1. THE EVOLUTION

NO LIFE FORM has had a greater impact upon this planet than the human male. Explorers, inventors, architects, builders, warriors and foresters have almost always been males and they have changed the surface of the earth to a degree that makes all other species seem insignificant. In the seas they may have had to take second place to the lowly organisms that constructed the vast coral reefs, but on land the human male reigns supreme, both as destroyer of natural features and as constructor of artificial ones. What is it about the human male that has made his legacy so utterly distinct from that of all other life forms, including even the human female? To find the answer we have to return to prehistoric times and take a look at the challenges that faced early men and that helped to mould their unique personality.

When our ancient ancestors descended from the trees, abandoned the vegetable diet of fruits, nuts and roots that was favoured by other monkeys and apes, and turned to hunting and meat-eating as a new way of life, they were at a considerable disadvantage. In taking this dramatic step they placed themselves in direct opposition to mighty predators such as the lions and leopards, hunting dogs and hyenas. Physically, they were no match for these specialised killers. The human body was puny by comparison, lacking sharp claws and fangs. They had to find some other way of competing and it was this pressure that was to fashion the human male in a new mould. They had to use their brains instead of their brawn. The human skull started to swell and intelligence increased.

With their bigger brains, prehistoric human hunters could employ cunning beyond anything their rivals could offer. They could not outrun the specialised carnivores, but they could outsmart them. In addition to increased intelligence they needed three other improvements. They had to modify their competitiveness, tempering it with increasing cooperation, so that they could work as an active team. They had to become more inventive, so that they could develop novel techniques. And they had to stand up on their hind legs, so that they could free their front feet from the toil of walking and running, and develop them into grasping hands that could fashion and refine implements and weapons.

With these improvements, the early bands of tribal hunters became a formidable force on the land. They could drive the great carnivores off their kills and scavenge the meat. Or they could make the kills themselves, devising manoeuvres, ambushes and traps that defeated even the most powerful of prey species.

With these improved skills came a new challenge. There was suddenly so much to eat that the leading hunters could not consume it all themselves. There was enough for the whole tribe and food-sharing became a basic facet of human society. Today we take this very much for granted, but to a monkey in a tree it is an alien concept. Animals that primarily eat vegetables never share them with their companions. Each vegetable-eater gobbles up what he or she finds. Vegetable-eating is always a selfish act. But if there is a food surplus, as there is after a big kill, the whole tribe can eat. The human feast was born.

As the efficiency of the human hunters gradually improved, their personality started to change. They became more and more distinct from the human female in mental outlook and physical build. Hunting was a dangerous pursuit and the females of the early tribes were too valuable reproductively to be risked in the chase. They became specialised as cautious, caring, maternally efficient individuals, operating at the centre of society and dealing with many different tasks in primitive settlements, while the more expendable males became more and more adventurous and increasingly roamed abroad in search of prey, taking risks of a kind that no tree-dwelling, fruit-eating monkey would ever contemplate.

The male brain and the male body both underwent special modifications during this crucial phase of human evolution. Mentally, the hunter not only became more venturesome, more cunning and more cooperative, but also more single-minded and more persistent, capable of planning long-term strategies as well as short-term tactics. Physically, the male body had to become increasingly muscular and athletic, and had to sacrifice the precious fat deposits that gave the tribal females their more curvaceous forms and also provided them with vital nutritional reserves during the inevitable, occasional periods of food shortage.

In this way the primeval human male evolved into a startlingly efficient prey-killer and early human tribes began to multiply and spread rapidly all over the globe. This condition, the classic hunter/gatherer society, lasted for hundreds of thousands of years, until a new phase appeared about 10,000 years ago with the arrival of farming. It began when our ancestors started to improve their gathering techniques. Instead of searching for their vegetable foods, early agriculturalists began to plant and grow certain crops near their settlements, attracting herbivorous prey animals. Instead of chasing after their prey, the hunters could get the prey to come to them. They began penning the animals in and keeping them as captive meat. Now they could enjoy a feast whenever they felt like it.

