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"The reason to think about ancient human behaviour is to get past current cultural impositions and find out what comes naturally."

As Khoth points out, ancient societies had cultures too. What makes you think ancient societies reflect anything other than cultural pressure to conform to forager norms? Given that foragers lived closer to starvation, can't I argue that cultural pressures were stronger on foragers? After all, for foragers to deviate from norms will mean death, whereas farmers have more collective wiggle room. Hence the fact that we see a wide variety of cultural norms among different farming societies. I'm not saying I necessarily believe this, but the fact is that much of evo-psych is guesswork - unless you can provide hard evidence, one plausible-sounding narrative is as good as another.

And not only that, but what makes culture an "imposition" and genetics "natural"? It's an absurd divide.

You calling rapscallion a wuss for his (excellent) post is of course typical, in that so many proponents of evo-psych come to it with an obvious axe to grind. The real reason to think about ancient human behaviour is better to understand ancient human behaviour. It may or may not tell us anything useful about modern humans.

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It's worth having another (somewhat hazy) datapoint, but don't forget to take the ancient cultural impositions into account too.

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Wuss! The reason to think about ancient human behaviour is to get past current cultural impositions and find out what comes naturally. After all, the biological term "mate for life" means a when a boy critter and a girl critter pair up then they stay together for their duration of their lives. Should one die early then the other member will not pair up again regardless of his or her age. The fact that current societies still support multiple partners via serial monogamy shows that humans do not "mate for life". The closest to monogamy for humans I heard of is the temporary pair-bonding long enough to get the child past infancy, i.e. four years of age. After that the relationship risks drifting apart as the chemical whirlwind dies down. There's probably something to be said that couples with umpteen children stay together because of four years of serial spurts. However the fact human societies have traditionally been almost all polygynous until fairly recently says a lot that humans aren't particularly genetically prone to monogamy.

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Leaving aside the issue as to whether knowing the biological origins of one's own urges should have any impact on the likelihood or otherwise of acting on those urges, it does seem that it might have an impact on how probable you consider it that, say, your partner might, or at the very least desire to, cheat on you.

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The front-page is currently full of posts about Cavali-Sforza. You might be referencing this post.

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The second last paragraph reminds me of Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class. He began from a different premise (hunting as high status, work as low status and so men did hunting because they don't want to be associated with low status individuals) but the conclusion is about the same.

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Well said. (If I had a "like" button I would have clicked it, but as it is I'm posting a whole comment instead just to say that.)

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It is worth spending time at Peter Frost's Evo and Proud blog to look at this question, because the answer depends.

Firstly, there will be variation within each population group that has spent significant time being selected under specific conditions, and

Secondly, different population groups will have mean values for preference for pair bonds that depend on the ability of females to provision their offspring by themselves (which is possible in some places) vs the requirement to have both parents contributing to offspring.

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"But in the range from near-perfect monogamy to chimp/bonobo style promiscuity, where do they think humans lie?"

Surely, the most relevant data for answering this question lies in current data on current humans, which is much less subject to error than speculative data on ancient humans. Nowadays, we see a lot of variation in human mating and pair-bonding behavior, so it's clear that humans are capable of exhibiting a wide-range of behavior, spanning the entire spectrum from pure, austere monogamy to bacchanalia.

I don't think much of the idea that studying ancient behavior will tell us much about our true preferences. Observed, current behavior is the best way to study those. Even if ancient behavior differed radically from current behavior, it's pure sophistry to label ancient behavior "human" and modern behavior somehow less-than-human. Human behavior is what humans do.

Thinking of ancient behavior as somehow more authentic also invites bad faith rationalizations. People may think that higher ancient promiscuity means that cheating on their spouse is excusable since they're just giving into their ancient biological drives. But knowing the origins of your biological urges doesn't in fact make them any more or less compelling. If you are in a relationship and thinking of cheating, you already know all that's relevant regarding how strong is the inducement to cheat; learning about the ancient origins of your urges doesn't add any new, truly relevant information.

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