Professor Desmond Clark, the consummate British gentleman and Africanist archaeologist, was fond of telling his intro class “if we were chimpanzees instead of humans this class would be severely interrupted owing to the presence of at least one or two ovulating females in the room at this moment.” I never took a class from Desmond (different school) but this quip was passed on to me by Glynn Isaac, and Glynn has passed it on to all of his students, we to ours, and so on. So this little off-the-cuff joke is surely repeated sixty or seventy times per semester, worldwide.

But the point of this is not ribald humor. Among the great apes, we are odd ducks. Actually, we would not be so odd as ducks as we are as apes, because ducks are birds and our system of mating is far more bird-like than ape-like. Desmond was a contemporary and colleague of Louis Leakey, and part of the small group of well connected Africanists studying human evolution active in the mid 20th century. These scientists appreciated back in the 1950s and early 1960s that an understanding of ape behavior and ecology would be essential to understanding human evolution. This was an explicit effort to advance Darwin’s comparative methods. Louis Leakey was instrumental in setting up Birute Galdikas, Dianne Fossey and Jane Goodall for fieldwork in Southeast Asia and Central Africa. The fieldwork of these pioneers in ape studies has served, and continues to serve, this purpose: Placing human evolutionary biology in a firm comparative framework.

And it is from this place … the perspective of our nearest living relative, the chimpanzees … that humans are odd ducks in ways that demand an evolutionary explanation. Continue reading The Evolution of Modern Human Mating Systems and Sexuality →