16 i Flora Unveiled
of, or perhaps no interest in, biological paternity. Upon further questioning, the informant
explained that “it is the baloma who gave her this child.”
Malinowski reported that the Trobriand Islanders’ concept of human reproduction
was based on the idea of reincarnation. The baloma was thought of as a person’s reflec-
tion or shadow image; only people had balomas. Each newly born child was a reincarnated
baloma. Malinowski concluded that Trobriand Islanders did not recognize any material
contribution of the father to the newborn. Malinowski further speculated that the failure
to understand the father’s role was the basis for the practice of matrilineal descent among
the different clans. However, in his book Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays,
Malinowski also pointed out that the islanders did have “a vague idea as to some nexus
between sexual connection and pregnancy.”^15 They understood, for example, that a woman
who is a virgin typically didn’t become pregnant. However, they believed that the function
of sexual intercourse was purely mechanical, to “open up” or “pierce” the vagina, making it
“easier for a spirit child to enter.”
Trobriander accounts of procreation obtained by later anthropologists have revealed a
surprising diversity of opinion about the role of the father. According to Montague, some
informants report that during intercourse the penis pounds on the cervix, which prevents
the loss of menstrual blood that participates in the formation of the fetus.^16 According to
another version (possibly influenced by outside contact), the semen acts a coagulant form-
ing a clot in the menstrual blood into which the spirit- child may enter. Thus the baloma
reincarnation model for childbirth has proved flexible enough to allow for some mechani-
cal or chemical role of the father without contradicting the core assumption that it is the
baloma and not the biological father that is essential for pregnancy to occur. Beliefs similar
to those of the Trobriand Islanders at the turn of the twentieth century may also have been
held by some groups in the Ice Age.
In summary, then, many factors could have combined to obscure the connection between
sexual intercourse and childbirth during the Upper Paleolithic, and it is therefore quite pos-
sible that the role of copulation in pregnancy was not understood for some time during the
early hunter- gatherer stage of human social evolution.
Could Ice Age People Count to Nine?In his book A Prehistory of Sex, Timothy Taylor quotes the British scientist James Biment
as saying, “Stone Age man probably didn’t associate sex with something that came along
nine months later ... I doubt he could count up to nine.” If Biment is correct and Upper
Paleolithic people couldn’t count to nine, tracing childbirth to its cause nine months earlier
would have been a daunting task. However, even if they could count to nine, did they know
how long a month was? In other words, did they have calendars? Let’s consider counting
first and calendars second.
As their cave paintings make clear, European early modern humans were able to create
stunning works of art, equal in skill to those of modern artists.^17 Nor is there any reason
to believe that the innate arithmetical abilities of Ice Age humans were any less impressive
than their artistic abilities. It is only the slow, incremental way in which mathematics pro-
gresses that obscures the numerical achievements of our Paleolithic forebears. Had he been