You are on page 1of 16

Why God Didn't Use Adam's Penis

Bone to Make Eve


Rib theory of Creation prevails: Ancient linguistics provide no support for the
theory that Eve was fashioned of man's mysteriously absent penis bone.

Elon Gilad
Dec 29, 2015 1:02 PM
13comments Zen Subscribe now

 10share on facebook

 Tweet

 send via email

 reddit

 stumbleupon
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?

Ziony's conclusion was that there must be another solution: If man is


missing a missing bone, he reasoned, it is the baculum, or penis bone.

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.

Wikimedia Commons, elaboration by Haaretz


Keep updated: Sign up to our newsletter
Email*
Sign up

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.

Elsewhere, it refers to the side room of a building, or the side of an object.


Ziony posits that in ancient times, tzela in anatomy referred to organs
protruding outward from the body: hands, legs and penis.

While this makes an interesting hypothesis, it is very unlikely. For one,


studying the verse in question, it is clear that God is taking something
from Adam of which he has many: “And the LORD God caused a deep
sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and
closed up the flesh instead thereof” (Genesis 2:21).

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.

Why don't humans have a penis bone?


Scientists may now know
Speed of human mating might be behind the lack of a baculum in
humans, suggests study tracing bone’s evolution

Ian Sample Science editor

@iansample

Wed 14 Dec 2016 00.01 GMTLast modified on Wed 14 Feb 2018 20.50 GMT



This article is over 1 year old


Shares
17,613

Comments
1,329

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

It can be as long as a finger in a monkey. In the walrus, it can be two feet


long. But the human male has lost it completely. And researchers are a
little stumped.

Known as the baculum to scientists with an interest, the penis bone is a


marvel of evolution. It pops up in mammals and primates around the
world, but 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.
Prompted by the extraordinary differences in penis bone length found in
the animal kingdom, scientists set out to reconstruct the evolutionary
story of the baculum, by tracing its appearance in mammals and primates
throughout history.

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.

Sign up for Lab Notes - the Guardian's


weekly science update
Read more

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.

In chimps, the penis bone is no longer than a human fingernail. The


tininess of the bone correlates with the very short spell that the male
spends mating, in the order of seven seconds. In chimpanzee groups,
females mate with all the males, in what appears to be a strategy to reduce
the risk of her children being killed by older males. “It gives each male an
idea that they may have fathered the subsequent offspring, and it is in her
interests to get that done quickly,” Opie said.

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.”

Since you’re here …

… 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

How penis bones help primates win


the mating game – and why humans
might have lost theirs
December 13, 2016 7.03pm EST
All shapes and sizes. Didier Descouens, CC BY-SA
Author

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.

View all partners

Republish this article

Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under Creative Commons license.

 Email
 Twitter43
 Facebook695
 LinkedIn
 Print
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.

In a new study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, my colleague Kit


Opie and I examined how the baculum developed in mammals by studying how it is
distributed across different species in light of their pattern of descent (known as
phylogenetics).

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.

Is that it? Shutterstock


Finally, it has been proposed that the baculum helps prolong intromission,
otherwise known as vaginal penetration. Far from simply being a nice way to spend
an afternoon, prolonging intromission like this is a way for a male to prevent a
female from sneaking off and mating with anyone else before his sperm have had a
chance to work their magic. This theory brings a whole new meaning to the term
“cock-blocking”.
We found that, over the entire course of primate evolution, having a baculum was
linked to longer intromission durations (anything over three minutes). On top of
this, males of primate species with longer intromission durations tend to have far
longer bacula than males of species where intromission is short.

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.

In a new study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, my


colleague Kit Opie and I examined how the baculum developed in
mammals by studying how it is distributed across different species in light
of their pattern of descent (known as phylogenetics).

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.

Finally, it has been proposed that the baculum helps prolong


intromission, otherwise known as vaginal penetration. Far from simply
being a nice way to spend an afternoon, prolonging intromission like this
is a way for a male to prevent a female from sneaking off and mating with
anyone else before his sperm have had a chance to work their magic. This
theory brings a whole new meaning to the term “cock-blocking”.
We found that, over the entire course of primate evolution, having a
baculum was linked to longer intromission durations (anything over three
minutes). On top of this, males of primate species with longer
intromission durations tend to have far longer bacula than males of
species where intromission is short.

