Volume
Chimpanzees do not have the same social mating dynamics of the gorillas. Chimpanzee females in heat will mate with numerous males during their ovulatory window.
So, if many males get access to the females during her fertile window, whose sperm has a chance at the competition?
The one with the most substantial volume.
The chimpanzees have the largest testicles. Larger testicles produce more sperm, and chimpanzees are proven to produce a much greater volume during ejaculation than either gorillas or humans.
Amongst themselves, naturally, some will produce even more than the others. The chimpanzee with the greatest likelihood of reproducing with the female is the one who offers the most swimmers in the race, as it were. Then, the genes for volume get passed on to the next generation, furthering the propensity of large testicles to the next generation.
Remember, gorilla males have smaller testicles than chimps, and gorillas females the least sexual partners. Knowing what we know now about chimpanzees, we can connect the dots and infer that the more promiscuous the female, the larger the testicles of the males, and vice versa. The less promiscuous the female, the smaller the testicles of the males need to be because there is less competition in the number of swimmers.
Are you still with me? I know you started reading for love, and now here we are at Chimpanzee testicles. Thank you for your patience, we are getting to the human part now.
If female mating partners is correlated in part to testicle size, and we know that humans have the middle sized testicles of the 3 apes in question, we can deduce that ancestral human females had sexual partners between 1 (like gorillas) and numerous (like chimps) during her ovulatory window. Knowing what we know about humans then (and now), that makes sense.
Humans - Competing With…Well, Love
We learned that humans have the largest overall penis and have the lengthiest duration of mating ritual. Our females also have concealed ovulation, making it imperceptible to a male when she might be most able to conceive.
To understand what determines the human aspects of sperm competition, we need to break down the human dynamic a bit more.
Let’s take a look at human newborns and infants compared to the others.
As we all know, a human infant is 100% helpless and in total dependance of the mother, or someone. Unlike the chimp and gorillas infants, which can at least cling to their mother’s body hair after birth and soon crawl and climb around, human babies are not able to do much of anything on their own for several months at least.
Humans have very large brains for our size, and our infants are no exception. This tradeoff of brains for strength and is why babies are born so helpless compared to other animals. We have to leave the womb before our brain gets any bigger or birth would be impossible, and this sacrifice of dexterity and strength pays for a more intelligent species.
This total dependency of the human offspring requires much more attention from the mother, even removing the ability of her to use one or both of her arms for a chapter after birth. Considering ancestral human behavior, and not the modern era that has done a great job of disconnecting women from organic motherhood, it is easy to see how the mother-baby is often considered one single organism, together, body against body, for gestation and the year after.
This creates more dependency from the mother on her community, or her partner, for thriving of her and her child. A woman with arms and heart full of infant is not the best equipped to hunt, gather, protect the tribe, carry heavy loads, etc, nor should she have to be.
Since a human child has a better chance surviving and thriving in an environment where he has more than one person consistently ensuring his survival, how has this been managed?
There are a few ways.
1) Living in communities with many people to support each other. This is similar to our other Great Apes above. Living in dense community is the rule for our 2 ape cousins and ourselves. Well, it used to be until the modern era came in and separated women from their sisterhood. In ancient communities, or even modern tribal ones, women breastfeed each other’s children and care for them like their own, allowing for much more available time and hands from the mother. Men in some of these communities also raised children collectively as their own, a group parenting environment providing care from many adults to many children.
2) The Grandmother Hypothesis. Human females go through menopause (the decline in reproductive hormones) and then have the potential to live for many years, or even decades, after they can procreate. This is unlike our fellow apes. With this unique adaptation, infants and mothers have a valuable additional support system. Post menopausal females are no longer of reproductive capacity for more of their own immediate offspring, but they can certainly increase the fitness (the ability to survive to reproductive age, find a mate, and produce offspring) of their children and even grandchildren. As far are the passing of genes go, this intergenerational care is truly remarkable.
3) Long term, intimate, monogamous relationships with sexual partners creates what we call a family.
Humans are unique in our capacity to intimately connect with our partners. We even call people lovers, even if the relationship is purely physical, because the emotional aspect of the act of human intercourse has such profound impacts on the well being and psyche of a person.
With no exaggeration at all I believe it is fair to say that we cannot deny how making love can be one of the most intense, fulfilling, sensual, meaningful, and fun aspects of human life overall. It is a major way that adults play.
