© Peter Watson 2017 Chapter 5: The Penis As I have already shown, there was during early Neolithic times a widespread concern with the penis, an erect penis as much as a flaccid one. Wall paintings showing human figures with erect penises, animals with identifiable penises, phallocentric figurines and sculptures are all common and plentiful. Neolithic phallocentrism has been identified as an aesthetic element of those times. In particular, at Göbekli Tepe there are ithyphallic figures. This development, combined with the fact that images of male prowess outweigh images of female figures, speaks for itself. The penis was a matter of great fascination to Neolithic peoples, and for good reason: they had found an all-important use for it. Chapter 6: Sexual Reproduction, Reproductive Power Sexual reproduction is in some ways the most intriguing and yet the most uncertain aspect of this whole changeover. Once the link between ‘intercourse’ and birth was understood, was it as straightforward as it now appears to us? What, exactly, did the Neolithic mind understand as ‘intercourse’? It is unlikely to have been a total understanding straight away and perhaps not for some considerable time. (A full understanding of genetics was not had until the late nineteenth century and the role/function of semen not even half-grasped until the mid-seventeenth century.) Also, at the time we are considering, humans would have had no understanding of ‘mammals’ and all that that implied. Because early peoples made the link between the reproductive activity of dogs and humans does that mean they immediately and automatically generalized the discovery to other mammals? The fact that sheep and goats were domesticated a full millennium before cattle (see above) suggests that this generalization took time, perhaps because the gestation period for cattle (285 days) and horses (340 days) is so much longer than that for sheep and goats (around 150 days in each case). Also, would the role of semen have been understood? Early peoples would have been aware of their own semen, but would they have grasped its role in reproduction? More to the point, in fact, would they have been aware of semen in dogs and sheep and goats? It would have been difficult, if not impossible, to observe ejaculation in dogs and sheep, simply because it occurred inside the