As the captive prey animals began to breed, these first farmers realised that they could now control the reproduction of their prey, and possess their own livestock. The agricultural revolution was upon us. In relative terms, it all happened so quickly that the personality of the male hunters did not have time to evolve to match the changing circumstances. In their genes they remained mighty hunters, while in their daily lives they became farmhands and herders, crop-sowers and harvesters. The drama of the hunt and the thrill of the chase became the drudgery of the farmyard. The huge advantage of having a food surplus was tempered by the loss of adventure and the bold spirit of the primeval hunting pack.

How did the new farming male cope with this loss? Sport-hunting was developed as a way of reliving the excitement of the kill, but this was not enough. The human male had been forged by evolution as a tough, inventive, cooperative, risk-taking being and needed to find some way of expressing himself that did not deny his biological heritage. In fact, he found two – one destructive and one creative.

The destructive one was warfare, in which rival males were treated as prey to be hunted down and killed. This gave the risk-hungry male all the dangers he could dream of and, as weapons became more and more sophisticated, far more dangerous than he had ever envisaged. If these two corrupted forms of hunting, sport-hunting and war-hunting, had been the only two ways in which the human male had faced the mental challenge of the farming era, our species would have remained in a sorry state. But there was also a constructive response to the loss of food-hunting. The ability to concentrate on long-term goals that was an integral part of the primeval chase was co-opted by Neolithic males and put to work in the service of major new endeavours.

At first, progress was painfully slow, but, as the centuries passed, flimsy huts became great buildings; crude body-painting became great art; simple tool-use became refined craftsmanship. Villages grew into towns and cities, technical specialisations blossomed and all the complexities of modern civilisation began to beckon.

The male inventor was the new, improved risk-taker, forever seeking novelty. In this role he was set firmly against the destructive male and, although the two still continue to reflect twin faces of the human male – the breaker and the maker – our modern world is a living testimony to the fact that creative male energy has managed largely to overshadow the negative one.

In recent times there has been much talk about the ‘Redundant Male’, the suggestion being that with new, artificial fertilisation techniques men will soon become obsolete. This theory first became popular in the 1970s when leaders of the feminist movement announced that clitoral orgasms were superior to vaginal ones and that males were not worth the trouble in the bedroom. However, even if men were not necessary for sexual pleasure, there was still the tricky problem of how to procreate the next generation of feminists. A few champion ejaculators would have to be kept for this purpose, with sperm samples being ordered whenever they were needed.

Since then, advances in reproductive technology have been made that suggest that one day, in the not too distant future, even sperm will not be necessary. Women will be able to have their eggs fertilised in the laboratory without any male element being involved, and then have them reinserted in the uterus to grow into a new generation of females. Lesbian pairs will be formed to create a new type of family unit with baby girls being reared in a male-free world.

According to this ideal, the absence of males will mean an end to warfare, testosterone-fuelled violence, aggressive sports, football hooligans, political extremists, rapists, religious terrorists and all the other destructive aspects of the masculine world. In its place will be the caring, sharing, gentler, more intelligent world of the human female. Quiet common sense will replace savage conflicts of honour, and life will become a warm, safe, friendly experience rather than a cruel, anxiety-ridden ordeal.

How all the existing men would be disposed of is not clear. Perhaps they are just ignored and allowed to grow old until the male gender slowly fades away. Or perhaps they would be massacred, as proposed in the manifesto of the radical feminist movement called SCUM (The Society For Cutting Up Men). Eventually they will be no more than a distant memory, and a testosterone-free planet will rotate to the sound of female laughter.

It is worth pointing out, on a serious note, that in addition to ridding the world of the destructive elements in the masculine psyche, this extreme scenario would also remove all the constructive elements. There would be far fewer major inventions – they would be considered too risky. There would be far fewer single-minded, long-term projects – too time-consuming when set against the demands of family and daily social life.

If women have always been more sensible than men, men have always been more playful than women. And it is this adult playfulness that has given the human species many of its greatest achievements.

