Labor Pains and Helpless Infants: Eve or Evolution? (Part 1)
Anthropologists often use an idea called the "obstetrical dilemma" to explain why humans have helpless infants, but there is mounting evidence that this explanation is insufficient.
Labor Pains and Helpless Infants: Eve or Evolution? (Part 1)
Sex
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Skeleton Sex Pots
The Moche, one of the world’s great ancient civilizations, occupied the northern coast of Peru from roughly A.D. 100 to A.D. 800. They produced beautiful ceramic vessels; hundreds of thousands are in museums worldwide. A unique subset is composed of “erotic” pottery, or “sex pots.” Inelegantly—albeit appropriately—named, Moche sex pots depict human figures engaged in a wide range of sex acts involving mouths, hands, nipples, genitals, anuses, and …
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Surprise! Semen Is Required
Reproduction seems so obvious to us now. Even if we don’t know the details, we know about the birds and the bees. For humans and an overwhelming number of other species, both female and male contribute stuff that, together, transmogrifies into babies. These days we take our understanding of the baby-making process so much for granted that it’s amusing to look back at the intellectual struggles of early …
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When Sperm Compete, Nature’s Call Leads to Bigger … Testicles
[In humans, the testes] are from an inch and a half to two inches long, about an inch and a quarter from the anterior to the posterior border, and nearly an inch from side to side. The weight of each varies from three-quarters of an ounce to an ounce, and the left is often a little the larger of the two. —Quain’s Elements of Anatomy, 1867 Success in …
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The Half of the World That Doesn’t Make Out
Surprisingly few societies have romantic kissing in their repertoire.