---
product_id: 13730738
title: "Sex at Dawn"
price: "$1077"
currency: MXN
in_stock: false
reviews_count: 8
url: https://www.desertcart.mx/products/13730738-sex-at-dawn
store_origin: MX
region: Mexico
---

# Sex at Dawn

**Price:** $1077
**Availability:** ❌ Out of Stock

## Quick Answers

- **What is this?** Sex at Dawn
- **How much does it cost?** $1077 with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Currently out of stock
- **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.mx](https://www.desertcart.mx/products/13730738-sex-at-dawn)

## Best For

- Customers looking for quality international products

## Why This Product

- Free international shipping included
- Worldwide delivery with tracking
- 15-day hassle-free returns

## Description

desertcart.com: Sex at Dawn: 9781491512401: Christopher Ryan, Cacilda Jetha, Allyson Johnson, Jonathan Davis, Christopher Ryan: Books

Review: Incredible Facts About Monogamy and our Prehistoric Ancestors - Wish I'd read this book 30 years ago. **SPOILER ALERT** Discussion of the main themes and revelatory points follows. First, the book is extremely well written. Complex subjects are analyzed and explained clearly and concisely, and wonderful examples and metaphors are frequently offered to emphasize points. The authors also display a delightful sense of humor at various points during exploration of topics most people don't feel comfortable discussing openly. The thing that blew me away the most was his discussion of how agriculture changed the world more than any other single event or series of events. With the advent of farming, human societies invented concepts of land ownership and private property. This led to the formation of hierarchical societies, which was necessary to wage war for land and other limited resources--a circumstance that did not exist among hunter-gatherer societies, they say, because no one claimed to own the land or anything else. There simply were no wars for land or resources among prehistoric people; they lived in a world of abundance and would have had no reason to organize to control territory; nor did they store food; they were "immediate return" hunter-gatherers, meaning they consumed what they found or acquired daily. I can't find any flaws with the theories or logic. Another reader did, however, writing: “ ‘If human sexuality developed primarily as a bonding mechanism in interdependent bands where paternity certainty was a nonissue, then the standard narrative of human evolution is toast.’ If the standard narrative of human evolution is, in fact, ‘toast,’ how does their competing worldview better help explain contemporary human sexual relations?” The book answers this question with the detailed discussion of agriculture referenced above, noting the many social, cultural and legal consequences that resulted from land ownership, hoarding of food, farming, and the need to preserve and pass on private property to heirs. The authors further argue that monogamy is simply a cultural construct that arose with agriculture as the logical consequence of abandoning communal living. Once everyone stopped cooperating mutually for each other's survival and farming began, a psychological shift from abundance to scarcity occurred, as resources suddenly became limited, had to be cultivated, hoarded, and sold, rather than gathered communally and distributed equally. Sexuality followed the same path. By imposing monogamy, men could have some reassurance of their paternity, which became increasingly important, because fathers passed property to their children (unlike in communal times), so paternity certainty became vital to ensure that property was passed to true heirs, not another man's children. The whole thing is amazing and forces one to reexamine the merit and utility of monogamy, among various other cultural beliefs. Fun and fantastic read.
Review: Agriculture just RUINED EVERYTHING! - (Hey! Hey, baby, baby, waitwaitwaitwait. Wait. Wait! Baby, don't... don't freak out Okay, okay, I know what this looks like, but I can explain! Quiet, Chad, let me handle this. I can explain! I'm just - please, stop crying and listen - I'm just fulfilling my evolutionary heritage and helping to cement social bonds with... um... the pizza boy, but that'snotthepoint!! That's not the point! Look, before you do anything, y'know, drastic, you just need to read this book....) Humans are really good at figuring things out. As far as we go, we have a real knack for taking things apart and figuring out how they work. Though determined curiosity and perseverance, we know what's happening at the center of the sun, we know how the continents slide across the surface of the earth, how plants turn sunlight into potatoes. We can smash atoms and cure disease and peer back to the moment of creation itself. There is almost nothing that humans cannot comprehend if we put our minds to it. Except ourselves. Don't get me wrong - we have made great strides in philosophy and psychology, and come very far in understanding human origins and our spread across the planet. But there is a fundamental problem that we have when we study ourselves, and that is that we cannot do so objectively. Try as we might, it is impossible to completely put aside our own biases, judgments and backgrounds when we study how humans behave and try to understand why they do what they do. They are still there, if you look for them, and nowhere are they more evident than in the search for the origins of foundations of human sexuality. The standard model, as it's often called, goes something like this: ancient men and women established a pattern of monogamy based on mutual self-interest. The man would keep to one mate in order to be absolutely sure that he was dedicating his efforts towards raising his own kids and not someone else's. If a man had multiple partners, he wouldn't be able to provide for them all, and his genetic investment would die out. So, in terms of efficiency, it is much better for the man to keep himself to one woman, focusing all his attention on the children he knows he has fathered and making sure they live to have children of their own. As far as women are concerned, they require the resources that the men bring. When pregnant, a woman's physical capacities are reduced and she is in a vulnerable state, so by staying monogamous, she is essentially purchasing security and resources that would otherwise be unavailable to her in a world that brought quick and merciless death to the weak. If she slept around, the man wouldn't be sure that the child she bore was his, and would therefore have less interest in taking care of the both of them. Thus, monogamy is the best bet to assure the survival of herself and her child. This is the story that's been told for a long time, and it's considered by most to be the truth. Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, however, disagree. Not only do they think the standard model is wrong, but they think it is nothing more than a relic of our own modern biases and hang-ups. The process, they say, can be referred to as "Flintstonization." As you know, the characters in "The Flintstones" were more or less just like us. They went to work, they had houses and appliances and domestic disputes. They had the same issues and amusements as we did, because we overlaid our own society onto a prehistoric setting. Now in cartoons, that's good entertainment, and in the right hands it can be used as powerful satire and commentary. In science, though, it's just no good. Starting with Darwin, people have imagined prehistoric humans to have the same sexual values that we have: a demure, reluctant female who is very choosy in deciding which male she will mate with. A bond forms, and they are faithful to each other until the end of their days. Later researchers, looking at our ape cousins, have plenty of observational research to support the idea that very early humans were monogamous. They look at chimps and gorillas and baboons and confirm what they had always suspected - that our natural sexual state is one of monogamy. The logical conclusion, then, is that our modern attitude towards sexuality, with the rising rates of divorce and teen sexuality, represents a deviation from the way things "should" be, and must therefore be fixed. A loveless marriage, a man's roving eye, a woman who cuckolds her husband, serial monogamists, all of these, according to the standard model, result from our attempts to go against our nature. Or is it the other way around? Ryan and Jetha have put together a very compelling argument that the standard model of pre-agricultural human sexuality is not only wrong, but dangerously so. By looking at modern foraging tribes and the way they live, as well as doing a comparative analysis of humans against our nearest ape cousins, they have come to this conclusion: our "natural" sexual state is one of promiscuity. Back in the day, communities were small and tightly bonded, and sex was one of the things that held those bonds tight. Rather than one man and one woman struggling to protect their own genetic line, their entire community made sure that children were cared for and raised well. Everyone was everyone else's responsibility, and in a world of plenty there was no reason to try and enforce any kind of sexual exclusivity. It was only with the rise of agriculture that it became important to know what was yours, as opposed to someone else's, and that quickly extended from fields and livestock to wives and children. Now that people were keeping their own food and making sure to divide their lands from their neighbor's lands, sharing went out of style. With so much work put into growing crops, that's where the standard model of economic monogamy settled in, and it's been with us ever since. The advent of agriculture changed everything, and not everything for the better. In addition, the very biology of humans, from the way sperm behaves to the shape of the penis, to the anatomy of the clitoris to the noises women make in the throes of orgasm - all of these point to an evolutionary history of sexual promiscuity. The evidence of our bodies tell us that being locked into a lifetime monogamous pair-bond is not what we evolved to do. Ryan and Jetha know that their view of the fundamental nature of human sexuality will not be popular, mainly because it completely undermines our vision of who we are. So much law, tradition, education, entertainment and just plain common sense relies on humans being naturally monogamous. It's something that seems so obvious to us that we cannot imagine a society built any other way. Unfortunately, if Ryan and Jetha are right, society is the problem. We have established a cultural norm that goes completely against our biological and evolutionary nature, and which makes people miserable on a daily basis. I bought this book mainly to stop Dan Savage from nagging me about it. If you listen to Savage's podcast - and you should - you will soon realize that monogamy is something that a lot of people aren't good at. We look at other people with lust in our hearts, we cheat, we stay in relationships where we're sexually miserable just because that's what we "should" do. For most people, our sexual urges are to be fought against, with everything from self-restraint to social shame to law itself. It seems like staying monogamous is one of the hardest things for many people to do. This, of course, raises the question: if it were natural, would it really be so hard? It is a fascinating read, which covers a lot of ground and makes some very compelling arguments. It's also quite funny in places, which was quite welcome. In discussing the standard model the authors note that this is, fundamentally, prostitution, wherein the woman uses sex for material resources. This sexual barter system has been assumed to be true for years, leading the authors to write, "Darwin says your mother's a whore. Simple as that." They also put in some special notes for adventurous grad students in the field of sexual research (especially genital to genital rubbing, something popular in bonobo apes, but which is rarely studied in humans) and re-titling the extremely popular song "When A Man Loves a Woman" as "When a Man Becomes Pathologically Obsessed and Sacrifices All Self-Respect and Dignity by Making a Complete Ass of Himself (and Losing the Woman Anyway Because Really, Who Wants a Boyfriend Who Sleeps Out in the Rain Because Someone Told Him To?)" I don't really know what can be made of the serious information proposed in this book. No matter how it may seem, the authors are not proposing a dissolution of marriage or compulsory orgies or anything like that, nor is this book a "Get Out of Cheating Free" card. We've spent thousands of years putting these restraints on human sexuality, and they're not going to come off anytime soon. The best we can do right now is to be aware of where our ideas about relationships come from, and stop to think about the difference between what is true and what we wish were true. This understanding might help to save relationships that would otherwise work. People cheat not because they're scum or whores, but because they're human. Being monogamous is really hard not because we're weak or flawed, but because it's not what our bodies want for us. The search for a better understanding of human nature should lead us to being better humans, and nothing should be left out. Not even our most sacred beliefs. Not even sex. ------------------------------------------------ "Asking whether our species is naturally peaceful or warlike, generous or possessive, free-loving or jealous, is like asking whether H2O is naturally a solid, liquid or gas. The only meaningful answer to such a question is: It depends." - Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, Sex at Dawn ------------------------------------------------ (Okay? Okay, baby? So you see, I wasn't really cheating - okay, I was, but you can see why, right? I was just acting in accordance with my fundamental humanity, following the biological impulses as determined by millions of years of evolution when we... Hey, where are you going? Where are you? Oh, hell, he's going for the shotgun. Run, Chad, leave your pants, you don't have time, run!)

