Morris latched on to the fact that the sexual division of labour (the men away hunting, the women at home gathering) necessitated some mechanism to ensure the sexual loyalty of one’s mate – this was the era of free love, after all. The early 1960s had seen the first field studies of monkeys and apes, and a corresponding interest in human evolution and the biology of contemporary hunter-gatherers. In the laid-back, blue-smoke atmosphere of the hippy era, the book struck a chord with the wider public – if for no other reason than that, in the decade of free love, it asserted that humans had the largest penis for body size of all the primates. With his zoologist’s training (he had had a distinguished career studying the behaviour of fishes and birds at Oxford University as part of the leading international group in this field), he gave us a picture of who we really are. Yes, we were naked and bipedal, but beneath the veneer of culture lurked an ancestral avatar. Its pitch was that humans really were just apes, and much of our behaviour could be understood in terms of animal behaviour and its evolution. We were all gearing up for the summer of love when, in 1967, Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape took us by storm.
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