If we allowed the champion of all things male to offer his riposte to the feminist position, he would probably say:

Yes, there may have been great female artists, scientists, politicians, religious leaders, philosophers, inventors, engineers and architects. But for every one of them there have been a hundred men, possibly a thousand. Greatness seems to demand the sort of stubborn perversity that is a predominantly male quality.

It has often been argued that this has been a matter of opportunity – that women were not allowed to develop their true potential. But in practical terms this simply means that women were not great enough to demand that their greatness be recognised. Greatness has to be achieved, not merely postulated, and it is the men who have been driven on by their genetically installed ambitions actually to take the great steps necessary to build our towering civilisations.

Both these extreme views are exaggerations and represent the enormous waste of energy that has gone into the so-called battle of the sexes. The truth is that the human male and the human female make a perfect evolutionary team. They are different in several important ways that have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to refine the division of labour that exists in the human tribe, but at the same time they are equal in importance. Different but equal, that is the key. The male brain has become specialised in single-minded determination. The female brain has become adept at multi-tasking. The male has become specialised in planning, innovating, risk-taking, spatial problem-solving and muscular expression. The female has become specialised in verbal fluency, and with better developed senses of hearing, smell and touch, and a greater resistance to disease.

Sexually, the human male has changed dramatically from his monkey and ape relatives. While they usually only have one sexual strategy, he has two. The first is to fall in love and form a pair-bond with a particular female. This is not, as is sometimes claimed, a cultural sophistication, but a deep-seated biological quality. The emotional upheaval that accompanies the process of pair-formation is anything but sophisticated. It is deeply physiological with dramatic chemical changes taking place inside the male (and female) body. And it occurs globally, even in those societies that have tried to impose other, inappropriate mating systems on human adults. There are many cases where, once the bonding process has taken place, the couple in question will face imprisonment, torture and even death, rather than abandon their chosen partner.

In evolutionary terms the advantage of human pair-formation is that, in a small tribe, it shares out the females between the male hunters. Unlike other male primates, human males had to cooperate on the hunt. Alone, the individual hunter was not fast enough or strong enough to defeat his prey. The leading hunter needed the active cooperation of his male companions. If the leading male kept all the females in the tribe for himself, he could hardly expect to be given active assistance by the other males when they were out together on the hunt. The pairing system, back at the tribal settlement, created a greater equality between the males. There would still be a social hierarchy, with more dominant and less dominant individuals, but the gradient between the top and the bottom of the hunting pack would be far less steep.

It would be wrong to think of this newly developed cooperativeness as one of our ‘refined’ qualities, inspired by a new, spiritual sense of acquired restraint and saintly unselfishness. In reality it is one of our most basic animal properties. Moralists often seem to think that, biologically, the human species is competitive and selfish, and that only moral teaching can induce us to behave in a helpful, unselfish, altruistic way. But the truth is that such behaviour is in our genes. If we had not changed genetically to become more helpful towards one another, early human tribes simply would not have survived. Paradoxically, behaving unselfishly was a selfish act.

There was a second, important advantage in the pair-formation system of tribal mating. It created a family unit in which the children knew their father as well as their mother. And it added paternal care to the maternal care found in other species. At a stroke, it doubled the parental protection that growing children received. Powerful paternal feelings are unleashed the moment a human father holds his new baby in his arms and in the years ahead he will devote a great deal of time and attention to the rearing of his offspring.

The reason evolution has changed the human male in this way and converted him into a good father is that our species has such a heavy parental burden that one adult, the mother, cannot cope alone. A female monkey has a much easier task. Her baby is able, from birth, to cling actively on to her fur and ride on her body as she moves about. The newborn monkey is so much more advanced that it does not have to be carried or placed in a nest. It grows rapidly and is soon scampering about near its mother’s body, returning quickly to her if danger threatens. Before the mother has another baby to care for, her first is already more or less independent. So she never has a big family to worry about.

In stark contrast, the human mother has a serial litter to care for. Her babies are helpless at birth, demanding endless attention during the early months, and they are still completely dependent on her a year or two later, when the next baby arrives. And so on, until the mother is caring for a whole brood. Having the support of a protective, loving father during this process provides a major boost to the survival chances of the young ones. From the male’s point of view, the stronger his paternal feelings the more chance he has of seeing his genetic progeny thrive.

