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“Genesis” from: THERE
BE NO
WILLIAM HARWOOD
William Harwood is the author of thirty-six books and over 500 articles
for freethought journals in eight countries. He is a
contributing editor of American Rationalist, and for the seven years that Free
Inquiry maintained an advisory Editorial Board, he was a member of that Board.
Dr Harwood’s first book, Mythology’s
Last Gods, based on his
doctoral dissertation, did to religion what the first close-up photographs of
Mars did to the “canals” delusion. His most recent books are American Hitler: George W. Bush and the Republicanazi Gestapo, and the two-volume The Fully Translated Bible.
§
Introduction: Characters in this story have the same names as characters
in the fantasy novel called Genesis. That is intentional. Since geneticists,
when they established that all living humans are descended from a single woman,
borrowed from mythology and called her Eve, I did likewise. I utilized other
names from the same source, since, while we cannot know where or when such a
person lived, somebody had to be humankind’s first manslayer. Paleoanthropo-logical events are squeezed into a few
generations of a single family for literary convenience, not because mythologians who did likewise had any knowledge of
historical events of the distant past.
§
Her name was Eve. At least that was the name, borrowed from mythology,
which geneticists of the far distant future would retroactively bestow on her
when their discovery of an identical
The descendants who named her Eve would not have called her
a human being, had they been able to see her as she was now. Although
marginally less hirsute than the female who had borne her, or the seven males
who had the highest probability of being her sire, she was not yet so different
from the rest of her hominid herd as to trigger the ostracism that would befall
her in adolescence. In her fifth year she resembled not so much a naked Shirley
Temple, as a prepubescent gibbon or macaque.
Eve was more intelligent than her mother, not merely
quantitatively but also qualitatively. That, essentially, was what made her a
human being, even though her mother was indistinguishable from the thousand
other hominids that inhabited this part of
Eve was that rare individual, a viable mutant. Thousands of
times a day one of the millions of radioactive isotopes found in every
protoplasmic body decayed in such a way as to disrupt the orderly arrangement
of
Neither Eve’s mother nor her aunts, uncles
or cousins, or any of the males whose casual matings
with her mother were not known to have any connection with pregnancy, noticed at first
that Eve was different. Sure, she was different in the sense that all babies
are different, all unique. Her mother could distinguish her from other infants
by her face, her smell, and her cry. She made strange noises, unlike those of
other babies. She had a slightly larger skull than her fellows, slightly less
hair, and slightly larger nipples. But even as an adult she would not have
hemispherical breasts of the kind found on Playboy centerfolds and, according
to unconfirmed reports, on an extinct relative of the manatee. And while Eve’s
genital orifice was a shade less dorsal than her mother’s, it was far from
ventral. Her descendants would mate by rear mounting for as long as they
remained strictly land-dwellers. She was different, but she was not different.
Eve was hungry. Although past the age at which other members
of the herd had learned to fend for themselves, Eve still needed her mother to
fetch the kind of food that grew on branches too high for her to reach. For her
mutated cerebral cortex discouraged her from climbing very far, by giving her
an increased awareness of the hardness of the ground and the unpleasantness of
hitting it from any considerable distance.
“Yubba dubba
mubba bubba,” Eve yelled. Her mother understood.
Since Eve’s mutated larynx prevented her from emitting any of the six or eight
different squeals that constituted the hominid language, Eve had concocted her
own words for the most essential concepts, and her mother had learned to
differentiate three or four. Thus, while Eve could not ask for a banana with
any reasonable expectation of getting precisely what she specified, she could
impart the message, “Eve hungry,” and expect to be satisfied. And she was
satisfied.
