Incidentally, whether this “cave” fantasy bears any resemblance to anthropological reality is irrelevant to the fantasy. No anthropologists were present taking notes during the early paleolithic era, so we do not much know. It would seem likely that the brain, morality and civilization all developed simultaneously. It seems further likely that, given primate societies, there was always order and structure in human groupings, leadership by an elite of strong, dominant males, and, thence, downward through a social hierarchy ending up with smaller, weak males, sons of females not mated to dominant males, on the periphery of the group for the leopards. There is always going to be an establishment, in which aggressive, intelligent, often unscrupulous individuals, within whatever political structure is available, are going to lie and knife and fight their way to the top. Trees may come in many different shapes but the toughest monkeys will always be in the high branches. On the other hand, even if there was always “law” in this sense in human groupings, this “law,” quite presumably, did not extend outside the groupings. Outsiders, even of one’s own species, have usually been regarded as fair game for about anything. To think of mankind as one grouping, to think in terms of a universal morality, is an achievement of a highly developed morality. Most of us, even today, except for a few delightful years in our naive adolescence, find it difficult to feel it in our blood. The stranger, too many times, has meant danger. Evolution has contrived us in such a way as to be suspicious of strangers. If this suspicion should be reduced in the prime mating years, evolution, too, may have had a hand in that. Those groups which were suspicious of strangers, we note, tended to survive. Whether there is any longer an evolutional point in holding outsiders in suspicion is arguable. Our main hope now for survival is clearly our rationality. If we make it through the next thousand years it will doubtless be because of our brains and not our reflexes.

In short, whether the human situation conjectured in this fantasy ever actually obtained or not is irrelevant to the fantasy. It is a powerful fantasy, regardless of what the case might actually have been, regardless of what anthropology may someday decide the case actually was. It does seem likely, however, that the fantasy would correspond to a past reality, provided the captured female was not a member of the in-group, not a member of the family or clan or tribal grouping. Such women, as they are with primitive tribes today, would be regarded as suitable objects of predation. Further, of course, history is replete with evidence as to the frequent capture, rape and enslavement of human females, particularly those of villages, cities, races and nations other than your own. The capture, rape and enslavement of women was one of the great historical pastimes of man.1

19. The Kidnap Fantasy.

The wife is kidnapped for sexual purposes.

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