Grandchildren and breeding

[erudito]

(Yes, another post on gay stuff, but I am nutting through things and this LJ is called Thinking Out Aloud. So, some thoughts on the very long run social history of attitudes to homosexuality partly provoked by thinking further about a question fizzyland raised on an earlier post. Note that I am talking about very general tendencies. The complexity of

Comments

[korgmeister]

An interesting and somewhat compelling argument, but I have one little niggle, namely:

Hunter-gatherer societies and (post) industrial societies also have three other things in common. Higher levels of knowledge about the natural world...

My classics teacher back in high school posited that people in hunter-gatherer societies were unaware of the link between sex and pregnancy, since a woman doesn't become obviously pregnant until about 4-5 months after sex.

Hence the tendency for such societies to be matriarchal, as women were considered to have a magical power to create life.

However, that lag is much shorter for farm animals, so men in agricultural socities were able to figure out their role in the reproductive process.

As such, it is possible that you overstate the amount of knowledge that hunter-gatherer socities had about sex. Of course, it is also possible that my classics teacher underestimated it (incidentally, his specialty was ancient Greece).

Not really

[erudito]

Actually, my argument doesn't rest on hunter-gatherers understanding sexual reproduction at all. Merely that they observe that sex is not always between males and females as well as other forms of sexual diversity in nature.

Indeed, if the reproductive role of sex is not understood at all, then the connective role is completely salient, at least in their understanding of matters.

I also used the expression They evolve mechanisms to ensure this deliberately as whether the arrangements were deliberately created or not is not important to the argument.

Having said that, I am a touch sceptical that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were quite that clueless about the connection between sex and babies. The matrilineal (if don't know)/patrilineal (if do know) thing seems a bit too pat to me. It strikes me as much more likely to be about something practical--like whether the menfolk are away a lot or not.