British Museum, London
The floor where I now stood, puzzled, and waving about what seemed to me like a wand-like bone, had once been covered in milk. This was the site of an old dairy farm, now the home of UofT ‘s zooarchaeology collection.
I found myself shuffling through cardboard boxes marked Vulpes lagopus, Ovibos moschatus, and Erignathus barbatus, in a hopeless attempt to identify my bone. That’s when Prof Friesen pointed out to me (and to the class): “Anna, you are holding a baculum” – blank stare – “That’s a penis bone”.
By then I knew they came in all sorts of different shapes and sizes (across the animal kingdom I mean), but it had never occured to me that the penis could also come in the calcified version. And I thought, what a waste to have given it up to evolution…
While most other primate fellows are endowed with a baculum, it seems Adam may have lost it for humanity when he sacrificed his ‘rib’ for Eve; indeed, a few misunderstandings over the years may have made his os penis into a rib. While the baculum is a very simple and elegant way of solving the ‘boner’ issue, man has chosen a more boastful approach to the intercourse affair: hydraulics.
Sex is life, and while the female womb is its cradle, the penis is its vessel. As such, only a few elementary tasks are but asked of it: rigidity and deliverance… in a flash.
Humans seem to have made an absolutely complicated mess of the very basic business of ‘seed-planting’, but most mammals, being more pragmatical about these issues, keep sexual encounters at a bare minimum. They ‘get in’ and ‘get out’ as quickly as they can (the baculum-endowed Chimpanzee for instance, lasts on average a mere 6 seconds – an expedience which must lie in the other 2% of the genome we did not, thankfully, inherit), in which case assuring stiffness at the crucial moment is key. A bone, for instance, does the trick.
But behind every handicap, there is a blessings in disguise… and mammals without a baculum strut bigger erections and provide longer lasting carnal hook-ups. If the lion is able to provide 250, 30 second bouts of sexual ecstasy in 4 days, the human penis is able to bring multiple five-second bursts of joy (with a capital ‘G’) to its female counterpart in an average 7.3 minutes of union, due to its great size (the greatest of all primates in fact).
And while we don’t ride with the lions on their copulation marathon, (whose erection depends on a willingly moved muscle that pushes the baculum sitting inside his abdomen into his penis), the wandless human erection is nothing short of magic.
Indeed, the gravity-defying performance the male penis must rise for, relies solely on the concentration of blood inside two tubular structures that cover its length – a mostly involuntary occurrence.
Not short of a physiological feat, females may have seen in these shaftless tumescences a sign of good health, and may have acquired, over the years, a preference for the soft version of the erection over the all too easy baculum-style one. Perhaps as a serendipitous outcome of this preference, these boneless erections were left free to grow long enough to reach the female G-spot. And according to studies, it may well turn out to be that ‘a happy female is a pregnant female’ – in which case females would tend to be drawn to the orgasm-inducing engorgements…
After much excavating through the cardboard boxes in the zooarchaeology collection at UofT, I finally found my glorious Eureka moment when I matched my baculum to that of a raccoon’s. Despite being sometimes worn as a luck or fertility charm, this raccoon baculum brought me neither the best mark in the class nor pregnancy (phew), but it gave me a new perspective on the human male genitalia.
… and although I am much the bone lover myself, those are several inches of flesh that seem to do just fine without one. Clearly, one can get all the magic needed without a ‘wand’.