Eve never masturbated. The new species, like the old, was
subject to an estrus cycle, and the female animal was therefore incapable of
experiencing sexual pleasure at any time other than during the days of
ovulation. In about seven years she would come into heat for the first time,
and for the rest of her life would spend two or three days a month copulating
diligently, and the rest of the time scornfully rejecting any male whose
inadequate olfactory sense caused him to sniff her out of season. Having the
capacity to do so, she might eventually learn to masturbate, if she ever lacked
an available male to feed her peculiar monthly hunger. But an available male
would never be lacking. It did not occur to her that paleoanthropologists
might one day debate whether she was “promiscuous.” Certainly she had no such
concept. She ate when she was hungry, drank when she was thirsty, copulated
when she was in heat, yelled when she was hurting, and punched, bit and
scratched when she was angry. If she had ever needed to masturbate, she would
have masturbated.
At the age of eight she was raped. It did not occur to the
twenty members of her herd, male and female, that watched the violation to
intervene. That an aging rogue, no longer able to compete with younger,
stronger males for the favors of females in heat, would force himself upon an
unripe cub, may have struck them as pathetic, had they been capable of such a
sophisticated concept. But the human concept of “crime” was far beyond the
intellectual capacity of Homo erectus. And since Eve had not been born into a phallusocracy that viewed women as men’s privately owned
breeding stock, and had therefore not been conditioned into believing that her
rapist had somehow destroyed her “chastity,” a concept of the far distant
future, it did not occur to her that the victim of a crime should feel guilty.
Thus she was not emotionally scarred by the attack, not for life, not for a day,
not for five minutes.
When Eve finally did feel a burning, itching, stinging
hunger between her legs, she deduced at once how best to anesthetize the itch
and feed the hunger. Had she been a pre-human, she would have known by
instinct. But Eve was a human being, not yet Homo sapiens, but more than Homo
erectus. She presented her rear to the nearest adult male and invited him to
ease her pain, because that was what she had seen other females do in similar
circumstances. And it worked. The male’s frantic thrusts satisfied her need, at
least temporarily. In an hour, perhaps less, the need would return. Another
male, or perhaps the same one if it happened to be in the right place at the
right time, would provide the relief that she craved. The process would be
repeated as many as fifty times in three days.
Copulation was a pleasurable activity for Eve. It gave her
satisfaction, but only in the sense that calamine lotion gives satisfaction to
a poison ivy victim. While it made sense to scratch an itch, scratching in the
absence of an itch would have been pointless and even unpleasant. Not until
Cro-Magnon times would humans, like gibbons, lose their estrus cycle, enabling
the females to copulate at any time. A woman would then be able to attract a
permanent mate, and serial monogamy would be born. But Eve, like her pre-human
ancestors, scratched only when she itched, and one scratcher
was the same as another.
Eve’s first offspring was an erectus. The genes that made
Eve human were confined to a single chromosome, and there was only a fifty
percent probability of that chromosome being passed on to a specific cub. Since
the human genes were dominant, that meant that Eve was human and any child that
inherited the human genes would be human. Eve’s first child, a female, was not,
and her second, also female, was not.
Eve’s third child was a male human. She did not name him
Adam. The paleoanthropologists who deduced that the
first man must have been the son of the first woman, fathered by a pre-human,
would give that name to him retroactively. By all logic, neither mother nor
child should have survived Adam’s birth, for the same reason that Eve should
not have survived her own birth. The enlarged human skull, unaccompanied by any
complementary enlargement of the pelvic opening, should have made birth
impossible. Indeed, not until the invention of surgical forceps would human
birth become a routine procedure in which the probability of both parties
surviving would rise from less than fifty percent to almost one hundred
percent. That the two births without which humankind could not have existed
were both accomplished without mishap, some would call a miracle. Others would
recognize that an event with a twenty percent probability is certain to happen
one-fifth of the time. Ten straight passes will not happen often, but it will
assuredly happen.
As with Eve, Adam’s first controlled utterances were “da da, ma ma,
ba ba,” and his next were
“pa pa, ta ta, ya ya,”
eventually followed by “ga ga”
and “ka ka.” But whereas Eve’s mother, neither
recognizing nor being able to reproduce any of those phonemes, had offered no
reinforcement or interpretation, Eve echoed and encouraged the formation of the
twenty or more sound combinations that, to her alone, constituted words. Before
he was three years old, Adam had learned that “da”
could be either an interrogative of direction or an indicator of direction,
while “ma” was either an interrogative pronoun or its response. Thus, “Da ga ga?”
meant, “Where is Adam?” and “Da ga
ga, ma ga ga,” meant, “Here is Adam. I am Adam.” By the time Adam had
sons of his own, the human vocabulary would have risen
to between forty and fifty words.
