© Peter Watson 2017 (It is now known that when early people switched from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a more sedentary existence, eating mainly cereals, this has a profound effect on the birth canal, narrowing it and making birth more fraught. Even today the birth canals of modern women are less capacious than their palaeolithic sisters. In addition to the changes in the dimensions of the birth canal, other contemporary research has shown that birth intervals of fewer than four years are more perilous than longer intervals. Although people at that time did not have the advantage of modern science, they were a lot nearer the event itself, and in a better position to note the changes that were occurring.) Genesis does not ‘date’ when humanity linked sex and birth, not directly, but it does associate the link with the transition to farming. Therefore, is Genesis, and the Fall it records, really reporting a very great, indeed shocking breakthrough that humanity made around 10,000-8,000 BC, that coitus and gestation are related? Is that why animal domestication followed plant domestication by about a thousand years, because the link was only then made? Timothy Taylor, in The Prehistory of Sex, reports that around that time, among the Inuit of Alaska, they had what archaeologist Lewis Binford recognized as ‘lovers’ camps’ – places where new couples could ‘get away from it all’ to cement their relationships. Does this reflect a new understanding? Taylor also makes the point that, around 10,000 years ago, the caves where the cave art proliferated, also seem to have been forgotten. Whatever was going on was pretty important. Venus figurines were no longer needed, cave art was no longer needed. Mammal reproduction was understood and domestication in place. These are tentative arguments but their main strength lies in the consistent picture they paint. Around 10,000-8,000 years ago, as well as a transition to sedentism, urbanism and domestication, people discovered the link between coitus and birth and this produced a seminal change in attitudes to ancestry, the male role, monogamy, children, privacy, property – it was, above all, a momentous psychological change as much as anything else and that is why it was recorded, in coded form, in Genesis. Once you scrutinize Genesis, there are other links to the changes that took place in Neolithic culture. There is the fact that God specifically gave humans ‘dominion’ over the animals and throughout distinguished between ‘livestock’ and wild animals. Then there are, for instance, the very great ages recorded for many of the patriarchs – up to 900 years and even more in some cases. This cannot be right of course but it does recall the great sequences of houses in Çatalhöyük, which could extend over 600 years. When Genesis refers to people by name, does this derive from the ‘dynasty’