Human Nature isn't what you've been taught

Many women who have lived in close proximity with other women report that gradually, menstrual cycles coincide and even regularize.  Modern science took notice when, in 1971, Martha McClintock, a young graduate student, published an article called “Menstrual Synchrony and Suppression” in the science journal Nature. Her study population was the women in her dormitory. Her findings stated that over time, women who lived together tended to cycle together. One might conclude from this, that women living together is a requirement for healthy menstruation.

Obviously, to make monthly fertility festivals a success, all ovulating females in the world needed to be fertile at the same time of the month. This was accomplished by the mechanism of pheromones given off by the dominant, most heat-producing female in each clan.

In one word—seeds. Grass seeds, so many of them, in fact, that they were no longer portable. Ten thousand years ago, give or take a millennium or two, nomadic forager-hunters who practiced rudimentary slash-and-burn agriculture became so adept at growing cereals and legumes that they chose to become sedentary farmers rather than leave so much food behind for the birds and rodents. Cereals and legumes, unlike most other food items, are encased in hard shells. They can be stored in abundance for long periods of time, like money in a bank. And like a savings account, they served as insurance against famines caused by droughts and other natural disasters.

Several clans came together to form the first farming villages, and probably continued for a while with their full moon festivals. Gradually, the clans most successful at cereal farming stopped sharing their wealth and became the dominant groups. They could pay others with bread and beer to do their bidding, and thus was born hierarchical class society.

Worship of the moon gave way to worship of the sun, the farmers’ friend. Infected with greed, the big chiefs demanded more and more wealth from a grumbling workforce. As explained in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State by Frederick Engels, the toiling masses had to be divided and turned against themselves, a common feature of all class societies. The first and easiest division was right down the middle—men versus women. The bigger and more potentially dangerous men were bought off, that is to say, received more privileges than the women.

The accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few men led to the invention of “fatherhood,” and a movement away from the more traditional leadership role of the mothers and brothers as outlined in Women’s Evolution, by Evelyn Reed and The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler.  The chiefs needed biological sons to pass on their wealth, and so they claimed exclusive sexual access to specific women who could serve as baby incubators and nursemaids. The rest of society followed suit.

Finally, the patriarchal ownership of women and children meant certain death for our matrilineal, matrilocal clans and their monthly fertility festivals, and the beginning of polygamy, pair bonding, greed, war, jealousy, rape, incest, and every other calamity that modern, conventional society labels as “human nature.”