Eve had four more cubs in the next four years, two male and
two female. One male and one female had the same enlarged skull and sparsity of hair as Adam, but neither survived the first
year. The other two remained with their mother for almost four years before
leaving the nest to join the herd of independent juveniles. Adam, at the age of
eight, was by no means totally dependent, but neither was he yet ready to fend
for himself. He clung to Eve as if he were not of an age at which erectus males
were already mounting and unknowingly impregnating nubile females.
In all primates, and indeed in species far below that level,
the ability of males to experience sexual arousal considerably precedes
puberty, and Adam was no exception. After two years of clumsy, unsuccessful
attempts, he finally managed to penetrate Eve’s genital orifice during her
mating season, shortly after what would have been his ninth birthday, if he had
had such a concept as “birthday.” And while he had no capacity to ejaculate, he
was able to achieve orgasm and consequently remained ensheathed
until that objective had been attained. Thus, whereas a male erectus tended to
mount, intromit and disengage in an average of
twenty-seven seconds, Adam continued to tup his dam
for almost two minutes. The satisfaction that he gave her was multiplied
accordingly.
Still Adam refused to leave the comfort and convenience of
Eve’s side. While he could have survived on the food that was within his reach,
he remained at least emotionally addicted to the warm milk that she alone was
willing to provide. Why Eve continued to allow him this privilege, she was
unsure. Her other cubs had been weaned with sharp swats across the face and
body as soon as they were able to consume solid food. Only the hairless one had
never been subjected to the same discipline. That Adam alone was of her own species, she would not have been able to comprehend even if
it had been explained to her, although his similarity to herself and their
difference from the rest of the herd had by now penetrated her awareness.
Perhaps she remembered being abandoned by her mother at an age when separation
melancholia had proven more agonizing than unrelieved rut, and was unwilling to
impose on her equally deformed cub the kind of rejection she had experienced.
There was probably no single reason why Adam and Eve were
expelled from the herd soon after their first mating. It can be assumed that
their “difference” was a factor. But if that had been the sole reason, then the
ostracism would have occurred years earlier. Their sexual relationship could
not have been relevant. While erectus sons did not tup
their mothers, former sons, once the filial relationship was terminated by the
onset of adulthood, tupped their former mothers as
casually as they would tup any other female in heat.
And Adam’s ongoing attempts to mount the herd’s female cubs as a preferred
alternative to masturbation, although more persistent than the similar behavior
of other young males, was not viewed as “monstrous” or “perverted” or
“unchaste” or any of the other words that priests would one day invent for the
purpose of keeping the masses guilt-ridden and submissive.
Adam’s ability to service females in heat for as much as
five minutes at a time no doubt frustrated other males, since it forced them to
wait far longer than was customary to take their turns. That would not have
endeared the freak to his fellows. However, to accuse them of jealousy would be
to anthropomorphize a herd that was only pre-human. A concept analogous to
jealousy exists among alpha males in animal species that view the females as
the alpha’s exclusive property, but not in any species in which females are
polyandrous.
Perhaps the mating of Adam and Eve did contribute to their
being driven into exile, although not for any of the anachronous reasons
believers in man-made taboos have been known to project onto cultures and even
species that had no such concepts. If so, the sight of the two deliberately
prolonging a natural function that normal herd members got over and done with
as quickly as shitting or pissing may have been viewed as the final proof that
their infantile slowness was permanent and incurable. To creatures that were
already grandmothers at the age of ten, the continued toleration of retards, as
the slow-maturing humans must have seemed, might have been deemed inimical to
the herd’s best interests. That Homo erectus had the capacity to reason that
Eve might produce even more retards is far from certain. But recognizing that
they had been harboring undesirable aliens, and rectifying that error, was well
within their intellectual capacity.
