Elaine Morgan - The Descent of Woman: The Classic Study of Evolution

The Descent of Woman

By the same author

FALLING APART
The Rise and Decline of Urban Civilisation

THE AQUATIC APE
A Theory of Human Evolution

THE SCARS OF EVOLUTION
What Our Bodies Tell us about Human Evolution

THE DESCENT OF THE CHILD
Human Evolution from a New Perspective

THE AQUATIC APE HYPOTHESIS
The Most Credible Theory of Human Evolution

THE DESCENT OF
WOMAN

Elaine Morgan

SOUVENIR PRESS

Copyright 1972, 1985 by Elaine Morgan

The right of Elaine Morgan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 1972 by Souvenir Press Ltd,
43 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3PA

Revised Edition 1985

Reissued in paperback 1989
Reprinted 1992
Reprinted 1996
Reprinted 1998
Reprinted 2001
Reprinted 2006 (twice)
Reprinted 2009

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the Copyright owner.

ISBN 978 0 285 62700 0

Printed and bound in Germany by Bercker, Kevelaer

Contents

The quotations from Sir Alister Hardy and Desmond Morris, appearing on pages 276 and 277, are taken from the script of the documentary film The Water Babies by kind permission of Golden Dolphin Productions Ltd.

According to the Book of Genesis, God first created man. Woman was not only an afterthought, but an amenity. For close on two thousand years this holy scripture was believed to justify her subordination and explain her inferiority; for even as a copy she was not a very good copy. There were differences. She was not one of His best efforts.

There is a line in an old folk song that runs: I called my donkey a horse gone wonky. Throughout most of the literature dealing with the differences between the sexes there runs a subtle underlying assumption that woman is a man gone wonky; that woman is a distorted version of the original blueprint; that they are the norm, and we are the deviation.

It might have been expected that when Darwin came along and wrote an entirely different account of The Descent of Man, this assumption would have been eradicated, for Darwin didnt believe she was an afterthought: he believed her origin was at least contemporaneous with mans. It should have led to some kind of breakthrough in the relationship between the sexes. But it didnt.

Almost at once men set about the congenial and fascinating task of working out an entirely new set of reasons why woman was manifestly inferior and irreversibly subordinate, and they have been happily engaged on this ever since. Instead of theology they use biology, and ethology, and primatology, but they use them to reach the same conclusions.

They are now prepared to debate the most complex problems of economic reform not in terms of the will of God, but in terms of the sexual behaviour patterns of the cichlid fish; so that if a woman claims equal pay or the right to promotion there is usually an authoritative male thinker around to deliver a brief homily on hormones, and point out that what she secretly intends by this, and what will inevitably result, is the psychological castration of the men in her life.

Now, that may look to us like a stock piece of emotional blackmaillike the woman who whimpers that if Sonny doesnt do as she wants him to do, then Mothers going to have one of her nasty turns. It is not really surprising that most women who are concerned to win themselves a new and better status in society tend to sheer away from the whole subject of biology and origins, and hope that we can ignore all that and concentrate on ensuring that in the future things will be different.

I believe this is a mistake. The legend of the jungle heritage and the evolution of man as a hunting carnivore has taken root in mans mind as firmly as Genesis ever did. He may even genuinely believe that equal pay will do something terrible to his gonads. He has built a beautiful theoretical construction, with himself on the top of it, buttressed with a formidable array of scientifically authenticated facts. We cannot dispute the facts. We should not attempt to ignore the facts. What I think we can do is to suggest that the currently accepted interpretation of the facts is not the only possible one.

I have considerable admiration for scientists in general, and evolutionists and ethologists in particular, and though I think they have sometimes gone astray, it has not been purely through prejudice. Partly it is due to sheer semantic accidentthe fact that man is an ambiguous term. It means the species; it also means the male of the species. If you begin to write a book about man or conceive a theory about man you cannot avoid using this word. You cannot avoid using a pronoun as a substitute for the word, and you will use the pronoun he as a simple matter of linguistic convenience. But before you are halfway through the first chapter a mental image of this evolving creature begins to form in your mind. It will be a male image, and he will be the hero of the story: everything and everyone else in the story will relate to him.

All this may sound like a mere linguistic quibble or a piece of feminist petulance. If you stay with me, I hope to convince you its neither. I believe the deeply rooted semantic confusion between man as a male and man as a species has been fed back into and vitiated a great deal of the speculation that goes on about the origins, development, and nature of the human race.

A very high proportion of the thinking on these topics is androcentric (male-centred) in the same way as pre-Copernican thinking was geocentric. Its just as hard for man to break the habit of thinking of himself as central to the species as it was to break the habit of thinking of himself as central to the universe. He sees himself quite unconsciously as the main line of evolution, with a female satellite revolving around him as the moon revolves around the earth. This not only causes him to overlook valuable clues to our ancestry, but sometimes leads him into making statements that are arrant and demonstrable nonsense.

The longer I went oh reading his own books about himself, the more I longed to find a volume that would begin: When the first ancestor of the human race descended from the trees, she had not yet developed the mighty brain that was to distinguish her so sharply from all other species.

Of course, she was no more the first ancestor than he wasbut she was no less the first ancestor, either. She was there all along, contributing half the genes to each succeeding generation. Most of the books forget about her for most of the time. They drag her onstage rather suddenly for the obligatory chapter on Sex and Reproduction, and then say: All right, love, you can go now, while they get on with the real meaty stuff about the Mighty Hunter with his lovely new weapons and his lovely new straight legs racing across the Pleistocene plains. Any modifications in her morphology are taken to be imitations of the Hunters evolution, or else designed solely for his delectation.

Evolutionary thinking has been making great strides lately. Archaeologists, ethologists, paleontologists, geologists, chemists, biologists and physicists, are closing in from all points of the compass on the central area of mystery that remains. For despite the frequent triumph dances of researchers coming up with another jawbone or another statistic, some part of the miracle is still unaccounted for. Most of their books include some such phrase as: the early stages of mans evolutionary progress remain a total mystery. Man is an accident, the culmination of a series of highly improbable coincidences. Man is a product of circumstances special to the point of disbelief. They feel there is still something missing, and they dont know what.

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