Let me tell you a story. It's about men and women and what happened in history when women invented agriculture and we started having big towns and cities and lots of arable land about 10,000 years ago and could sustain larger populations. It turns out that at the time there was a mass extinction of Y-chromosome diversity. Attached is a chart bottlel.jpg across all human cultures showing this precipitous collapse - Y on the left and mitochondrial for comparison on the right.
We know the Y-chromosome goes only down the male line, while the mitochondrial DNA from the endosymbiont bacteria that gives us all our respiration energy go only down the female line from mother to sons and daughters. When we try to look for the mitochondrial Eve, we generally find she is around twice as old as the Y-chromosome Adam - about 160,000 years as opposed to 70,000. This is because men don't get pregnant and so have to try to get as many women pregnant as possible to reproduce themselves, so like all mammals, "hogamus higamus men are polygamous". Men just love the scent of a woman and particularly the scent of a new different exotic nubile woman.
The difference in ages of Adam and Eve reflects the fact that, on average, the men that have successfully reproduced have had an average of two female partners bearing their children, while half the men have sired no children at all. This isn't wrong and it doesn't reflect something insensitive about men or male sexual infidelity or anything else invented by Christian monogamous culture.
Now we come to the punch line. We believe women invented agriculture as an extension of gathering, but when this happened, despite the planter Queens and neolithic Goddesses, human Y-chromosome diversity fell precipitously almost tenfold. The reason? The polygyny ratio leaped from 2:1 to 17:1 - the very few men who successfully reproduced had on average 17 female reproductive partners and the rest none.
This doesn't mean that "higamus hogamus women are monogamous" either, because we know that, like all species, socially monogamous or otherwise, females outsire as a regular and necessary strategy to avoid putting all their eggs into one possibly inferior genetic basket, so a rough 10% of children are not the offspring of their apparent father. The key here however is that women like sexual privacy and the trappings of social monogamy both as a resource for parenting to keep men as faithful as possible and more insidiously so the men don't know who they are doing it with on the sly.
The notion of serial monogamy, which many people in the West have held so dear, on the belief that it provides at least a fleeting experience of one-on-one commitment is just a Christian disguise for male polygyny in a repressed distorted form, where deceit and divorce perpetrate what should be a healthy and natural process.
When Jesus said of Adam and Eve "What God has joined together let no man cast asunder", he was criticizing divorce and men putting away their wives - serial monogamy, not advocating monogamy. We know in Jewish folklore that Lilith preceded Eve, but she flew up into the air when Adam objected to making love topsy-turvy, so rather than blaming Eve as the "Devil's gateway", we should be restoring Lilith to her primal place in the reproductive panoply.
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