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Elon Gilad
Dec 29, 2015 1:02 PM
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The Creation of Eve, from the Sistine Chapel ceiling by Michelangelo: Was
it from Adam's rib, as the story tells, or his baculum, as Ziony Zevit
theorizes? Rib maybe not, baculum definitely not.Sailko, Wikimedia
Commons
Genesis of Genesis: Where did the biblical story of Creation
come from?
Why is Israel called Israel?
What Israelis call Palestinians and why it matters
Eve was not created from Adam’s rib but from his baculum, meaning, his
penis bone, argues a distinguished professor. Ziony Zevit's theory is,
however, even more unlikely than the original story.
The famous story of how God created Eve from Adam’s rib in Genesis 2
was all a misunderstanding, suggests Zevit, a professor of Biblical
Literature and Northwest Semitic Languages at the American Jewish
University in California, in a recent article in the Biblical Archaeology
Review (“Was Eve Made from Adam’s Rib - or His Baculum?”).
Men do not have an uneven number of ribs, Zevit reasons. Nor do men
have less ribs than women – none seem to be missing. Why would the
ancient Hebrews come up with a story that so plainly fails to correspond
with reality?
For one thing, most mammals have a bone in their penis. Dogs do, whales
do, raccoons do, but actually, humans do not. Genesis 2, says Ziony,
explains how man lost his baculum – to Eve.
According to Ziony, translators of yore were led astray by the tricky word
the Bible uses for the contentious bone – tzela.
The word tzela appears about 40 times in the Bible, but nowhere does it
mean rib – except in Genesis 2.
Ziony’s explanation that these many tzlaot (plural of tzela) are the
collection which includes hands, legs and penises is unconvincing. It
might be more persuasive if a collective noun for hands, feet and penis
could be found in any language, but it doesn't exist.
Ziony also argues that ribs are not related to giving life, while penises are.
Indeed, to us, associating ribs with generating life seems preposterous,
but it didn’t seem so to the ancients.
The Sumerian myth Enki and Nihursag (a central god and his wife, a
mother goddess), which predates the Hebrew bible, actually tells a story
of life been generated from a rib. Enki becomes sick and his mother cures
him by giving birth to two gods from her ribs in order to heal him. One is
Ninti, whose name is a pun on the double meaning of ti in Sumerian - the
noun “rib”, and the verb “to make live.” Thus Ninti’s name means “Mrs.
Rib” and “Lady who give life.” Eve too is called “Mother of all life.”
But the clearest evidence that tzela is biblical Hebrew for “rib” is
linguistic.
Not only is tzela "rib" in post-biblical Hebrew, it has cognates meaning rib
in practically every Semitic language we know. That powerfully indicates
that tzela meant “rib” thousands and thousands of years before proto-
Semitic split up into the different Semitic languages: Aramaic has ala,
Arabic has dhala, Akkadian has tzela. All these and other cognates are
exactly in the form we would expect if the original proto-Semitic word
slowly morphed into different words for rib as the different Semitic
languages drifted apart.
It seems that for ancient Hebrews, the fact that men and women had the
same even number of ribs was not enough to kill a good story. Or perhaps
they never bothered to count the ribs in the first place.
@iansample
Wed 14 Dec 2016 00.01 GMTLast modified on Wed 14 Feb 2018 20.50 GMT
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Penis bones from various mammals. The baculum varies so much in terms of length and whether
it is present at all, that it is described as the most diverse bone ever to exist. Photograph:
KPA/Zuma/REX/Shutterstock
They found that the penis bone evolved in mammals more than 95 million
years ago and was present in the first primates that emerged about 50
million years ago. From that moment on, the baculum became larger in
some animals and smaller in others. The stump-tailed macaque, an
animal that weighs only 10kg, has an extremely long baculum for its size,
with the bone extending for 5cm. The bone is five times the size of the
baculum in the collared mangabey, which is a slightly larger monkey.
Kit Opie who ran the study with Matilda Brindle at University College
London, said that penis bone length was longer in males that engaged in
what he called “prolonged intromission.” In plain English, that means
that the act of penetration lasts for more than three minutes, a strategy
that helps the male impregnate the female while keeping her away from
competing males. The penis bone, which attaches at the tip of the penis
rather than the base, provides structural support for male animals that
engage in prolonged intromission.
Humans may have lost their penis bones when monogamy emerged as the
dominant reproductive strategy during the time of Homo erectus about
1.9 million years ago, the scientists believe. In monogamous relationships,
the male does not need to spend a long time penetrating the female,
because she is not likely to be leapt upon by other amorous males. That, at
least, is the theory.
“We think that is when the human baculum would have disappeared
because the mating system changed at that point,” Opie said. “This may
have been the final nail in the coffin for the already diminished baculum,
which was then lost in ancestral humans.” Details of the research are
published in Proceedings of the Royal Society.
“With the reduced competition for mates, you are less likely to need a
baculum,” he added. “Despite what we might want to think, we are
actually one of the species that comes in below the three minute cut-off
where these things come in handy.”
… we have a small favour to ask. More people are reading the Guardian
than ever but advertising revenues across the media are falling fast. And
unlike many news organisations, we haven’t put up a paywall – we want
to keep our journalism as open as we can. So you can see why we need to
ask for your help. The Guardian’s independent, investigative journalism
takes a lot of time, money and hard work to produce. But we do it because
we believe our perspective matters – because it might well be your
perspective, too.
