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And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked.
— Genesis 3:72
The Discovery of Sex
Before people could discover sex in plants, they first had to discover it in themselves.
Not the sexual act itself, of course, which humans and all living creatures are programmed
to perform more or less spontaneously. It is also self- evident that women give birth. The
question we are posing is one of comprehension: When did humans learn the role of men
in childbirth? This question raises a second, even more basic question: Is it even possible to
answer the first question?
The short answer to the second question is, no, we can never know when humans first
understood the cause of childbirth. However, we can make an educated guess when the
earliest archaeological evidence for such knowledge appears. We can say with absolute cer-
tainty, for example, that the discovery of the contribution of the male to childbirth predates
the historic period, which begins with the invention of writing in ancient Mesopotamia
around 3500 bce.* From the earliest cuneiform tablets onward, poets have celebrated love’s
passion as well as love’s outcome: the birth of a child. To uncover the first glimmerings
of sexual knowledge, we must travel further back in time to the remarkable florescence of
human self- expression and creativity that began during the last Ice Age— a period known
as the Upper Paleolithic, between 40,000 and 11,000 years ago (see Table 2.1). Although
modern humans— Homo sapiens— had spread from Africa to Europe, Asia, and Australia
by this time, most of our understanding of this period is derived from two centuries of
research on the artistically rich sites of Western Europe. We will therefore focus our discus-
sion on this geographical area as an exemplar of Upper Paleolithic culture, with the caveat
that significant regional differences are known to exist.^1* Following modern convention in archaeolog y, we will use bce/ ce (“Before the Common Era” and
“Common Era”) in place of the traditional b c / a d.