The Good Old Days

or
Two Theories of Evolution:
why Males Snuggle and Sleep
After Sex
While Women Rise up

followed by a query

by Rick Wise

Theory One

Long ago when Homo sapiens sapiens were just emerging, they lived in a small band, a close and happy group.  One of the great pleasures of their lives was that after coupling the male rose and thumped his chest and pranced around the tribe showing off his wet member.  All the other males and females laughed and clapped their hands and stamped their feet, which encouraged the male to prance and dance higher and wilder than ever.  These Homo sapiens sapiens pronounced their days good.

One day, one of the sons of such a prancing and dancing father found that upon maturity and his first sexual encounters with females, he promptly fell into a sort of snugly daze which soon lulled him to sleep.  This new behavior rather surprised his female companions, but they put up with it and to their delight discovered that they had many babies.  By contrast, the chest-thumpers had the usual few.

In the late twentieth century we have learned that after intercourse the gonads need a short rest to restore energy.  The chest-thumpers of those long-ago days and dancing nights ignored that need, and in time their entire kind died out, replaced by the snugglers and sleepers who in their cozy way took over the world.

Theory Two

The second theory is the obverse.  It holds that long, long ago males and females were all snugglers and sleepers after coupling.  Each time they awoke, they pronounced their days good.  One day, one of the daughters of a snuggling and sleeping female discovered, when she matured and had her first coupling, that unlike her sisters and mothers and grandmothers, once she had enjoyed her mating she liked to promptly get up.  This trait was passed on to her daughters, and to her daughters' daughters.  Some of these descendants discovered that what they wanted to do as they rose was to find another male for further coupling, and these daughters had many children because they were not plagued, as were so many of their sisters, with problems of their partners' low sperm-count or other incompatibilities that held down the population of her ancestors.  Others of these descendants discovered that upon rising, they leapt forward to hunt or gather fruit.  Yet others invented agriculture.

So you can see that it was indeed these new, vigorous females who made their tribe prosper and expand, and in time the sleepy females perished, while the vigorous ones flourished and brought great happiness to their snuggling, dozing mates.

Combining Theories One and Two

These two theories are not mutually exclusive.  Perhaps what kept that first band of Homo sapiens sapiens restricted to one miniscule spot on our spinning globe was a simple, fundamental error.  After coupling the males rose and the females dozed, and though they pronounced their days good, the band remained savagely cornered, low in birth rate, poorly tooled, woefully dependent upon vague currents of weather and marauding beasts.  But when through an amazing evolutionary changes males and females reversed roles, Homo sapiens sapiens multiplied and prospered.

The Query

Since any of these theories may be true, we wonder if it is an unconscious, atavistic sexual longing that induces pockets of our modern society to hunger for, "the good old days."