In this respect the human male is more like a bird than a monkey. Birds have helpless offspring too, in the shape of eggs, and the parental burden of incubating them requires the efforts of both the male and the female parent. If the male bird did not share the duties of sitting on the eggs, the female bird would starve to death before she could hatch them. If, to prevent this, she took off to feed when there was no male to take over from her, the uncovered eggs would soon chill and the chicks inside them would die. So pair-bonding in birds is the typical mating system, found in almost every species, and for the same reason it is found in humans, namely the need for intensive parental care.

I said earlier that the human male has not one, but two sexual strategies. The first, as we have seen, is to devote a huge amount of time and effort to his family unit, ensuring that his children have the very best chance of survival. The second is the more primitive one of scattering his seed wherever and whenever he gets the chance. If he finds himself in the company of an adult female who is not his family partner, he may feel the urge to engage in a brief bout of sexual activity with her, even if he is never going to encounter her again. If she produces an offspring as a result of this brief encounter, he will not take any part in its rearing and may not even know of its existence. Lacking his paternal care, the baby will have less chance of survival than one inside a carefully protected family unit, but it will not be without any chance. Furthermore, in instances where the female concerned is already paired with another male, her permanent male partner may believe that the offspring is his and give it his full protection. In this way it will have an excellent chance of survival.

The inevitable question arises as to why a paired human female should take the risk of mating with a strange male when she has a permanent partner available to her to make her pregnant. If she is discovered it could clearly cause serious damage to the stability of her family unit, and yet it does still happen. The reason appears to be that the human female is programmed to assess human males in two different ways. In one assessment, she rates them according to their supportive qualities. She senses how well they will look after her and her offspring, and how socially successful and reliable they are. In the other assessment, she rates them according to their physical fitness. Do their bodies look as though they will pass on good genes to her offspring? In an ideal relationship, the female’s permanent partner will be both reliably supportive and also physically impressive, and she will have no genetic reason to stray. But if she has chosen a partner primarily for qualities of protection and caring, then she may be tempted, from time to time, to engage in a little risky sexual activity outside the family unit.

In earlier epochs it was never possible to be certain about how much of this extra-marital activity was going on. In some cultures males went to great lengths to ensure that their female partners had no chance to encounter strange males by keeping them inside the family home for most of the time and by always accompanying them or having them chaperoned when they did allow them out. In some instances custom went even further, with women being forced to cover their bodies completely when they went outside the home. Female circumcision, the surgical removal of the external genitals of young girls, was also practised. This reduced their chances of gaining sexual pleasure, and in that way further reduced their interest in other men. This practice still continues in many parts of the world with at least ten million women alive today who have been sexually mutilated in this way.

Today, in the West, efficient DNA testing has at last made it possible to ascertain, with some accuracy, how many children are the result of the human male’s pair-bonding strategy and how many are the result of his more ancient seed-scattering strategy. The results have been surprising. Most married men, in modern times, would have imagined that a family-unit child that had a stranger as a father would be a great rarity. But this has not been proved to be the case.

DNA paternity testing was first introduced during 1995/6, as a means of resolving paternity disputes without the need to go to court. Figures obtained over a seven-year period from 1998 to 2004 revealed that, in Great Britain, 16 out of every 100 children tested for paternity proved to have biological fathers who were not the ‘husbands’ who were rearing them as their own. Similar tests in Northern Ireland gave almost identical results, differing by only 0.2 per cent. These were much higher figures than anyone had expected.

In the United States, a paternity authority has been quoted as saying: ‘The generic number used by us is ten per cent.’ In Germany, the Max Planck Institute stated: ‘The rate of wrongful paternity in “stable monogamous marriages,” ranges from one in ten with the first child to one in four with the fourth.’