I appreciate there not being a paywall: it is more democratic for the media
to be available for all and not a commodity to be purchased by a few. I’m
happy to make a contribution so others with less means still have access
to information.Thomasine, Sweden
1. Matilda Brindle
PhD candidate on the London NERC DTP, UCL
Disclosure statement
Matilda Brindle receives funding from the London NERC DTP (NE/L002485/1).
Partners
University College London provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation UK.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under Creative Commons license.
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One of the most weird and wonderful products of evolution is the penis bone, or
baculum. The baculum is an extra-skeletal bone, which means it is not attached to
the rest of the skeleton but instead floats daintily at the end of the penis.
Depending on the animal, bacula range in size from under a millimetre to nearly a
metre long, and in shape, varying from needle-like spines to fork like prongs.
The walrus baculum, which could easily be mistaken for a 2ft-long club, is around a
sixth of its body length, whereas the diminutive centimetre-long baculum of the
ring-tailed lemur is only around a 40th of its body length.
Bacula are found in certain species of mammal, but not all. Most primate males
have a baculum, so humans are rather an oddity in that they don’t have one. In a
handful of extraordinary circumstances human males have formed bones in the
soft tissue at the end of their penises, but this is a rare abnormality, rather than a
baculum.
We showed that the baculum first evolved after placental and non-placental
mammals split, around 145m years ago, but before the most recent common
ancestor of primates and carnivores evolved, around 95m years ago. Our research
also shows that the common ancestor of primates and carnivores had a baculum.
This means that any species in these groups without a baculum, such as humans,
must have lost it over the course of evolution.
So, why on earth would an animal need a bone in their penis in the first place?
Scientists have come up with a few theories as to why a baculum might be handy.
In certain species, such as cats, a female’s body doesn’t release its eggs until she
mates, and some argue that the baculum may help to stimulate females and trigger
ovulation. Another, somewhat colourfully named, theory is the vaginal friction
hypothesis. This essentially argues that the baculum acts as a shoehorn, enabling a
male to overcome any friction and squeeze himself into a female.
Another interesting discovery was that males of species facing high levels of sexual
competition for females have longer bacula than those facing lower levels of sexual
competition.
But what about humans? If the penis bone is so important in competing for a mate
and prolonging copulation, then why don’t we have one? Well, the short answer to
that is that humans don’t quite make it into the “prolonged intromission” category.
The average duration from penetration to ejaculation for human males is less than
two minutes.
But bonobos only copulate for about 15 seconds at a time and they still have a
baculum, even if it is very small (about 8mm). So what makes us different? It’s
possible that this comes down to our mating strategies. Human males (generally)
have minimal sexual competition as females typically only mate with one male at a
time. Perhaps the adoption of this mating pattern, in addition to our short
intromission duration, was the last straw for the baculum.
Scientists are only just beginning to piece together the function of this most
unusual bone. What seems to be clear is that changes in the primate baculum are
driven, at least partly, by a species’ mating strategy. The picture that seems to be
emerging is that, under high levels of sexual competition, bigger is better when it
comes to the penis bone.
hy Humans Have No
Penis Bone
Mating practices may help explain the mystery
By Matilda Brindle, The Conversation on December 14, 2016
Credit: Didier Descouens Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation,
an online publication covering the latest research.
One of the most weird and wonderful products of evolution is the penis
bone, or baculum. The baculum is an extra-skeletal bone, which means it
is not attached to the rest of the skeleton but instead floats daintily at the
end of the penis. Depending on the animal, bacula range in size from
under a millimetre to nearly a metre long, and in shape, varying from
needle-like spines to fork like prongs.
The walrus baculum, which could easily be mistaken for a 2ft-long club, is
around a sixth of its body length, whereas the diminutive centimetre-long
baculum of the ring-tailed lemur is only around a 40th of its body length.
Bacula are found in certain species of mammal, but not all. Most primate
males have a baculum, so humans are rather an oddity in that they don’t
have one. In a handful of extraordinary circumstances human males have
formed bones in the soft tissue at the end of their penises, but this is a
rare abnormality, rather than a baculum.
We showed that the baculum first evolved after placental and non-
placental mammals split, around 145m years ago, but before the most
recent common ancestor of primates and carnivores evolved, around 95m
years ago. Our research also shows that the common ancestor of primates
and carnivores had a baculum. This means that any species in these
groups without a baculum, such as humans, must have lost it over the
course of evolution.
So, why on earth would an animal need a bone in their penis in the first
place? Scientists have come up with a few theories as to why a baculum
might be handy. In certain species, such as cats, a female’s body doesn’t
release its eggs until she mates, and some argue that the baculum may
help to stimulate females and trigger ovulation. Another, somewhat
colourfully named, theory is the vaginal friction hypothesis. This
essentially argues that the baculum acts as a shoehorn, enabling a male to
overcome any friction and squeeze himself into a female.
Another interesting discovery was that males of species facing high levels
of sexual competition for females have longer bacula than those facing
lower levels of sexual competition.
But bonobos only copulate for about 15 seconds at a time and they still
have a baculum, even if it is very small (about 8mm). So what makes us
different? It’s possible that this comes down to our mating strategies.
Human males (generally) have minimal sexual competition as females
typically only mate with one male at a time. Perhaps the adoption of this
mating pattern, in addition to our short intromission duration, was the
last straw for the baculum.
Scientists are only just beginning to piece together the function of this
most unusual bone. What seems to be clear is that changes in the primate
baculum are driven, at least partly, by a species’ mating strategy. The
picture that seems to be emerging is that, under high levels of sexual
competition, bigger is better when it comes to the penis bone.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read
the original article.
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