Autoplectic wrote:
>
> As we don't have
> videos of our ancestors sexual proclivities we can only come up with
> stories..........Lord I wish we could have the videos; I think we'd be
> humbled beyond belief.
There must have been a period (perhaps of great duration) subsequent to the appearance of _us_, i.e. biologically modern humans, and precedent to the invention of language. _That_ would be the interesting period! Is it possible to raise practice to the level of conscious theory without language? Is it possible to have "sex" in our sense without 'symboling' it? Anthropologists & evolutionary biologists have (I think) pushed the emergence of modern humans back before 100,000 b.p., but there is little or no evidence of symbolic power before about 40,000 b.p.
Human evolution would have substantially ceased 100,000 +/- years ago, and the species would have remained pretty stable since then. Hence when we are discussing the "darwinian fitness" of any particular human feature we are discussing something that was fully formed 100,000 years ago. And most human features, presumably, would have been present in preceding species for another 100k or more.
I notice in the book section of this week's Science News that a book on evo-devo at least somewhat intelligible to non-biologists has been published. That should be interesting.
Carrol