A broader study of nine major regions (the UK, US, Europe, Russia, Canada, South Africa, South America, New Zealand and Mexico) revealed that estimates varied from 1 to 30 per cent. This huge variation suggested that there might be something wrong with the samples being used. The problem seemed to arise from the fact that, in many of the reports, the figures were based on cases where true paternity was already being questioned, and where there was some doubt about who was the father. If all those studies were ignored, then the figure was much lower. The investigation concluded, ‘The remaining research showed an average paternal discrepancy of 3.7 per cent, or a little less than one in 25.’

To return to the human male’s two mating strategies, this means that, even within a society that is, in comparison to earlier times, a sexually liberated society, 24 out of every 25 children are the result of the pair-bonding strategy and only one is the outcome of the seed-scattering strategy. It is clear from this that, despite his well-documented urge for philandering, the human male is essentially a pair-forming being.

How, then, can one explain the male’s endlessly roving eye? He may not father too many extra-mural children, but this does not mean that he is as faithful to his mate as a strict pair-bond should imply. The answer comes from an evolutionary trend that has seen the human species become increasingly childlike during the past million years or so. The value of this trend, called neoteny, has been that it has resulted in human beings retaining their childlike sense of playfulness and curiosity well into adulthood. This has enabled them to become increasingly innovative, leading to all the ingenious inventions that have given us our complex modern technologies. But at the same time it has led to this heightened level of curiosity spilling over into other aspects of life, including our most basic animal activities.

With food and drink this trait is not a problem; the result is simply gourmet eating and fine wines. But where sex is concerned it has often played havoc with our primary reproductive strategy. When an already paired male sees an attractive stranger of the opposite sex, his curiosity makes him wonder what it would be like to enjoy her sexually. In the vast majority of cases he is able to keep his curiosity operating at the level of sexual fantasy, but he also occasionally goes further. Usually, once he has satisfied his curiosity, that is the end of the matter, but in many instances there is a disruption of the original pair-bond and often the formation of a new one. This inevitably reduces the quality of his paternal caring for the children of his original relationship, no matter how he tries to repair the damage.

Major family disruptions of this kind were more difficult in the small tribal communities where male reproductive patterns evolved. But modern society is more complex and the opportunities for pair-bond disruption so much greater that the ancient system is coming under increasing strain in modern times. The divorce rate has increased dramatically and, although some figures quoted are wild exaggerations, it seems that, in twenty-first century America, for example, of those who marry, 34 per cent will experience divorce. A comparable figure for the UK is 36 per cent. So it seems that about one-third of modern pair-bonds collapse, a fact used by professional anxiety-makers as a sign that society is in decay. Another way of looking at the situation, however, is that, even in the midst of modern decadence and liberal sexual attitudes, two-thirds of modern couples do manage to make their pair-bonds work. Given the highly unnatural structure of urban society, to which the human tribal animal has had to adapt, this is a remarkable testimony to the tenacity of the pair-bonding mating strategy.

One argument that is sometimes heard is that, if pair-bonding is such a basic feature of the human species, why is it not total? If it was so valuable to the early tribal groups, why did evolution not make it permanent? There are stories about birds that pair for life with such an intensity of attachment that when one of them dies, the surviving partner never takes a new mate. Why did evolution not develop this extreme mechanism for humans and avoid all the misery and inefficiency of marriage collapse?

The answer, it would seem, is that in primeval times when the new mating strategy was developing in the hunter/gatherer tribes, the males were facing serious dangers in their search for prey and the females were facing difficult births due to the new vertical posture of our species. Either member of a mated pair could easily die young and this would leave the surviving partner reproductively stranded if the pairing mechanism was too rigid. If, on the other hand, after a period of distress and mourning, the surviving young adults could find it possible to form new pair-bonds, then the reproductive rate of the very small tribes could benefit. So, an almost perfect pair-bond would be better, from a survival point of view, than a perfect one.

In evolutionary terms, then, the human male is programmed to form a long-term relationship with a female partner, but with the reproductively valuable possibility that, should she die, he can, after a while, form a new pair. It is this slight weakening of the bond of attachment, so useful in early days, that has been magnified into a serious problem in modern times. The main reason for this has been the way in which the hunting pattern of the male has changed. Instead of setting out on a gruelling, dangerous pursuit of animal prey, he now sets off for the city to engage in a different kind of hunt. Once there, he will find himself in the company of many attractive young women, women who were totally absent from the primeval hunting fields. There were few temptations out on the savannah, but in the big city they are all around him. And this is where his less than perfect tendency to remain exclusively bonded to his mate lets him down.