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #10,937,245 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #589 in Social Sciences (Books) #3,141 in General Anthropology #7,904 in Books on CD |
| Customer Reviews | 4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars (4,958) |
| Dimensions  | 5.5 x 5.5 x 0.25 inches |
| Edition  | Unabridged |
| ISBN-10  | 1491512407 |
| ISBN-13  | 978-1491512401 |
| Item Weight  | 3.5 ounces |
| Language  | English |
| Publication date  | April 8, 2014 |
| Publisher  | Brilliance Audio |

## Images

![Sex at Dawn - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41JGHGcVFtL.jpg)
![Sex at Dawn - Image 2](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51NgzlGtdeL.jpg)
![Sex at Dawn - Image 3](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/617TkomPXIL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Incredible Facts About Monogamy and our Prehistoric Ancestors
*by D***L on May 25, 2022*

Wish I'd read this book 30 years ago. **SPOILER ALERT** Discussion of the main themes and revelatory points follows. First, the book is extremely well written. Complex subjects are analyzed and explained clearly and concisely, and wonderful examples and metaphors are frequently offered to emphasize points. The authors also display a delightful sense of humor at various points during exploration of topics most people don't feel comfortable discussing openly. The thing that blew me away the most was his discussion of how agriculture changed the world more than any other single event or series of events. With the advent of farming, human societies invented concepts of land ownership and private property. This led to the formation of hierarchical societies, which was necessary to wage war for land and other limited resources--a circumstance that did not exist among hunter-gatherer societies, they say, because no one claimed to own the land or anything else. There simply were no wars for land or resources among prehistoric people; they lived in a world of abundance and would have had no reason to organize to control territory; nor did they store food; they were "immediate return" hunter-gatherers, meaning they consumed what they found or acquired daily. I can't find any flaws with the theories or logic. Another reader did, however, writing: “ ‘If human sexuality developed primarily as a bonding mechanism in interdependent bands where paternity certainty was a nonissue, then the standard narrative of human evolution is toast.’ If the standard narrative of human evolution is, in fact, ‘toast,’ how does their competing worldview better help explain contemporary human sexual relations?” The book answers this question with the detailed discussion of agriculture referenced above, noting the many social, cultural and legal consequences that resulted from land ownership, hoarding of food, farming, and the need to preserve and pass on private property to heirs. The authors further argue that monogamy is simply a cultural construct that arose with agriculture as the logical consequence of abandoning communal living. Once everyone stopped cooperating mutually for each other's survival and farming began, a psychological shift from abundance to scarcity occurred, as resources suddenly became limited, had to be cultivated, hoarded, and sold, rather than gathered communally and distributed equally. Sexuality followed the same path. By imposing monogamy, men could have some reassurance of their paternity, which became increasingly important, because fathers passed property to their children (unlike in communal times), so paternity certainty became vital to ensure that property was passed to true heirs, not another man's children. The whole thing is amazing and forces one to reexamine the merit and utility of monogamy, among various other cultural beliefs. Fun and fantastic read.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Agriculture just RUINED EVERYTHING!
*by C***S on January 1, 2011*

