Time was, we took lessons from brute creation. Medieval bestiaries, books of beasts, weren’t simply descriptions of animals; these compendiums of their home lives and habits, mostly derived from a text called the Physiologus of the second century, were for the edification of the reader.
The upshot of the research is that we are roughly two third monogamous, which puts us way ahead of dolphins and chimps
‘But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee, and the fowls of the air and they shall tell thee’, said the book of Job. The lion, being brave and kingly, represented Christ. Some animals had bad characteristics to avoid, like the duplicity of the fox. The authors were particularly keen on identifying habits of fidelity and monogamy among the dumb chums to show men that sexual restraint is indeed possible…look at turtle doves.
Fancy what the writers would have made of the findings of the Cambridge evolutionary biologist, Dr Mark Dyble, who has given us a league table of monogamy among assorted species by comparing the proportion of siblings who shared both parents with half-siblings, since species that mate in exclusive pairs produce full siblings; and the promiscuous don’t.
For humans, Dr Dyble used not just contemporary records, but DNA from archeological sites and burial grounds. The upshot of the research is that we are roughly two third monogamous, at 66 per cent, which puts us way ahead of dolphins and chimps who will have sex with practically anyone, but way behind the California deermouse, who were uniformly faithful. He didn’t mention turtle doves. So you can just imagine what a bestiary writer – a medieval clerk – would have made of all this. The manuscripts would have been full of texts, saying Consider the Deermouse, which, at the time wasn’t possible on account of America not having been discovered by Europeans.
What the findings suggest is that people may have adopted monogamy for good reasons, or we wouldn’t have stuck with it this long. And we can surmise that this is because it provides a stable foundation for childrearing, given that both parents are invested in the future of the offspring. But it’s not quite how our current social mores look. If two thirds of us, historically, have been monogamous (maybe the others were organised polygamists as well as just libidinous) that’s better than at present. A report from the Marriage Foundation in 2023 which followed 4,476 first-born children born in 2000-2002 over their first 14 years, found that by the age of 14, some 46 per cent were not living with both natural parents (assuming their putative father was their real father) and this was particularly true of children born outside marriage.
In other words, we seem to be less monogamous than we used to be. We are lagging way behind even beavers, over three quarters of whom mate for the long term; I’d surmise we’re somewhere around the level of the grey wolf (46 per cent). What we need are contemporary clerical bestiaries telling us to look to the Deermouse and stick to one spouse. It works for them.
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