But whatever its faults and its weaknesses, the fact remains that the majority of human males, in the majority of human cultures, settle in to long-term family units. And despite all the conflicts and the disruptions, these units have proved themselves to be remarkably successful at child-rearing. The proof of this is that the global human population has more than doubled in the past forty years, from 3,000 million to more than 6,000 million today.

If, on a global scale, the human male succeeds as a father, what of his role as a tribal hunter? As already mentioned, his ancient urge to hunt down prey animals has not been lost – evolution works too slowly for that to have happened – but it has been transformed in several ways, so that the hunt has become a symbolic one. All modern competitive sports, for example, are symbolic forms of hunting. They are all concerned with being skilled at either chasing or aiming, or both, and chasing and aiming are, of course, the basic ingredients of the primeval hunt. A huge industry has grown up around this symbolic activity, with enormous prizes for the champion chasers (like Michael Schumacher) or aimers (like Tiger Woods), and with vast throngs of would-be champions cheering them on from the sidelines. Team sports like football and basketball, to name but two, involve both chasing and aiming and, in addition, provide the modern sportsmen with the same sort of involvement in planning, cooperation, tactics and strategies that so absorbed their ancient counterparts.

It is noticeable that sport has no end product. It manufactures nothing. Its end point consists of a victorious champion holding aloft the precious prize, the symbolic prey. This is usually a cup, a statue or a plaque of some kind, an inedible, useless piece of metal. There may be a celebratory feast at the end of a major contest, just as there was at the end of a successful hunt, but the sporting activity itself is not productive in any way. It simply satisfies a deep-seated urge in the human male to re-enact, either as performer or onlooker, the skilful, physical challenge of the hunt. Every time the dart hits the bull’s eye, the billiard ball sinks into a pocket, the puck crosses the goal-line, the baseball goes for a home run, the cricket ball is hit for six, the football strikes the back of the net, and so on, the modern hunter and his followers let out a roar of triumph that, just for a moment, is as primeval as Tarzan’s great cry in the jungle. The moment of aiming has succeeded. The tribe will flourish. It is little wonder that, despite a great deal of female interest, the world of sport remains a predominantly male domain.

One of the special attributes of the human male is his physical strength. His athletic body, required for the hunt, developed advanced musculature that set him apart from the human female. On average, a man is 30 per cent stronger than a woman. His body contains 26 kg (57 lb) of muscle; hers contains only 15 kg (33 lb). In complete contrast, only 12.5 per cent of the male’s body weight is fat, whereas the figure for the female is 25 per cent. Nowhere is the division of labour in human evolution more clear than this. This is underlined by the fact that, when women indulge in muscle-building, they start to look more and more like men. It is impossible for them to develop a muscle-bound body that is feminine in appearance. If they go to the extreme of high-level competition in body-building, they even cease to ovulate.

The design of the male body means that he can lift much greater weights than the female – again an important quality when the hunters were carrying home the kill. The average male can lift twice his body weight; the average female can lift only half her weight. Internally, the male organs, the heart, lungs and bones, are bigger than those of the female, providing a valuable support system for the stronger male’s muscles. And the male’s blood contains more haemoglobin than the female’s.

The whole skeleton of the male body is bigger, giving the muscles a more powerful base from which to operate. And the average male is about 10 per cent heavier and 7 per cent taller than his female counterpart. The development of this more powerful male body can be detected as early as day one. The newborn male baby is, on average, both longer and heavier than the average female baby, and it displays more vigorous limb movements. It also has a higher basal metabolism and retains this all through life. Even at birth the male is showing signs of a greater athleticism than the female.

Among children, males display a greater visual acuity, something that will be useful on the hunt when they become adult. When at play, boys typically indulge in power play, with far more pushing, shoving, running, jumping, hammering and banging than is seen with girls. And their level of curiosity is already ahead of that of girls, revealing the birth of what will later become adult male risk-taking.

