The Prehistory of Sex: Four Million Years of Human Sexual Culture Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Archaeology is ultimately an act of the imagination and Prof. Taylor does a brave job in trying to reconstruct sexual behaviors that have had only the most indirect effects on the archaeological record. Many of his hypotheses are stimulating; a few may even be correct. He is adept at pointing out prejudices and assumptions that are so ingrained that we do not even realize we are making them. He certainly changed my opinion on a number of issues. His reinterpretation of passages in classical history is also most helpful. The topic is extremely exciting and underresearched in an accessible form. However, perhaps because he didn't really identify his intended audience or because of the limited amount of material strictly relevant to his subject, he has padded the book with a rather routine run through human palaeontology and spends a lot of time demolishing straw men in the field like the acquatic ape hypothesis. I often wished he had spent more time dealing (even speculatively) with sex. In several places I was surprised that he avoided or abbreviated discussions when I knew there was more material to present. The result is scattershot and repetitious and the narrative structure falls apart at the end just when the amount of source material increases. I felt genuinely disappointed that he wouldn't follow his speculations through. More a draft or outline for a book than a finished work.
Prof. Taylor's nonjudgemental pleas for a tolerant approach to sexual behavior both in practice and in academic study and his mapping of the broad range of sexual behavior in primates are admirable. In this context the book should be required reading for all psychologists and psychiatrists (I ordered quite a few copies this year for all the therapists I know).
His list of sources is wide and furnished me with a great deal of interesting reading, though some evaluation of the reliability of the works he cites would be extremely valuable since some of the works are scholarly and some fringe. Additionally, a great deal of his source material consists of popular presentations rather than primary scholarly sources.
All in all a near miss, but still a worthy effort and well worth reading.

Click Here to see more reviews about: The Prehistory of Sex: Four Million Years of Human Sexual Culture

Get 15% OFF