SALVE ROMA! A Felidae Novel - By Akif Pirincci Page 0,82
all comparable to the sudden rise, which can be registered in the male dog at the moment of ejaculation. In the animal kingdom a point of culmination of arousal, which also marks the event of orgasm in women, could only be found in female apes.
In the past, some scientists considered the possibility that the bizarre postcoital behavior of female cats hints at an orgiastic experience. Directly after the generic »quickie« cats utter an explosive cry and oppose their »benefactor« with sudden anger. In the early Middle Ages Arabian scientists concluded from this, that the tomcats merges acrid ejaculate into his playmate. »She is in great pain because the sperm cauterizes, and she screams until she has ejected it.« Then the female cat wriggles heavily and welters almost spastically. Repeatedly, she licks her vulva, and the female won’t let herself get mounted until the strange »postlude« is ended. If this behavior really reflects a climax of arousal, which matches the male orgasm, remains doubtful though. The sudden change of mind might rather have another reason. The tomcat’s penis is riddled with many thorns on its tip, which probably cause a painful irritation inside the vagina. This tractation triggers the so-called »induced« ovulation in the female cat.
4. In regard to the reproduction skills of cats, older men of our species can easily take a leaf out of their book. Tomcats stay in the »breeding business« up until old age, at which many grown men are able to fight gravity only with the help of Viagra. Older female cats stay fertile until a point in life, which women of our species don’t even reach with the most advanced reproduction technologies. There are proven cases of tomcats, which successfully bred even at the high age of sixteen years. This matches a human age of 78 years. Female cats still have provably conceived kittens at the age of 12. This equates to 65 human years. This extreme fertility allows a female to conceive about 35 litters – or converted – 144 kittens in an average lifetime.
In contrary to the cat – and to our closest relatives in the world of animals – human women lose their ability to reproduce long before their bodies lapse due to aging. Most women are still so tough at the time of their so-called »menopause« that they could easily live as much more years as they lived before they reached the climacteric period. In the animal world the fertile years of the females only end close to their biological end, at least most of the times. The invention of the menopause, namely a »post-reproductional« phase of life, poses the evolutionary biologists a giant riddle: If evolution really benefits the survival of those individuals, who successfully pass their genes on, why do women stop passing their genes ahead of schedule?
As early as the 1950s, evolutionary biologists presented an explanation, which was adopted in literature under the name of »grandmother hypothesis«. According to this, it doesn’t »pay« for women of a certain age to conceive additional children, because pregnancy comes with to many risks. Hyper-mortality in old age also creates the risk that those late-born children become orphans. So it’s more useful for the maintenance of one’s own genes to invest into already existing children and grandchildren.
As plausible as this explanation may sound, for a long time there was no empirical support at all. This situation only changed when anthropologists studied a tribal of hunters and gatherers in Tanzania – the Hadza people. Their way of living may be seen as the closest approach to the human state of nature. The scientists found out that the grandmothers collected surprisingly much food for their grandchildren and took the pressure off their daughters in regard to search for food. The support enabled the daughters to conceive more children in less time. Basically, the grandmothers followed the genetic egoism, as their own genes survived in their daughters and grandchildren.
But without aiming for this purposely, with that strategy grandmas probably started a sheer »bluff failure« in tribal history – at least that’s what anthropologists believe: As women grew older and older, the human childhood prolonged, and with that the phase, in which humans gather knowledge. This caused the evolution of bigger brains, which enabled our ancestors to develop language, tools and culture. A totally different theory says that there are no fertile grandmas among us humans, because their fertility would have caused trouble in our evolutionary history. For example they would have survived their husbands and