Prehistoric Sex Patterns

I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how sexual relationships worked in the past, i.e. who had sex with whom. By "the past", I mean maybe like a hundred thousand years ago.

My theory is based on the fact that men and women are not 100% compatible, and that that incompatability is due to the fact that we evolved our sexual wants under one set of conditions, and then those conditions changed. When those conditions changed, we adapted culturally, rather than evolutionarily, so our sexual wants do not match up with what our culture demands.

I'm not terribly experienced with sex unfortunately, but I have noticed that, between my wife and I, she is most interested in sex just after we've had it. I, on the other hand, am least interested in sex at this time. I'm most interested in sex about two to three days after I've had it, but at this time, she's really not interested in it at all. She doesn't get interested again for about eight days. Do other couples experience this same pattern? I don't know, but I think they might, because steryotipically, women tend to complain that men don't last long enough, and men tend to complain that women aren't interested often enough, so I don't think this pattern is unique to us.

Now, it's possible that this incompatibility caused a certain edginess in our species, and that this edginess somehow enabled us to survive better, but I think it's more likely that our sexual pattern changed at some point in the fairly recent past, and that we just haven't caught up with it evolutionarily.

What was that ancient pattern? Well, my wife is ready to continue having sex after I'm done, so maybe in the distant past, there would have been some other male present for her to have sex with. I'm ready to have sex again after a couple of days, and she's really not interested, so maybe there would have been some other female in the group for me to have sex with at this time. I'm basically thinking of a situation where we have several males and females living together in a group. The females in the group get interested in sex one at a time, and during that time, they have sex with all, or maybe just several, of the males in the group. If you look at my wife's and my pattern, you might think that three to four women would have been the average for such a group, and maybe two or three males. (I'm really not sure how many men my wife's libido might last through, it has, at least as far as I know, never been tested).

Think about it for a second. Having several males in the group would have provided a better defense against predators than the single male with a haraam of females pattern, and the pattern of sex that I've described would be able to help hold this group together. However, this pattern would start to break down if you had more than four or so males in the group. A single female, when it became her time, simply wouldn't be able to satisfy a large number of males. In this situation, it becomes better to match a single female with a single male, like we do today. My theory is that by the time we shifted to these larger tribal groups, we had already developed the capacity for culture, so we adapted culturally rather than evolutionarily.

So what does this mean to us now? Maybe nothing. However, we live in large enough groups now that we could easily subdivide into smaller groups similar to what we may have had in the past. Unfortunately, in our current society, job opportunities often require moves that would be harder to make with a larger multi-partnered family. In fact, our society is so fractious right now, that it's hard to keep single partner families together.

I know that communes did become popular during the 1960's, but they didn't last, I suspect because people moved around too often, and the close bonds that would have formed over a lifetime, had the communes lasted, never got a chance to form.

Anyway, that's my theory. My wife think's I'm crazy, and probably you do to (assuming anyone ever reads this), but it's my theory and I'm sticking to it. So there!