It has become fashionable in recent years, as part of the creed of sexual equality, to suggest that these differences between small boys and small girls are not inborn, and that any divergence we see is entirely the result of adults imposing artificial male and female roles upon them. Any careful study of toddlers soon dispels this idea. The signs are present very early on, in any playgroup, where no parental bias is operating, and even before the parents realise that the differences exist.

In fact, the idea of childhood sameness with boys and girls is not only wishful thinking, carefully tailored to fit a theory, but it also happens to be quite unnecessary for that particular theory. The idea of sexual equality is, in itself, perfectly suited to our species, but it does not have to depend on males and females being the same (except for a few minor anatomical differences, of course). The important division of labour that evolved in early human tribes did not create a dominant gender and a subordinate gender, but two genders that were urgently dependent on one another and that had equal importance. The fact that boys have special inborn differences from girls does nothing to damage the concept of equality of importance.

Unfortunately for today’s male, the conditions of modern civilisation have rendered his muscular superiority obsolete in the majority of tasks. Sitting behind an office desk or a factory bench, standing behind a shop counter, or slumped in front of a computer screen, requires little athleticism. In physical terms these are not fitting occupations for the human male body. It needs more active expression than this, if it is to be faithful to its tribal roots.

Some men respond to this problem by setting aside time to engage in ‘keep fit’ activities of one kind or another, but the majority can’t be bothered. For a few men, however, the urge to demonstrate their physical maleness becomes overpowering and they undertake exceptional feats of endurance and compete in dramatic displays of body strength. Everything from weight-lifting to mountain-climbing, and from arm-wrestling to polar trekking is undertaken, not because it will serve any practical purpose but because it will enable certain males to show their disgust at the increasing softness of twenty-first-century men. To the vast majority, these displays seem pointless and a waste of energy, but they are nevertheless a vivid reminder of what has been lost by modern men.

As television and computers have made life increasingly sedentary for the human male, we have also seen the arrival of dangerous sports clubs and other organisations that cater to the young male who is determined to engage in high-risk, extreme forms of physical activity. Some of the most popular of these new sports are:

Base-jumping, which involves leaping off the top of a tall structure such as a skyscraper, a bridge or an electrical tower, wearing a parachute and hoping it will open in time.

Cave-diving, the exploration of labyrinthine underwater systems, wearing diving equipment, but with the risk of getting completely lost hundreds of feet below the surface and then running out of air.

Speed-skiing, in which participants travel downhill at up to 160 miles an hour, wearing aerodynamic suits and specialised skis. One crash in these events usually results in death.

Supercross, in which riders fly through the air on a motorcycle while doing back-flips and other aerobatic manoeuvres.

If the recent spreading popularity of these and many other extreme sports does not demonstrate the deep-seated male urge to take serious risks, nothing will.

For some males, physical challenges have little appeal, but they still want to enjoy the thrill of risk-taking. For them, there is a whole range of possibilities, from playing the stock market to gambling at Las Vegas. Life in the financial centres of the great cities of the world involves taking risks almost every minute of the day and it is no accident that this is a largely masculine pursuit. Serious gambling, too, is a male-dominated pursuit. It is true that, if you visit the casinos of Las Vegas, you will also see many women, but the majority of them are playing the slot machines. The high-rollers around the poker tables are mostly men. It is the same at local bingo games and race tracks, with low stakes for women and high stakes for men. Women are, by nature, sensible and cautious; men are, according to your point of view, either brave or stupid.

Physical exertion and risk-taking are only two aspects of the primeval hunt that men today still feel impelled to re-create in some symbolic form. There is also the urge to bring home the kill. Shopping for meat in the local supermarket does not quite do the trick. Something more is needed. One answer is to become obsessed with collecting things. The collector, again usually male, develops a passion for some particular category of object and then sets about amassing as many good examples as he can. The category he selects can be almost anything, from Old Master paintings to match-box labels. It really doesn’t matter, just as long as there are many to choose from, with collections usually starting out with the common examples and then progressing to the increasingly rare ones. Tracking these down and bringing them back home to add to the growing collection becomes the special joy of the object-hunter.

