The oldest swingers: sex games of Stone Age exposed

Story found by Snakechic

Snakey: Here's a bit of research...... Does it surprise anyone that sex is for fun as well as for making babies. ? Nah..SO why do christian conservatives / moderates / liberals no doubt, like to enforce strict controls on every one's sex lives? Whats with the beliefs about women ?- of course we're not preprogrammed to be mongomous! No such thing

Mothy: Thanks for bring up my second favourite topic... I can always count on you to contribute blogworthy stuff - heh. I think if I became a Christian again it'd have to be with the 'Libchrists'... Swinging christians? The two words just sound sooo funny together.

Wiki: Liberated Christians is the name used by a group that contends that monogamy is a tradition with no biblical basis. According to the Liberated Christians website, the group espouses responsible nonmonogamy and polyamory, and works to expose what they call "false traditions of sexual oppression".

Roger Dobson - The oldest swingers: sex games of Stone Age exposed

He may have come down from the trees, but prehistoric man did not stop swinging. New research into Stone Age humans has argued that, far from having intercourse simply to reproduce, they had sex for fun.

Practices ranging from bondage to group sex, transvestism and the use of sex toys were widespread in primitive societies as a way of building up cultural ties.

According to the study, a 30,000-year-old statue of a naked woman - the Venus of Willendorf - and an equally ancient stone phallus found in a German cave, provide the earliest direct evidence that sex was about far more than babies.

Timothy Taylor, reader in archeology at Bradford University, reviewed evidence from dozens of archeological finds and scientific studies for his research.

“The widespread lay belief that sex in the past was predominantly heterosexual and reproductive can be challenged,” said Taylor.

He argues that monogamy only became established as hunter-gatherer societies took up agriculture and settled in houses, allowing the social roles of men and women to become more fixed.

Experts believe research such as Taylor’s may help overturn false assumptions that sex for the purposes of reproduction is the form closest to nature.

Petra Boynton, a relationship counsellor and health lecturer at University College, London, found the study “refreshing”.

“So much evolutionary theory promotes the idea that humans, particularly women, are preprogrammed for monogamy, but that is often simply overlaying science on a preexisting view of society,” she said.

Taylor, whose research is published by Haworth Press in the Handbook of the Evolution of Human Sexuality, says the human attitude to sex arose from the complex interaction of physical and mental development. By comparison with modern humans, who appeared about 300,000-100,000 years ago, apes have tiny male genitals, no female breasts and are hairy. But they are easily able to distinguish the sexes because males can weigh up to three times as much as females.

Humans, by contrast, are far less easy to distinguish by size. Taylor says that prominent male genitals and female breasts developed to aid recognition of the opposite sex in creatures of similar size and shape. The similarity in size, combined with the ease of face-to-face sex, allowed intercourse to become a vital part of social interaction, communication and inventiveness.