Ask A Genius 454 – The Future of Cultures (7)
November 25, 2018
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: It would be a change of over 6,000 years. Much of the family unit was constructed within the framework of a holy text.
Rick Rosner: It was probably around a bit before that. You hear speculation. I have heard the theory that prehistoric human culture was matriarchal.
Jacobsen: It might have been patriarchal but matrilineal.
Rosner: I read texts speculating or postulating that women were the leaders. That they gave out the sex and had multiple male partners. They were in charge of things. That is not a traditional family structure. But at some point, the most convenient structure was pair bonding.
It was two different-sex couples or people raising kids.
Jacobsen: I mean the last 6,000 years of heterosexual pair-bonding with a framework provided by a holy text and so a literate culture guiding it.
Rosner: The religious texts reinforced it first, or, maybe, the pair bonding was already pretty solidly in place, and then the reinforcement came later.
Jacobsen: Regardless of what happened before, if we take a holy text, it is, at least, a change in 2,000 to 6,000 years of human history.
Rosner: Without a doubt, it has gone on for 6 millennia and probably before that with different levels of formality or civilizational support. You always had a minimum biological support.
To get someone pregnant, you need, at least, a momentary pairing up, enough to have sex at least. At some point, I have heard arguments about the birth of romance. The idea of love as fairly recent within the past 2,000-3,000 years.
The idea that you should be emotionally bonded. That emotional bond should be the number one thing in the relationship, as opposed to the economic bonds, which may be more recent than the heterosexual pairing itself.
Love as the glue is a recent idea.
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Authors[1]
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Footnotes
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Rick Rosner 