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.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read
the original article.

Why do some mammals have a bone in their


penises?
Everything you ever wanted to know about mammalian bacula
Print edition | Science and technology
Dec 17th 2016

PENILE stiffness is the stuff of smutty jokes. In Darwinian terms,


though, it is no laughing matter. Intromission, the meeting of penis and
vagina, is crucial to reproduction. With insufficient stiffness,
intromission will not happen and the genes of the male will fail to make
it into the next generation.

It is no surprise, therefore, that many male mammals have a bone, known


as a baculum, in their penises to add to stiffness. What is surprising is
that many others—men included—do not. What causes a baculum to
evolve is not clear. But a study just published in the Proceedings of the
Royal Society, by Matilda Brindle and Christopher Opie of University
College, London, has shed some light on the matter.

Get our daily newsletter

Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks.

Sign up now

Latest stories


How Ruth Bader Ginsburg became a trailblazer for gender equality

DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA 27 MINUTES AGO



France is still coming to grips with the role of feminism in May 1968

PROSPERO 2 HOURS AGO



When respect for diversity is taken to crazy extremes
OPEN FUTURE 3 HOURS AGO

Who has the right to judge Americans?

THE ECONOMIST EXPLAINS 10 HOURS AGO



On Marco Rubio’s interview with The Economist

DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA 13 HOURS AGO



Transcript: An interview with Marco Rubio

DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA 13 HOURS AGO


See more

Ms Brindle and Dr Opie have reviewed what data exist about


mammalian bacula, especially those of primates and carnivores, and
compared these with what is known about different species’ sex lives.
They picked primates and carnivores because both groups contain some
species whose males have a baculum and others whose males do not.
(The picture is of a skeleton of an extinct wolf species, in which the bone
is particularly prominent.)

The researchers predicted that species with a baculum would be those in


which male-male competition is worked out more at the level of the
sperm, in the female’s reproductive tract, than it is at the level of the
individual, by fighting and fancy display. There is a precedent here. In
primates, testis size is inversely correlated with harem formation. If you,
as a male, have fought off the competition and established reasonably
exclusive access to a group of females, then your sperm are unlikely to
be competing directly with those of other males. You therefore need to
generate fewer sperm, and so can get away with smaller testes. This, the
story goes, is why gorillas, which form harems, have much smaller
testes, relative to their body sizes, than do chimpanzees, which are
promiscuous. (Men’s testis size lies between these two extremes.)

It might therefore be expected that baculum size correlates with testis


size. Surprisingly, Ms Brindle and Dr Opie found that it does not. They
did, however, find three different but pertinent correlations. First, despite
the lack of a relationship between baculum size and testis size, there was
a clear one between the bone’s length (scaled for the size of the animal in
question) and a species’ promiscuity: more promiscuous species had
longer bacula. Second, species with specific mating seasons, rather than
all-year-round mating, had longer bacula. Third, there was a strong
correlation between the length of the bone in a species, and the average
length of time intromission lasted in that species.

All of these observations make sense if the baculum’s purpose is to


compete with the mating efforts of other males. Promiscuity increases
the risk that a female will be inseminated by another male before the first
male’s spermatozoa have had a chance to fertilise the female’s eggs.
Seasonal breeding similarly piles on the pressure, by concentrating
mating attempts into a small period of time. And increasing the length of
coitus, which a baculum’s stiffening presence permits, reduces the time
available for competitors to engage in a successful mating of their own.

Ms Brindle’s and Dr Opie’s prediction thus turns out to be correct—and


it applies to people, too. The lack of a baculum in humans is of a piece
with the lack of a mating season and with the existence of a pair-bonded
mating system that has, by comparison with many other species, only
limited levels of promiscuity. As for the length of time that sexual
congress lasts in Homo sapiens, the adequacy of that is, perhaps, not a
matter into which science should dare to trespass.

You might also like