(Hey! Hey, baby, baby, waitwaitwaitwait. Wait. Wait! Baby, don't... don't freak out Okay, okay, I know what this looks like, but I can explain! Quiet, Chad, let me handle this. I can explain! I'm just - please, stop crying and listen - I'm just fulfilling my evolutionary heritage and helping to cement social bonds with... um... the pizza boy, but that'snotthepoint!! That's not the point! Look, before you do anything, y'know, drastic, you just need to read this book....) Humans are really good at figuring things out. As far as we go, we have a real knack for taking things apart and figuring out how they work. Though determined curiosity and perseverance, we know what's happening at the center of the sun, we know how the continents slide across the surface of the earth, how plants turn sunlight into potatoes. We can smash atoms and cure disease and peer back to the moment of creation itself. There is almost nothing that humans cannot comprehend if we put our minds to it. Except ourselves. Don't get me wrong - we have made great strides in philosophy and psychology, and come very far in understanding human origins and our spread across the planet. But there is a fundamental problem that we have when we study ourselves, and that is that we cannot do so objectively. Try as we might, it is impossible to completely put aside our own biases, judgments and backgrounds when we study how humans behave and try to understand why they do what they do. They are still there, if you look for them, and nowhere are they more evident than in the search for the origins of foundations of human sexuality. The standard model, as it's often called, goes something like this: ancient men and women established a pattern of monogamy based on mutual self-interest. The man would keep to one mate in order to be absolutely sure that he was dedicating his efforts towards raising his own kids and not someone else's. If a man had multiple partners, he wouldn't be able to provide for them all, and his genetic investment would die out. So, in terms of efficiency, it is much better for the man to keep himself to one woman, focusing all his attention on the children he knows he has fathered and making sure they live to have children of their own. As far as women are concerned, they require the resources that the men bring. When pregnant, a woman's physical capacities are reduced and she is in a vulnerable state, so by staying monogamous, she is essentially purchasing security and resources that would otherwise be unavailable to her in a world that brought quick and merciless death to the weak. If she slept around, the man wouldn't be sure that the child she bore was his, and would therefore have less interest in taking care of the both of them. Thus, monogamy is the best bet to assure the survival of herself and her child. This is the story that's been told for a long time, and it's considered by most to be the truth. Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, however, disagree. Not only do they think the standard model is wrong, but they think it is nothing more than a relic of our own modern biases and hang-ups. The process, they say, can be referred to as "Flintstonization." As you know, the characters in "The Flintstones" were more or less just like us. They went to work, they had houses and appliances and domestic disputes. They had the same issues and amusements as we did, because we overlaid our own society onto a prehistoric setting. Now in cartoons, that's good entertainment, and in the right hands it can be used as powerful satire and commentary. In science, though, it's just no good. Starting with Darwin, people have imagined prehistoric humans to have the same sexual values that we have: a demure, reluctant female who is very choosy in deciding which male she will mate with. A bond forms, and they are faithful to each other until the end of their days. Later researchers, looking at our ape cousins, have plenty of observational research to support the idea that very early humans were monogamous. They look at chimps and gorillas and baboons and confirm what they had always suspected - that our natural sexual state is one of monogamy. The logical conclusion, then, is that our modern attitude towards sexuality, with the rising rates of divorce and teen sexuality, represents a deviation from the way things "should" be, and must therefore be fixed. A loveless marriage, a man's roving eye, a woman who cuckolds her husband, serial monogamists, all of these, according to the standard model, result from our attempts to go against our nature. Or is it the other way around? Ryan and Jetha have put together a very compelling argument that the standard model of pre-agricultural human sexuality is not only wrong, but dangerously so. By looking at modern foraging tribes and the way they live, as well as doing a comparative analysis of humans against our nearest ape cousins, they have come to this conclusion: our "natural" sexual state is one of promiscuity. Back in the day, communities were small and tightly bonded, and sex was one of the things that held those bonds tight. Rather than one man and one woman struggling to protect their own genetic