For some out there who choose to prioritize making love as an even higher calling, studying and practicing it with the intent that intercourse is actually a medium for the ability for two divine, celestial, infinite organisms to integrate and co-create during this current manifestation, it a can be a spiritual, therapeutic, and literally life changing practice as well.
Anyone who has made love for hours with a partner they deeply connect and are open and honest with can attest to the power, intense bonding, and supreme emotional healing of such an act. Then, imagine if that practice and partner were continuously studied and adapted to with the consideration that one would offer to a graduate level degree or a religious fervor.
Powerful is an understatement.
So How and Why Do We Mate So Intimately?
How?
For just the nuts and bolts of the how we do it, humans are able to last longer during mating, and provide for a more pleasurable experience for each other. The male penis is such that it is long, wide, and flexible, capable of articulating many more sexual positions than our counterparts. When you add in human creativity and the desire to please and be pleased, visually and physically, the combinations for mating dynamically and enjoyably are nearly endless.
There is another hypothesis that the glans or “head” of the penis evolved as a semen displacement mechanism. This shape allows for a previous man’s remaining deposit to be pulled out by the edge of the glans, and the swollen glans itself can create a suction inside the narrow vagina that actually pulls down other semen before inserting its own. The way the head shrinks immediately after ejaculation supports this claim, as the glans would not want to work against itself.
According to this source, “Consistent with the view of the human penis as a semen displacement device, two surveys of college students showed that sexual intercourse often involved deeper and more vigorous penile thrusting following periods of separation or in response to allegations of female infidelity.”
Wild, eh?
Why do we mate so intimately, though?
On one level, we make love for longer durations because it increases oxytocin, the “love hormone”, that increases bonding.
Since our children need more care, it would do our parents good to be very fond of each other so as to have them both, and both of their families, around to help raise us. The more intimate, lengthy, and passionate mating they can frequently accomplish, and for hopefully many months or years, it increases the likelihood of them staying together as a family unit and us living long healthy lives. The data on children raised in a home without a father (or by a single parent) has been out for a long time now, and our intuition alone will tell us what is says: fatherless children have a harder time in life by ending up poorer, more emotionally challenged, and less educated.
Another reason we mate so intimately is because we have the issue of paternity certainty.
Paternity certainty is what it sounds like, “the degree to which a male is certain that his partner's offspring is genetically his own.”
If a gorilla knows the short window of ovulation his mate has because of her visible estrus, he can do his best to ensure he is the only male around her during that time to mate with her. Then, when she is no longer ovulating, he has no worry about her galavanting with other males because they cannot get her pregnant, thus thwarting his genes and tricking him into caring for a mother who will raise a child that isn’t his.
For humans, this is quite different. As our females have no visible estrus, and mate year round, a male can never really be certain about the fidelity of his mate’s eggs.
In addition, an adult human female’s breasts are the largest of the bunch, and the same size year round, unlike gorillas and chimps that swell and shrink based on cycles.
A human female, our women, are always, any day of the week and month of the year, the curvy, sensual, and sexy potential mates we find them to be. There may be particular times when we can subconsciously sense ovulation, but human mating can, and does, occur naturally and willingly at all hours of day, days of the month, and months of the year.
Because of this, human paternity certainty can be quite low. If we men are of need to be around the children to help raise them, it would certainly benefit our biology if they were actually our kids. The Cinderella Effect (the phenomenon where non-biological children are abused more often than biological ones) is no secret. Men with more certainty of their paternity treat these children better overall on average.
This issue of paternity certainty is just called jealousy in the modern world, and it can carry quite the charge. But I don’t have to tell you that, as there has no doubt been severe moments of sexual jealousy in your life that likely have resulted in some form of violence either towards you or a mate, or even done by you.
Humans have a lot going on, to say the least. Our women are constantly considered highly desirable by many other males, we can’t be certain when and with who they have mated with if they ever leave our side, and our offspring also need the most care.
So, how can we possibly ensure successful victory in the sperm competition and maintain paternity certainty to encourage healthy and viable childrearing? When you also consider that our woman would certainly want to mate with some of those other males as much as the males want them, this would seem impossible!
How can we possibly keep our woman not only by our side, but yearning to be exclusively by our side?