Adam and Eve survived in isolation. Having the same capacity
as their ancestors to escape ground-dwelling predators by taking to the trees,
and being well able to feed themselves, there was no reason why they should not
have survived. They had no further contact with the erectus herd, and would
never learn that it was doomed to extinction at the hands of their own
descendants, the Cro-Magnons.
For two years Adam relieved Eve’s monthly genital craving to
the best of his ability. Having no mature male to impregnate her, she remained cubless. Then in his thirteenth year Adam’s sperm flowed
for the first time, and soon after that Eve’s orifice became unavailable to him
due to the biochemical changes associated with pregnancy. He did not have to
resume masturbation, for he had never ceased. But the absence of the accustomed
monthly break in the monotony struck him as a chronic nuisance, to say the
least.
Adam and Eve were both human, since
otherwise they could not have become the ancestors of all future humans. But
both had Homo erectus fathers. Each therefore had a chromosome pair of which
one member contained dominant human genes and the other contained recessive erectus
genes. The laws of probability therefore dictated that one quarter of their
mutual offspring would inherit recessive genes from both parents and be
throwbacks to Homo erectus. One half would inherit one dominant and one
recessive gene, and would be human but with the capacity to produce erectus cubs.
The remaining quarter would inherit dominant genes from both parents, and would
therefore belong to a human species that could neither interbreed with erectus nor
have erectus offspring.
The first child of Adam and Eve was a male human named Cain.
That was not the name he was known by during his lifetime. However, since there
is no way of determining what his real name was, or even if he had one, “Cain”
is as convenient a name as any. He was fully human at the macro level, and
never formed the slightest desire to mate with an erectus female. Whether he
possessed the recessive gene that would have enabled him to impregnate one is
thus academic.
Eve’s second child in her exile was Abel, another male. He
was a double recessive and therefore an erectus. The third and fourth were
human females. The fifth and sixth were erectus females.
Cain was eight years old when the blistering heat caused the humans to
take to the water, emerging only at twilight to pick the fruit and nuts that
supplemented their seafood diet and to sleep on the sand. The searing dryness
that would create the
Not until Cain was twelve did he attempt to copulate. Eve
did her best to cooperate, floating belly-down with her legs wide apart and
only her head above the water. But whereas Adam was tall enough to stand
between her legs, hold her waist and pull her onto his protruding organ while
his feet remained firmly planted on the ground, Cain could only have done so by
submerging his head and drowning. Orgasm was good, but not that good. He
abandoned the attempt.
Abel had no such difficulty. As an erectus, he only needed
to maintain penetration for twenty seconds to emit his sperm. And as a genetic
arboreal, he was better equipped than Cain to treat Eve’s body as a tree that
he was climbing, and maintain a secure hold with his legs while be used his
arms to swim underwater while he thrust. He completed coition, swam to the
surface, and inhaled.
He managed only one breath. Cain, in a fit of jealous rage,
locked his hands around Abel’s neck and held him under the water until he
drowned.
Eve had no words for, “Why?” or “Bad boy.” So she said, “You
make him not.”
Cain lacked the vocabulary to have asked, “Am I my brother’s
keeper?” even if he had possessed the concepts. Instead, he answered, “Him
monkey. Him person not. Monkey fuck
person not. Me make monkey not. Me make all
monkey not.”
Cain was as good as his word. He grabbed his erectus sisters,
one in each hand, and drowned both. Then, fearing retribution, he took the
elder of his human sisters by the hand and swam away with her. Their
descendants’ isolation from Homo sapiens would cause them to evolve into the
dead-end species, Homo Neanderthalensis.
Eve’s next child was her last. Although she could not remember
a time when she had not been alive, she had in fact been on earth a mere
thirty-nine years. That she had lived so long was a defiance of all
probability. Giving birth at such an advanced age was probably a function of
her possessing human genes for long life, and erectus genes for prolonged
fertility.
