More Than One Way To Skin A Cat

A shakeup in scholarly thought suggests that the oldest profession is not the oldest profession. Paleontologists now believe that the earliest men were at least one-third larger than the earliest women, making availability guaranteed and the issue of consent moot. So, if selling sexual favors is not the oldest profession, what is? We have to look to our beginnings as Cafferty John did in his Garden of Eden lyrics in which Eve says to Adam, “Wait a minute, big boy, not so fast.”

In eons with no signposts – and if you go back far enough, no speech – survival depended on learning from those who went before you. Something like my older dog, Psyche, experienced at 14, teaching my younger dog Ulysses, 2, that the best place to hide a marrow bone is to bury it in the sofa between the cushion and the frame. Prehistoric survival in a world of ferocious beasts that snatched away your young, earthquakes that split open the ground beneath your feet, and parching drought depended on learning how to coordinate a hunt, what crevasse to avoid, which berries were poisonous and where there was water.

Read the entire article in the February 2011 issue