The answer: love.
Humans compete in the sperm competition with love. And real love is the kind that cultivates the most healthy relationship and thus healthy children and grandchildren to extend our lineage. This keeps us together.
I am not talking about any old type of love. This isn’t some fear based love with this “if you ever leave me I swear…” type of threatening that we see with too frequent domestic violence.
This also isn’t a simple, “I have all these resources to offer you in exchange for your body and presence,” type of love that is being propped up right now.
This isn’t even a, “God and our families said we have to be together so we are,” type of love, although that kind certainly can go a long way.
The type of love I am talking about is a verb. The type of love that works every single day on multiple levels.
In reminder, the stakes here are massive. We have our entire bloodline of ancestors to pass on successfully, and we can’t do this unless our children and children’s children are equipped with the tools and know how to love as well so they can keep the line going.
Because the quality of the relationship between the mother and the father determines reproductive success and health of the children, love evolved to increase this fitness.
When men are around their pregnant partner soon to give birth, our hormones change. We produce less testosterone, and more estrogen and prolactin, increasing our ability to be affectionate and more sensitive to both mother and baby.
We even become adjusted to be more attuned and responsive to our own baby’s specific cries. This is amazing.
The agenda out there suggesting that male and female are a social construct has lost its basis in material reality and been consumed by 5th generation warfare communist propaganda. Men and women are miraculously different, each carrying our own specific and essential role in the cultivation and care of our children and thus our society.
So, How Do We Love In The Modern Era?
What does it mean to love in a way that bonds us to our partner in a physically and spiritually fulfilling manner that produces the most healthy, intelligent, capable offspring to support growing the strength of our community?
First, take serious note of the scope of the situation and the level of responsibility we each have.
This cohabitation in pairs we have developed as a species over hundreds of thousands of years that we are compelled to participate in with each other in pairs isn’t just about figuring out how to pay bills or vent about our boss’s attitude at work before we pick which streaming service to log into for the night.
That is a modern and socially engineered perversion of our true nature, designed to subvert our great power as a species of divine creatures evolved to live out of doors, autonomously, and in love.
We humans evolved love and pair bonding to cultivate culture and allow our species to achieve unimaginable feats and levels of emotional and supernatural awareness that many call magic, fate, or destiny.
At this perspective, your sexual mate has the potential to be a partner in manifesting providence at exactly the unique degree to which only you both as unique individuals working together can. And we direly need your contribution as a species.
Next, seriously understand who we and our partner are and want to be, and go outside.
If we can face our shortcomings, faults, insecurities, and fears together, we can tear away the aspects that get in the way of us expressing are uniqueness and living a most meaningful life. It’s not always about adding more and more. Taking away can be much more simple and powerful.
Michelangelo said about creating the statue of David, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”
That is what we can do for ourselves, and support our partner in doing.
Being outside in organic landscapes often can truly support this facing of our fears and realignment of our true nature. Gardening, hiking, laying in the grass, watching clouds, putting feet in dirt, swimming in the sea, anything involving our organic landscapes calms us, grounds us, and gives us perspective and peace.
We cannot become our total true nature without gleaning inspiration and wisdom from true nature. Being wildly, organically, masterfully, and uniquely human takes practice and intentionality.
Then, we act in care and consideration of this greater purpose with the responsibility on ourselves.
It is not possible to make love for hours and create real life magic with someone you love if there is a lot of blame, excuses, sadness, despair, hopelessness, and trauma between the two of you, or between either of you and your own selves or the external world. If you have the same recurring problems with money, health, purpose, self esteem, or relationships, this elevated level of activation is going to be much more distant and difficult to achieve.
We must continue to sort out our lives with great courage and deliberation to walk this path.
Through acting in love by taking responsibility for all of our thoughts, feelings, and actions, diving into caring for ourselves and our mate by truly listening and supporting their highest alignment and taking risks, treating our children with care as heavenly beings, and doing at least something small to contribute to our local community - we can literally change the world while being massively fulfilled.
This work will not be easy, at all. This requires daily commitment, hard conversations, and even more difficult actions. But because it is so challenging, the reward is beyond compare.
The evolution of [making] love holds greater weight, potential, and reasoning than I could have ever imagined, and this gravity has continued to provide my life with unforeseeable important challenge and purpose.