Speaking of Sex: An Interview with Psychologist Christopher Ryan, Co-Author of the New York Times Bestseller Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (Interview‪)‬

Christopher Ryan received a BA in English and American literature from Saybrook University in San Francisco, California, in 1984 and returned twenty years later for an MA and PhD in psychology. The intervening decades, he writes, were spent "traveling around the world, living in unexpected places working at very odd jobs (e.g., gutting salmon in Alaska, teaching English to prostitutes in Bangkok and self-defense to land-reform activists in Mexico, managing commercial real-estate in New York's Diamond District, and helping Spanish physicians publish their research)." Drawing upon his multi-cultural experience, Ryan's research focuses on trying to distinguish the human from the cultural; his doctoral dissertation looked specifically at the prehistoric roots of human sexuality. Based in Barcelona since the mid-1990s, he has lectured at the University of Barcelona Medical School and consults at various local hospitals. He speaks about human sexuality to audiences around the world, and his work has appeared in major newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals. He is also the author of a textbook used in medical schools and teaching hospitals throughout Spain and Latin America. In December 2010 Ryan appeared on the radio program Equal Time for Freethought (ETFF) where he spoke about Sex at Dawn, co-authored with Cacilda Jetha and published by Harper in 2010--and also about just what exactly the anthropological and psychological evidence says about humans' "natural" state. The following excerpt is reprinted with permission from the producers.