The roving eye is not a modern phenomenon. It traces its roots, scientific research has now revealed, to the life and times of the Early Man. The life of the caveman and the cavewoman, evidently, was not one of unrelenting drudgery. In between hunting - primarily the man's job then - and tending to the hearth - the modern Indian man still thinks that this is the woman's prerogative - primitive couples did take some time out to have some fun after all. And it was a bit of an orgy alright. According to a recent report published in the journal, Nature, Neanderthals, a subspecies of archaic humans, were busy bedding another subspecies, the Denisovans. The consequence of all that raw, primal hanky-panky was a love-child - a female - whose bony remains have now been discovered in a Siberian cave, sending ripples of excitement among scientists and laymen.

But then variety, the avant-gardists have argued with conviction, is the spice of life - especially sex-life. It is possible that their ancestors passed on this touch of radicalism in their veins. Science now has the evidence to show that the evolution of the human race was brought about by separate chains of lustful rendezvous among species with distinct genetic compositions. It was not just the Neanderthals and the Denisovans who were, in a manner of speaking, exchanging furtive, amorous glances before getting on to the act. Everyone was having fun. The Homo sapiens evenundertook an intercontinental journey, travelling from Africa to Neanderthal-dominated Eurasia, to heed their loins' calling. But who inducted the early humans into the pleasurable business of frolicking? Perhaps it was the gibbon, or even the finch. Interbreeding is not uncommon in nature. Human evolution itself is said to be the result of the allure of hybridity, which, in turn, has made the human race enchantingly diverse.

What is curious though is the complexity of the aesthetics concerning the idea of hybridity in the annals of human civilization. A hybrid entity, one that is unreal, can be an object of reverence and affection. Take, for instance, India's love for the elephant-headed god who is said to be the fount of wisdom. Yet, unlike their forebears, modern men and women are distinctly uncomfortable when it comes to certain kinds of mixing in life. Intersexed people remain objects of ridicule and discrimination; inter-racial unions are, more often than not, treated as an eyesore even in some progressive constituencies; closer home, the fates of inter-caste dalliances and, now, inter-faith courtship, are rather bleak.

The other imponderable for modernity is sex and the attendant autonomy of choice. Man's progenitors certainly had a lot of both - the sex as well as the freedom to choose with whom to have or not have it. But their descendants, restrained by factors real and imagined, are less free in this respect.