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And, second, we were designed, above all else, to be adaptable. We were designed to have all sorts of alternative strategies to achieve our ends. Even today, existing hunter-gatherer societies show enormous ecological and social variation, and they are probably an unrepresentative sample, because they mostly occupy deserts and forests, which were not mankind’s primary habitat. Even in the time of Homo erectus, let alone more modern men, there may have been specialized fishing, shore-dwelling, hunting, or plant-gathering cultures. Some of these may well have afforded opportunities for wealth accumulation and polygamy. In recent memory, there was a pre-agricultural culture, among the salmon-fishing Indians of the Pacific north-west of America, that was highly polygamous. If the local hunter-gathering economy favoured it, men were capable of being polygamous and women were capable of joining harems over the protests of the preceding co-wives. If not, then men were capable of being good fathers and women jealous monopolizers. Mankind, in other words, has many potential mating systems, one for each circumstance.28

This is supported by the fact that larger, more intelligent and more social animals are generally more flexible in their mating systems than smaller, stupider or more solitary ones. Chimpanzees go from small feeding bands to big groups depending on the nature of the food supply. Turkeys do the same. Coyotes hunt in packs when their food is deer, but hunt alone when their food is mice. These food-induced social patterns themselves induce slightly different mating patterns.

Money and Sex

But if humanity is a flexible species, then the EEA is in a sense still with us. Where people in twentieth-century societies act adaptively, or where power raises reproductive success, it could be because adaptations shaped in the EEA (wherever and whenever that was) are still working. The technological problems of suburban life may be a million miles from those of the Pleistocene savannah, but the human ones are not. We are still consumed by gossip about people we know or have heard about. Men are still obsessed with power-seeking and building or dominating male–male coalitions. Human institutions cannot be understood without understanding their internal politics. Modern monogamy may be just one of the many tricks in our mating-system repertoire, like harem polygamy in ancient China, or gerontocratic polygamy in some modern Australian Aboriginals, where men wait years to marry and then in their dotage enjoy huge harems.

If so, then the ‘sex drive’ that we all acknowledge within us, may be much more specific than we realize. Given the fact that men can always increase their reproductive success by philandering, whereas women cannot, we should suspect that men are apt to be behaviourally designed to take advantage of opportunities for polygamy, and that some of the things they do have that end in mind.

There is broad agreement among evolutionary biologists that most of our ancestors lived in a condition of only occasional polygamy during the Pleistocene era (the two million years of modern mankind’s existence before agriculture). Societies that hunt and gather today are not much different from modern western society. Most men are monogamous, many are adulterous and a few manage to be polygamous, sharing perhaps up to five wives in extreme cases. Among the Aka pygmies of the Central African Republic, who hunt for food in the forest using nets, fifteen per cent of men have more than one wife, a pattern typical of foraging societies.29

One of the reasons hunting and gathering cannot support much polygamy is that luck, more than skill, plays a large part in hunting success. Even the best hunter would often return empty handed and would be reliant on his fellow men to share what they had killed. This equitable sharing of hunted food is characteristic of people (in most other social hunting species, there is a free-for-all) and is the clearest example of a habit of ‘reciprocal altruism’ on which the whole of society sometimes appears