The intensity of object-hunting can become so great that it virtually takes over a man’s life. Some houses are so stuffed full of collected items that it is almost impossible to find an inch of space to spare. And some of the objects collected are truly bizarre. They include such unlikely things as lawnmowers, dog collars, air-sickness bags, vintage vacuum cleaners, electric toasters, and quack medical devices. Almost anything is fair game, once the hunter’s prey is no longer fresh meat but has become a symbolic substitute.

At the top end of the scale, the atmosphere in those very special hunting grounds, the world’s great auction houses, has to be felt to be believed. When rival hunters are in full cry, admiring gasps can be heard in the sale rooms as prices go through the roof. Picasso’s Boy with a Pipe, which was sold for $104 million in May 2004, holds the world record for a painting sold at auction. Even this was outdone recently by a private purchase arranged through Sotheby’s of a painting by Jackson Pollack that fetched a world record price of $140 million.

Another characteristic of the early hunting males was that, when they were resting from the chase, they would spend hours cleaning, repairing, caring for and generally improving their weapons, the vital implements that stood between them and starvation. This fascination for primitive technology is today reflected in a masculine love of gadgets and machines, instruments and equipment, a pursuit that appeals to very few women.

After a successful hunt, there was the inevitable celebration and the time to tell tall tales about the dangers experienced on the chase. In modern times this has been transformed into hard-drinking sessions for groups of males after work. Anthropologists have described this as the ‘separation of drinking from the female-dominated domestic arena as a means of constructing masculinity’. In other words, by getting together and downing generous amounts of alcohol, modern males are able to re-create for themselves, momentarily, the sensation of being part of a loyal hunting pack.

It is important, on these occasions, to buy one’s round and to hold one’s liquor. Anyone failing on either of these counts loses status in the group. In other words they must demonstrate both that they are sharing and that they are tough. In various countries at different times, these drinking sessions have become formalised. Mens’ clubs with a strict membership have been formed and drinking games and other rituals have been invented to give the drinking sessions a heavier significance. In some countries, other narcotics are employed in place of the usual alcohol. In Yemen, for instance, male groups gather every day to chew qat (pronounced gat), the leaves of a narcotic plant. To have any social significance at all, a Yemeni male must belong to one of these qat gatherings, from which all women are totally excluded.

Some kind of game is often employed as a focus to bring men together in a mildly competitive way. The oldest one known to mankind, and one that was almost certainly used by the primitive hunters themselves, is the African board game called mancala. It has been played for at least 3,400 years, and probably much longer. Its advantage is that it can be played even without special tokens or wooden boards. Small pebbles and holes scooped in the dry earth are sufficient to get a game going, as the hunters squat together, relaxing after a chase. There are many other masculine games, such as boules in France, chess in Russia, darts in Britain, poker in America, and so on. Each of these beckons the wedded man away from the bosom of his family and briefly back into the company of the all-male gang.

In some countries all-male activities are much closer to the original hunting pattern. A group of men will take off for the woods to camp, fish, trek, or carry out some other such pseudo-primitive pursuit. Others will go on safari to Africa, or explore ancient ruins in Central America.

Time and again, as one moves around the world, it is possible to discover all-male pastimes of this sort, each with its local, official reasons for existing. But underlying all of them is the re-enactment of the social bonding of the primeval hunting party, the bonding that is necessary to ensure unquestioning support at sudden moments of crisis.

The twenty-first-century hunter can fulfil his urge to chase and aim by engaging in sport. He can express his physical strength by engaging in fitness routines. He can demonstrate his bravery and his risk-taking skills, from the physical to the mental, from dangerous pursuits to gambling. He can satisfy his desire to bring home the kill by searching for rare objects and assembling a collection of them. He can display his urge to care for and improve his weapons, by developing a technical skill of some kind. And finally, he can relive the successful hunter’s feast by engaging in bouts of social drinking. The ancient, primeval hunter may be dead, but the modern, symbolic hunter lives on.