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A far clearer insight into whatever part orgasmic pleasure played in the lives of prehistoric peoples can be gleaned by basing our imaginative reconstruction of ancient sex lives on the habits of primitive peoples that have survived more or less intact from the Stone Age. The theory of the Blombos Cave lipstick, for example, was based by its anthropologist authors on similar body-painting sexual rituals they identified in some surviving traditional societies.

Likely as it is to provide the soundest evidence available to us of sex as it was in the real-life Garden of Eden, the study of ancient, preliterate tribes has not always endeared modern researchers to their contemporary society. Alfred Russel Wallace, the Victorian follower of Darwin studied the peoples of the Amazon, who were universally derided at the time as
‘savages'. Wallace thoroughly discomfited Victorian society, already traumatised by the assertion of Darwinites that humans were descended from monkeys, by further noting that there was less distance than you might think between Amazon Basin ‘savages' and us.

The obsession with orgasm and its accoutrements that is evident from a brief trawl around contemporary societies, both Western and Eastern, would not be unfamiliar to any visitor from a preliterate society – and, by extrapolation, would be equally recognisable to a prehistoric time traveller. He might also recognise the confusion, misinformation and mystification that continue to surround sexual issues in so many societies, our own included. If in subsequent chapters a sense of congratulating our own culture for making sexual knowledge so universal becomes evident, it is only partially deserved; the extent of enlightenment over sexual issues in modern societies is all too easy to exaggerate.

A Pacific island tribe, for instance, the Trobrianders, investigated by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski for his 1929 book
The Sexual Life of Savages of North-West Melanesia
, have no word for father. This follows from their having no concept of paternity – even though they fully understand the sexual reproduction of animals. They laughed at Western missionaries who urged them to introduce Christian marriage as a way of legitimising the notion of fatherhood. To Trobrianders of the time, it seemed (unless, and it is far from impossible, they were pulling Malinowski's leg) sex existed solely as a source of pleasure.

To this day, many Australian aborigines, too, tend to dissociate sexual intercourse from childbirth. When the facts of life as we know them were explained to a woman of one aboriginal tribe, anthropological folklore has it, she was derisive about such nonsense, responding with scorn, ‘Him nothing.' As late as the 1960s, the Tully River people of North Queensland believed that a woman became pregnant because she had been sitting over a fire on which she had roasted a particular species
of black bream given to her by the prospective father. Another Australian tribe avowed that women conceived by eating human flesh. Not far away in Papua New Guinea, members of the Hua people are still said to contend that a man can become pregnant, but will die in childbirth. (This has recently been deconstructed as a probable description of a malnutrition disease, kwashiorkor, one symptom of which is a grossly distended stomach.) And the Bellonese of the Solomon Islands believed, until the influence of missionaries persuaded them otherwise, that the sole function of sex was pleasure, and that babies were implanted in women by ancestral gods.

Even without any clear notion of how human reproduction works, though, the idea still seems to have taken root in a wide variety of primitive societies many thousands of miles apart that the sperm produced by orgasm is a very special and powerful substance. If the Sambia of New Guinea, studied in the 1970s by the anthropologist Gilbert Herdt, are anything to go by, our ancestors may have been quite obsessed with semen. These transient jungle farmers believe sperm is the most important element in the production of children – and that it is also precious and in very short supply. They believe that a boy is born with an internal organ that will eventually produce both semen and growth, but it must be supplied with semen from older men before it can do so. To make the most of this dwindling resource, they harness an unusual mix of homosexual and heterosexual practice designed to produce brave, strong men who are capable of having babies with women.

The key act by which the male Sambian's supply of strong sperm is ensured, is regular male-on-male fellatio. A set of rules determines who the semen donor will be (the fellator's sister's husband is desirable; the father is not acceptable). Boys from about the age of ten try to accept semen on a daily basis by performing fellatio on a proper donor. After six to eight years as an acceptor, a boy becomes a donor.

