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Lack of Penis Bone In Humans Linked To Monogamous Relationships and Quick Sex, Study Says (theguardian.com)
The penis bone can be as long as a finger in a monkey and two feet long in a walrus, but the human male has lost it completely. According to a new report published in Proceedings of the Royal Society, the lack of a penis bone in human males may be a consequence of monogamy and quick sex. The Guardian reports: Known as the baculum to scientists with an interest, the penis bone is a marvel of evolution. It pops up in mammals and primates around the world, but varies so much in terms of length and whether it is present at all, that it is described as the most diverse bone ever to exist. Prompted by the extraordinary differences in penis bone length found in the animal kingdom, scientists set out to reconstruct the evolutionary story of the baculum, by tracing its appearance in mammals and primates throughout history. They found that the penis bone evolved in mammals more than 95 million years ago and was present in the first primates that emerged about 50 million years ago. From that moment on, the baculum became larger in some animals and smaller in others. Kit Opie who ran the study with Matilda Brindle at University College London, said that penis bone length was longer in males that engaged in what he called "prolonged intromission." In plain English, that means that the act of penetration lasts for more than three minutes, a strategy that helps the male impregnate the female while keeping her away from competing males. The penis bone, which attaches at the tip of the penis rather than the base, provides structural support for male animals that engage in prolonged intromission. Humans may have lost their penis bones when monogamy emerged as the dominant reproductive strategy during the time of Homo erectus about 1.9 million years ago, the scientists believe. In monogamous relationships, the male does not need to spend a long time penetrating the female, because she is not likely to be leapt upon by other amorous males. That, at least, is the theory.
The hypothesis doesn't really make sense. Chimpanzees do not practice monogamy, yet sex between chimps lasts a few seconds. In a pack or herd animal, the difference between spending a few seconds and spending a few minutes penetrating a female makes a negligible difference to that female's general availability: the male is still not going to be inside her for hours of the day. Oh, and chimpanzees do have a baculum, so the correlation is simply not there between longer intercourse and existence of a baculum.
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> once you own a plot of land and invested lots of work into it, you pretty much want to limit access to it (and its production),
Aaah the gold old flaws of using projection and 'common sense' to try and know things. There is documented proof that this is not true. It's not even obscure science - it's a book from that era that is still found in every hotel room in America !
*If a man walks over your field he is permitted to leave with all the food he can carry in his stomach.
*The final harvest of the season may not be gathered, it must be left in the field for the widows and the orphans.
* When you gather the harvest from your fields, do not gather from the edges of your fields. Do not gather the *gleanings of your harvest.
* Do not gather *grapes from your *vineyard a second time. Do not pick up the *grapes that fell (to the ground). Leave them for poor people (to gather) and for foreigners (to gather). I am the *LORD (who is) your God.
Those are from the book of Leviticus, part of the mosaic code - one of the oldest set of societal laws of which we have a record. This is thousands of years*after* the invention of agriculture and, and this is important, still several thousand BEFORE the invention of monogamy (which was not invented until the 3rd century AD and even after that remained limited to only one religion for several more centuries).
There is no evidence that monogamy and agriculture is in any way link, and all the evidence we do have suggests that your idea of restricting access to the results of agriculture was utterly rejected (and indeed made illegal) in ancient societies.
You can think of those verses as the Biblical era version of the modern welfare state.
This is also not unique to the Judeo-Christian history - I merely used that because it's well-known but you found similar rules and setups in the Aztec and Inca societies as well. Indeed, everywherre we have written records or other evidence to learn from - we find that agriculture was always a collective process which involved large sections of society and was shared quite freely within that society. The Inca version for example had no concept of money - they traded labour. If I wanted some of your pumpkins you would freely give them to me, and I would promise you a favour at some future date - perhaps helping you plow the field for your next batch of pumpkins.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I think it's a different selector.
Think about the biggest 'disadvantage' of having a squishy penis: Men under stress don't get a hard-on and thus can't reproduce. This could've emphasized and benefited populations with lesser stress and more room to develop higher skillsets to surpass a potential human branch with real boner.
It could also be for 'economic' reasons. Humans are built and optimised towards long-distance running. No other animal can sweat like we do. A bushman (or any other non-obese halfway trained human) can run an antelope to 'death by bodyheat and/or exhaustion'. That is a pretty awesome raw survival skill innate to homo sapiens. I suspect lugging a bone penis dangling between your awesome running legs might actually be quite cumbersome - since it's mostly men doing the running and the ladies nourishing big-headed babies (that need special attendance and culture as extended brain + serious actual brain nutrition) after laboriously squeezing them out of a notably narrow birth canal.
Also we only need our penis once in a while. Having a lightweight retractable one is generally quite practical from an evolutionary perspective. Also I suspect the squishiness prevents injuries and infections better than a true boner would. Wales float. They don't have to worry about their boner bumping and scraping on the ground or on rocks.
Bottom line:
You needn't go to far to get a handle on what's up with the squishy penis - the answer is probably quite simple.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
If logic had anything to do with it, the penis bone would not have disappeared from homo erectus.