The incest taboo and the origin of the human species

The interest that anthropologists have shown in the incest taboo has been described as bordering on obsession. It used to be believed that the incest taboo is a universal taboo. However, some anthropologists have successfully contested this view, pointing out that what seems universal in human societies is the avoidance of sexual relations between very closely related individuals. It has been shown that in many cultures where the incest taboo is not formally expressed, close relatives still seem to avoid sexual relations, especially when such relatives have lived together for most of their lives. Anthropologists have noted, too, that human societies tend to invest more effort in spelling out incest taboos with respect to what have been called “fictitious kinships.”

The Westermack effect refers to the observed tendency of closely related people, especially closely related people who have lived together continuously, to avoid sexual intercourse. The Westermack effect, however, raises some fundamental questions about heterosexual mating patterns in prehistoric human societies.

The total world population of humans is estimated to have been less than 10,000 some 60,000 years ago, having witnessed a major bottleneck. It is also generally thought that prehistoric human societies were small and scattered with many small societies living, relative to modern standards, in almost total isolation. Social scientists have pointed out that even in the 1800s, most people lived and died in the societies they were born into and rarely traveled. Many modern rural societies are very small, with populations of a few hundred to a few thousand. It is believed that most prehistoric human societies were even smaller and more isolated. This raises the important question: how did the so-called Westermack effect impact human heterosexual behavior in prehistoric societies? If the size of the prehistoric human population was very small and isolated, how did people avoid incest under the supposed compulsion of the Westermack effect?

It is hard to believe that the Westermack effect could have been so compelling as to prevent biologically close relatives from inbreeding in prehistoric times. Even in historical times, we find that populations that are socially, rather than physically isolated, tend to interbreed. Incestuous marriages were common among the upper classes in Ancient Egypt, for example, especially in royal families. These royal families were not physically isolated from the rest of the population, only social class factors isolated them enough to resort to incestuous matings. The same pattern is seen among the royal families of Europe.

It would seem, therefore, that isolated human populations unscrupulously resort to what would be termed incest in the culture of larger interbreeding populations. We have good reason to believe that the categories of heterosexual relationships that we would now call incest must have been relatively common in prehistoric societies.

There is evidence to believe that the incestuous pairing of mother and child had been part of the magical fertility ritual of prehistoric Paleolithic man, and that such incest was common enough to significantly impact human evolution, especially with regard to the juvenilization of the mother. human species. Circumstantial evidence for this conclusion is found not only in the widespread myths of the mother-child incestuous divine couple in the early historical Mediterranean world, but also in a close examination of the heterosexual dualistic philosophy of fertility cults. It would appear that the intensity of inbreeding associated with incestuous cult rites had played an important role in stabilizing the human gene pool.