‘Among the New Guinea Sambia,' Herdt observed, ‘an aberrant bachelor is one who does not offer his penis to be sucked
by pre-pubescent boys.' An older teenager, he explained, arranges a meeting with a younger boy at a quiet jungle rendezvous, puts his penis in the mouth of the younger male and is brought to orgasm. The crucial part of this custom is that the younger boys swallow the semen produced. The older, fellated boy demonstrates his superior status by standing during this procedure, while the fellator represents his inferiority by kneeling in front of him. Curiously, however, the fellated professes to derive little sexual pleasure from this otherwise fairly standard homoerotic duet. For the convention is that the younger fellator is the prime beneficiary of the ritual, acquiring as he ingests his peer's precious emission valuable, high-potency fuel for his future seminal needs. The fellat
ed
, furthermore, donates his sperm at a certain risk to himself, for even strong, mature males in Sambian philosophy can find their semen depleted if they are over-generous with it.

The Sambian sperm rite seems like an institutionalisation of homosexuality, and adolescent and adult males in this society turn out commonly to be stimulated erotically by images of and fantasies involving younger males' mouths. Not surprisingly, young Sambian fellators do not report receiving sexual pleasure from performing their duty; yet as they approach puberty, some of them begin to find it stimulating and get erections while doing it. (Sadly, there is little they can do about these erections since masturbation is taboo because of the waste of semen; the Sambians consider spillage caused by involuntary orgasms in the form of wet dreams to be the result of bad spirits coming and seducing them while asleep.)

However, pornographic websites originating both in the West and Asia discuss what they call an oral or mouth orgasm as something women can enjoy with considerable intensity while fellating. Some women on the more literate of these sites describe it as similar to ‘an electric current' beginning in the mouth and taking over the rest of the body. A dissenting sexological voice on one fairly standard, non-pornographic sex
advice site which advocates the mouth orgasm (
www.afterglow.com
) argues that it is the result of women unconsciously compressing their thighs or rubbing their legs together while fellating, thus stimulating the clitoris and inducing a conventional climax. A similar mechanism could well be operating for young male Sambian fellators.

Despite such overtly homosexual initiation traditions, almost all Sambian men marry heterosexually – with the slight twist that their early sex life involves exclusively oral sex, the husband now being fellated by his wife, who swallows his semen in the belief that this will enhance her sexual maturity and, in particular, her milk flow when she is lactating after childbirth.

No wonder, then, given the survival of such rituals amongst a preliterate population, that the renowned Duke University anthropologist Raoul Weston La Barre, who studied mainly Native American and South American peoples, concluded that to our ancestors, sperm, bone marrow and brain matter were one unified life-substance – a conviction that he held went back to the Neanderthals a quarter of a million years ago.

Yet what we now know to be misconceptions about the finer details of human reproduction continue to mislead even peoples who acknowledge the concept of fatherhood. Elders of the (until recent years) headhunting Sema people in Nagaland, in north-eastern India, maintain that pregnancy is the cumulative effect of having sex many times. The Sambians, again, similarly hold that babies are formed in the womb by regular doses of semen from a male.

And more than twenty other tribal societies from Paraguay to Tanzania studied by a Pennsylvania State University anthropologist, Stephen Beckerman, believe a child can, and ideally ought to, have more than one father. Until the middle of the last century, Canela women, in Amazonian Brazil, had sex consecutively with up to forty men in festive rituals designed both to ensure conception and to blur paternity.

Yet any uncomfortable image of a misogynistic ‘gang-bang'
mentality in this culture can safely be dismissed; men were very much under the thumb of women in Canela society. When they wanted to have a child, they would choose their favourite five or so lovers to help their husband with the job of fertilisation. Every bit of semen was believed to contribute to the baby, and mothers-to-be would select for a variety of desirable traits among her contributing lovers, from sexual skills to good looks to a good singing voice. The multi-fathering tradition among the Canela was only finally extirpated by missionaries, who convinced them that it was morally wrong by such propagandistic methods as translating the Bible into the Canelan language – and by traders in such items as pots and pans, who taught them the entirely alien concept of personal property.

