How the human penis lost its bone

There is no doubt that when reading the title of this article, many people suddenly wondered: “There is a bone in the penis?! “. And yes ! But if the idea seems so absurd to us, it is because the human species is effectively deprived of it, unlike many other species. Difference (injustice?) which led London scientists to question the why and how, tells us Marie-Céline Jacquier, of Futura Sciences. Their conclusions are published in the very serious journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

baculum. It is therefore the scientific name of this famous bone, ignored by humans, but yet widely distributed among primates and carnivores. Note that it is bacula like penises: strong disparities in size exist. We thus learn that bonobos, known for their insatiable sexual appetite, have a baculum 8 small millimeters, while the walrus can boast of having a penile bone of 50 cm, or one-sixth of the total length of its body. And yet, the walrus does not have a more unbridled sexuality than that of the bonobos. If the function creates the organ, it does not seem to create the bone…

And yet, there would indeed be a link between sex and baculum, according to the British researchers. The seasonality of reproduction would have an effect on the size of the penile bone. But more interestingly, it would play a role in the duration of penetration.
The presence of baculum would be associated with a longer “intromission” in primates. However, the average duration of penetration would be only two minutes in humans, a duration which, obviously, did not justify that it is equipped with this additional bone. Except that, underlines Marie-Céline Jacquier, the bonobo certainly copulates a lot, but only 15 seconds each time, and yet, it has indeed retained a vestige of baculum.

The researchers therefore pushed their research further and proposed a hypothesis. the baculum would have been conserved during evolution only in species where sexual competition is high. The longer the penetration, the less the female would be tempted to copulate with several males in a row…

A theory that still does not really explain the case of bonobos, whose micro-baculum will therefore remain a mystery, but which suggests an explanation as to the absence of penile bone in humans. Women would rather tend to mate with only one partner at a time, thus making sexual competition almost nil. It would therefore be monogamy that would have made the bones of men’s penises disappear!