Re: Male chimps use sexual coercion

On Feb 7, 2:30 am, "simple_langu...@xxxxxxxxx"
<simple_langu...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
source:http://www.newscientist.com/blog/shortsharpscience/

Male chimps are highly aggressive towards their female counterparts -
sometimes using branches as clubs to beat them. The study found that
male chimps are most aggressive towards the fecund females in their
group. It also revealed that these males mated more with the females
that they beat. "We conclude that male-female aggression represents an
evolved strategy to constrain female sexuality," the authors say. They
add that the males mainly used force to prevent the females from
mating with other chimps. Does this study help explain domestic
violence in humans? Researchers point out that we are far less
promiscuous than chimps, so it's difficult to say what the findings
mean for people. I think it's far too early to draw a connection
between these chimpanzee beatings and the horrific domestic assaults
some people suffer.

Another study darted Macaques, drew blood, and found that the alpha
males, who commit all the violence, have higher adrenalin and lower
seratonin. The hormone profile is handed down on the Y chromosome.

WE may be far less promiscuous now, but were not always. JP Mallory,
In Search of the Indo-Europeans, cant find a word for "marriage". DNA
shows that Native Europeans evolved in villages of 150-300, and all
the notorious 'fertility rites' were one way of maximizing diversity.
Tacitus reports the rebuttal by a celt to the charge of
wantonness:"Well, we Celts consort with the best of men in public,
while you Roman wives do so in secret with the most vile."

Archeology has found Nordic long houses where people lived
polyamorously for centuries. This type of timber frame communal
housing can be found in the tels going back 8000 years to the era of
Proto-Indo-European Mallory was looking at.

I grant that hominids commonly have pair bonds. But Gimbutas shows us
lotsa Chalcolithic couples... in which the sex is either both female,
or ambiguous. http://www.dc-pc.org/artifax/artifax.html shows a Minoan
family (scroll down the page), mother, child... and another *woman*.

An anthro classic, "The Forest People" on the Mbuti pygmi, reports
that 1/3 of the tribe is monogamous. 1/3 do what we call 'serial
monogamy', and 1/3 are promiscuous. They do not have a standard that
everyone should adopt. Whatever floats your boat. Written over 50
years ago, the Mbuti were still living pretty much as they had for the
last 100,000 years.

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