Married women of the Barí tribe in Columbia and Venezuela who are bearing a child still proudly announce a list of ‘fathers'. Elderly Barí women will reportedly chuckle and nudge one other as they recall their lifetime's roll-call of lovers. Among the Curripaco people in the same area, conception is regarded as a process that requires a great deal of co-operative work by many men. But they still put on what Beckerman's collaborator, Dr Paul Valentine of the University of East London, South Africa, describes as ‘a smug look' when they describe this process – an indication that multi-father ‘conception' represents the ultimate coincidence of work and pleasure.

Multi-fatherhood is a puzzling belief; but curiously, Charles Darwin himself would not have disagreed with it. It was still not understood as late as the nineteenth century that fertilisation was brought about by a single sperm acting in one instant. Though the question remains as to whether the supposedly unsophisticated people who express such ideas to anthropologists are in fact having a joke at the researchers' expense, testing the extent of Western credulity, being diplomatic about sensitive or embarrassing matters – or being discreet about the delights of having many orgasms a day, something that, for all they know, ‘refined' Westerners do not, or cannot, enjoy.

It can hardly be insignificant that it was not until decades after the bulk of pioneering anthropological work was done in Papua and New Guinea that Herdt felt free to investigate the Sambians' homosexual practices. Even in academic research in the mid- to late-twentieth century, it was not considered decent in Western society to probe such a matter. The Sheffield University zoologist Tim Birkhead, author of a 2000 book on the central evolutionary topic of sperm competition, makes the same point in his preface – that the scientific study of reproductive matters is mostly recent because, for a long time, it was not considered respectable.

Another reason for isolated peoples to cherish the idea of multi-fatherhood – beyond the fact that it allows everyone to enjoy a great deal of sex – is that the tradition has sensible and stabilising economic and social benefits. Barí children with more than one father are more likely to survive into adulthood, with gifts of food from several sources in times of scarcity. Barí males also tend to die young from malaria and tuberculosis. ‘You know that if you die, there's some other man who has a residual obligation to care for at least one of your children,' explains Beckerman. ‘So looking the other way or even giving your blessing when your wife takes a lover is the only insurance you can buy.'

We are still some distance away, too, from being free from our own curious tribal customs. When the Tully River aborigines speak of women becoming pregnant by the action of barbecuing fish, they are not stating anything more outlandish than a Western Catholic would when expressing the belief that Christ was born to a virgin. As one modern anthropologist has commented: ‘If we believe in the Virgin Birth, we are devout; if others do, they are idiots.'

Educated atheists in the modern world can also find themselves uncertain about whether certain sexual behaviour is taboo or not. According to a Glasgow midwife interviewed by the author some middle-class Western mothers, for example, follow the practice (well known in the South Pacific, as we
will see) of altruistically masturbating or fellating very young baby boys in the hope of developing and enhancing their infants' sexual feelings – or even of sending them to sleep. But they carry out this ancient folk practice somewhat guiltily -aware
inter alia
that for a father to do the same to an infant girl would be sufficient to guarantee him a lengthy jail sentence.

Alongside confirmation that we are still a long way from being comfortable with our sexuality, there is parallel evidence, too, of creditable sexual refinement among some primitive peoples, suggesting that any idea we may cherish of a brutal, male-centred ‘caveman' form of sex among our distant ancestors is misleading. Less developed societies with a tradition of encouraging males to delay their orgasm while affectionately stimulating the female are as well documented as those cultures that have less sexually democratic traditions.

Some indications of the existence of good prehistoric sex may be gleaned, for instance, from anthropological studies of the !Kung bushmen of the Kalahari and of the Muria, an aboriginal people on the plains of central India. These peoples, although separated by huge distances, are remarkably similar in their sexual beliefs and practices – and therefore can plausibly be relied upon to retain echoes in their sexual culture of humans as they were at the dawn of mankind.