line, their entire community made sure that children were cared for and raised well. Everyone was everyone else's responsibility, and in a world of plenty there was no reason to try and enforce any kind of sexual exclusivity. It was only with the rise of agriculture that it became important to know what was yours, as opposed to someone else's, and that quickly extended from fields and livestock to wives and children. Now that people were keeping their own food and making sure to divide their lands from their neighbor's lands, sharing went out of style. With so much work put into growing crops, that's where the standard model of economic monogamy settled in, and it's been with us ever since. The advent of agriculture changed everything, and not everything for the better. In addition, the very biology of humans, from the way sperm behaves to the shape of the penis, to the anatomy of the clitoris to the noises women make in the throes of orgasm - all of these point to an evolutionary history of sexual promiscuity. The evidence of our bodies tell us that being locked into a lifetime monogamous pair-bond is not what we evolved to do. Ryan and Jetha know that their view of the fundamental nature of human sexuality will not be popular, mainly because it completely undermines our vision of who we are. So much law, tradition, education, entertainment and just plain common sense relies on humans being naturally monogamous. It's something that seems so obvious to us that we cannot imagine a society built any other way. Unfortunately, if Ryan and Jetha are right, society is the problem. We have established a cultural norm that goes completely against our biological and evolutionary nature, and which makes people miserable on a daily basis. I bought this book mainly to stop Dan Savage from nagging me about it. If you listen to Savage's podcast - and you should - you will soon realize that monogamy is something that a lot of people aren't good at. We look at other people with lust in our hearts, we cheat, we stay in relationships where we're sexually miserable just because that's what we "should" do. For most people, our sexual urges are to be fought against, with everything from self-restraint to social shame to law itself. It seems like staying monogamous is one of the hardest things for many people to do. This, of course, raises the question: if it were natural, would it really be so hard? It is a fascinating read, which covers a lot of ground and makes some very compelling arguments. It's also quite funny in places, which was quite welcome. In discussing the standard model the authors note that this is, fundamentally, prostitution, wherein the woman uses sex for material resources. This sexual barter system has been assumed to be true for years, leading the authors to write, "Darwin says your mother's a whore. Simple as that." They also put in some special notes for adventurous grad students in the field of sexual research (especially genital to genital rubbing, something popular in bonobo apes, but which is rarely studied in humans) and re-titling the extremely popular song "When A Man Loves a Woman" as "When a Man Becomes Pathologically Obsessed and Sacrifices All Self-Respect and Dignity by Making a Complete Ass of Himself (and Losing the Woman Anyway Because Really, Who Wants a Boyfriend Who Sleeps Out in the Rain Because Someone Told Him To?)" I don't really know what can be made of the serious information proposed in this book. No matter how it may seem, the authors are not proposing a dissolution of marriage or compulsory orgies or anything like that, nor is this book a "Get Out of Cheating Free" card. We've spent thousands of years putting these restraints on human sexuality, and they're not going to come off anytime soon. The best we can do right now is to be aware of where our ideas about relationships come from, and stop to think about the difference between what is true and what we wish were true. This understanding might help to save relationships that would otherwise work. People cheat not because they're scum or whores, but because they're human. Being monogamous is really hard not because we're weak or flawed, but because it's not what our bodies want for us. The search for a better understanding of human nature should lead us to being better humans, and nothing should be left out. Not even our most sacred beliefs. Not even sex. ------------------------------------------------ "Asking whether our species is naturally peaceful or warlike, generous or possessive, free-loving or jealous, is like asking whether H2O is naturally a solid, liquid or gas. The only meaningful answer to such a question is: It depends." - Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, Sex at Dawn ------------------------------------------------ (Okay? Okay, baby? So you see, I wasn't really cheating - okay, I was, but you can see why, right? I was just acting in accordance with my fundamental humanity, following the biological impulses as determined by millions of years of evolution when we... Hey, where are you going? Where are you? Oh, hell, he's going for the shotgun. Run, Chad, leave your pants, you don't have time, run!)

