As mentioned in this post, during the Sex 1.0 era human beings lived in nomadic tribes and had no concept of property.

Now that does not mean that people did not compete for survival resources.

Competition & Territory

All creatures follow nature’s primary desire – survival.  This means all animals will compete, when they need to for reasons of scarcity or any other reasons, for survival resources like food and mating opportunities.

Confusing competition over territory and survival resources in other creatures with the uniquely human notion of property is an extremely common mapping mistake.

You put 10 animals of any species in a confined space and only provide enough food for 2 of them then they will fight over it.  Not because they think the food is their property but just because they have to in order to survive.  They have no choice but to fight.  Likewise, all animals will compete over mating opportunities if they need to.

Competition over survival resources should not be confused with concepts of property.

Being “territorial” should not be confused with property either.  Being territorial simply means defending the space immediately around you, wherever that happens to be, and the survival resources within it.

You can be territorial, as a hunter gatherer, move 5 miles the next day and be territorial about the space around you again whilst completely forgetting the space you were territorial about yesterday.  Property had no meaning.  It did not exist.

What does this have to do with sex?  Everything.

If you have no concept of property, what that means is that human beings cannot be sexual property.

Therefore, there was no marriage in Sex 1.0.  As there was no concept of marriage there was no concept of boyfriend / girlfriend relationships either in the conventional sense as those are essentially try-before-you-buy arrangements with the intention that they should lead to marriage.

As a species, quite simply we just followed our sexual nature.  In this respect, we were exactly the same as the other 8.7 million species on the planet.

In other words, ALL sexual relationships in a Sex 1.0 world were unfenced.

Men and women hunted and gathered and were pretty much equal in a socio-economic sense.  Nobody was “rich” because there was no concept of money or property.  Children were raised collaboratively in the tribe.

People, both men and women, simply competed in the sexual marketplace for what they both wanted and needed in order to satisfy their respective biological imperatives.

Females used their youth and their fertility to attract the best alpha males.

Alpha males used their alpha-ness, their desirable qualities like leadership, strength, dominance, good hunting and gathering skills and so on to attract the most fertile and attractive females.

The Spectrum Dilemma

Alpha males dominated the Sex 1.0 marketplace and dominated the opportunities for mating with the fertile females.  The beta males were left out in the cold in that respect and got very little or no action.  They lived a largely sexless life and the best they could hope for was to survive and that was not best achieved by challenging the alpha male dominance which might lead to a beating or to death.

This lead to an interesting dynamic which is still at play today.  Alpha and beta males living in essentially two different realities even though they may live in the same social group.  Alpha males leading a life where women are attracted to him and available to him.  An alpha’s mentality would be one of sexual abundance where the best way for a woman to be especially desirable to him is to have signs of youth and fertility.

Beta males, on the other hand, lived with a scarcity mentality where they would take whatever they could get.

This is why men, even today, have a crushing fear of rejection and are scared to approach women and perhaps might never do it without the Dutch courage that a few drinks might provide.

This is also why, the more desirable the woman, the greater the fear.  If you think about it logically, experiencing greater fear because a woman is more superficially beautiful makes no sense at all bearing in mind that all women have the same sexual organs and bearing mind the male genetic imperative is to have sex with lots of women.

In this context however, this fear is totally understandable as being rejected by a woman with less visible signs of attractiveness and fertility would be regarded as less of a slight in terms of pre-selection and social proof amongst a small tribe of people than the crushing rejection from a more obviously fertile and desirable woman would be.  Also, the knowledge that a more attractive woman is far, far more likely to be sought after by alphas drastically heightens male fear as conflict with an alpha over a survival resource could mean death.

The spectrum dilemma for a beta male in the Sex 1.0 era always meant that his lack of success guaranteed even less success in the future.  Women don’t want a guy that is low in the social hierarchy and that other women don’t want.

The spectrum dilemma works in reverse for an alpha.  Receiving pre-selection from other women and social proof from the tribe in general would have made him even more highly desirable.

The spectrum dilemma at play in the Sex 1.0 marketplace would have had a clearly polarising effect for men, shoving them to either one end of the spectrum or the other and leaving very little in the middle.

Beta males in the Sex 1.0 marketplace mostly got weeded out of the genetic pool and their genetic survival chances were poor whilst alpha genetics thrived.

The Big Shift

The shift from Sex 1.0 to Sex 2.0 started about 8,000 BC  during the neolithic era when humanity started to go through the agricultural revolution also known as the neolithic revolution.

We started to move away from being nomadic hunter gatherers and started to rely on agriculture and farming.  This allowed us to live in settlements for the first time in human history.  It allowed us, for the first time, to have towns and villages and live a settled or sedentary lifestyle.

As we now relied on the food that we grew for our survival, human beings developed the notion, for the first time, of property.

The very first property that ever existed was land.  Specifically arable or fertile land that was good for growing food.

Land itself was never scarce and, as the human population of the world was much, much lower back then (less than 1 person per square mile) there would be no reason to covet it and to want to own it especially if it was rocky or barren.

Fertile land that was good for growing food however, was scarce and so for the first time ever in human history we owned property.

This changed everything and was the catalyst for the transition from Sex 1.0 to Sex 2.0 which I will talk about in the next posts.