Claudius F. Mayer: From Plato to Pope Paul / Orvostörténeti Közlemények – Supplementum 17. (Budapest, 1989)

practices of all ages would require many years of reading and studying the world literature, and large volumes could not hold all the related findings. Lack of time and lack of space force me therefore that

—keeping in view the Polybian

3 advice about historical truth

—I present my material as historical samples of the genetic ways of the human race in a manner as MADÁCH, the Hungarian playwright, used just scenic fragments of history to illustrate the fate of mankind in his "The Tragedy of Man".

4 II. PREHISTORIC AND PRIMITIVE RACES The social and sexual behavior of the early man in the Pleistocene is a matter of speculation. Stone Age nomadic people probably enjoyed total equality and freedom, as birds in the air, and fish in the water.

5 Children of our "

first parents

" married each other, brothers and sisters,

6 just as gods have loved their sisters in classical mythology:

—Saturn married Ops, Oceanos married Tethys, Zeus took Hera. The children belonged to the community in these inbred primitive herds. It is assumed that each tribe passed through a period of social organization when syngenetic relations were established only by maternal blood. Matriarchate was mostly accompanied by polyandry, several brothers having a single wife. When nomadic life stopped, and human economy changed to agriculture and husbandry, matriarchate gave way to patriarchal rule, and, with the father's right, polygyny also developed on the side of monogamy. The pile dwellers of Switzerland had already many wives apiece.

7 The Stone Age races had many population problems. Although the primitive groups needed extra fighters and producers, they were also afraid of extra mouths to feed.

8 To increase tribal population, killing the males captured in war, and retaining the females as secondary mates has been therefore a common practice throughout the centuries. About preventive checks of the paleo- and neolithic populations some idea may be derived from observation of analogous customs existing a few decades or centuries ago among primitive people.

9 Most of such observations are found in the reports of travellers and Christian missionaries in the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries at their first contact with uncivilized peoples (supposedly still in their Stone Age period) all over the Globe. How often preventive population checks were applied from racial genetic, eugenic motives or for egotistic other reasons remains an open question.

1

0 Among primitive peoples, these checks included castration, coitus interruptus, mechanical contraception, urethral surgery, abortion, infanticide and infant cannibalism, delayed lactation, and gerontocide. By analogy we may assume that these practices date from prehistoric times. 1. Castration.

—-On the Caroline Islands, excision of one testicle was customary to reduce male potency. Among the Hottentots, the same custom was practised. The African Galla tribes squashed one testicle between two stones, but it is doubtful whether this procedure was also carried out for eugenic sterilization. Africans also practiced castration on males of conquered tribes with the intention of annihilating the entire hostile tribe (an early and most drastic form of genocide!). 6