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ A provocative look at monogamy and modern relationships
*by T***E on December 6, 2025*

"Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships" is a provocative and highly readable book, challenging deeply ingrained assumptions about monogamy and human nature. Its core thesis—that prehistoric societies may have been more sexually egalitarian and less monogamous than traditionally assumed—is both intriguing and engaging, effectively encouraging readers to rethink prevailing narratives about relationships and sexual evolution. As Ryan and Jethá highlight, when Homo sapiens moved from egalitarian hunter-gatherer groups to more settled agricultural societies, new ideas about property, inheritance, and sexual exclusivity emerged—radically altering relationship dynamics. Ryan and Jethá write in a lucid, often entertaining style that makes the book accessible to a wide audience, not just specialists. However, the book has not won over many skeptical academic critics. Anthropologists and psychologists point out that while the authors raise compelling questions, their actual evidence is often ambiguous and selectively interpreted. Critics have frequently dismissed the work as oversimplified pop science, noting that it does not conclusively prove its central claims—particularly regarding the naturalness of non-monogamy in humans. Despite these reservations, "Sex at Dawn" remains a stimulating read for anyone interested in rethinking the history and possibilities of human sexuality.

---

## Why Shop on Desertcart?

- 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016
- 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories
- 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price
- 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members)
- 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection
- ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews

**Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.mx/products/13730738-sex-at-dawn](https://www.desertcart.mx/products/13730738-sex-at-dawn)

---

*Product available on Desertcart Mexico*
*Store origin: MX*
*Last updated: 2026-01-31*