The child was Set, a male. Like his remaining sister, he
carried a double set of human chromosomes. All descendants of the two, for as
long as humankind survived, would be humans, with no capacity either to bear an
erectus or interbreed with an erectus. The girl’s first two offspring carried erectus
genes, inherited from their sire, Adam, but neither lived to reach puberty. Eve
did not live to see Set reach sexual maturity. In her forty-fifth year she
succumbed to the hypothermia that would become Homo aquaticus’s
most common cause of death for the thousand generations until only descendants
with a layer of subcutaneous fat were left. Not until the species returned to
the land would any human achieve the age of fifty years, even though all
carried genes, inherited from Eve, that gave them the
potential to live twice that long.
Set’s phallus was not much larger than that of a chimpanzee.
It was, however, as an accidental concomitant of his reinforced human genes,
observably longer than that of any erectus. Similarly, while his sister-wife
did not have breasts, for evolution within a species does not give rise to such
profound changes except by reinforcement of survival traits, she did have a
deposit of fat immediately behind her mammary areolas that gave her nipples a
degree of added buoyancy in an aquatic environment. Both mutations would prove
useful to humankind’s survival.
Set’s sister, whose name can be freely translated as
Mating with Set proved more difficult. Not yet of full adult
height, Set was forced to tread water continuously. His every attempt to enter
The solution was really self-evident. Since rear-mounting,
practical and convenient for land-dwellers, was out of the question for
aquanauts that had to remain vertical throughout, particularly since completion
of the act in water considerably cooler than body heat could not be achieved in
much less than five minutes, face-to-face conjunction was the only logical alternative.
Each could use one arm to hold themselves together,
and the remaining three limbs to generate the forward and upward thrusts that
would keep their genitals stimulated and their heads above water.
Set and
Cunti had more fatty tissue behind her
areolas than had Frig, causing her nipples to protrude further from her body
and ride higher in breast-high water. Consequently less of her babies drowned
trying to nurse. Surviving females passed on the tendency to have fatty mammary
glands to their descendants, and in a thousand generations breast development
would prove such a survival trait that, forever afterward, women would be
equipped with hemispherical appendages that, on land, could serve only an
esthetic function.
Siva had a longer phallus than Thor. He was thus enabled to
emit his sperm further inside of his love partners than could his rival. On
land, with mating occurring in a horizontal position, that would not have given
him a breeding advantage. A strong swimming sperm might have found its way to
its target ovum even from the vicinity of the vaginal entrance. In a salt water
environment, in an orifice that was not hermetically sealed, with both tide and
gravity to combat, sperm emitted closer to the uterine cervix had a
significantly better chance of achieving impregnation than sperm emitted
further away. Since men with the longest phalluses and women with the most
frontal vaginas would continue to produce the most children, by the time
humankind returned to the land, face-to-face mating and deep penetration would
be the norm, even though survival was no longer an issue. Homo aquaticus had in effect created the missionary position.
And the layer of subcutaneous fat that had evolved as a survival factor
in a cold water environment would, on humankind’s return to the land, allow the
near-hairless humans to leave tropical
Adam died, and then
All memory of Homo aquaticus ever
having been a land-dweller disappeared. After a thousand generations, either
because the land temperature had become more bearable, or because the inland
sea dried up, or for other reasons yet undiscovered, humankind’s aquatic
interlude came to an end. In neck-high water, the question of what to do with
the head during face-to-face mating had never arisen. Heads were automatically
tipped back to keep the mouth and nose out of the water and the ears submerged.
On land, with women lying supine and men straddling them horizontally, there
was a definite problem. Eve’s descendants solved it by learning to accompany
missionary position coupling with a mouth-to-mouth contact that came to be
called a kiss. So intimately did kissing and mating become associated in the
human imagination, that in a hundred thousand years “kiss and cuddle” would
become an idiom, and fantasy novels would be written in which a woman could
become sexually aroused by a kiss alone.
And while all this was going on, what was God doing?
According to historians and anthropologists: very little.
She had not been invented yet.
The
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