They also did not know, as we do now, that homosexuality, both ritual and recreational, exists in most pre-urban tribal cultures, such as the Melanesians of Papua-New Guinea and Northern Australia as well as the tribes of the Amazon and Africa.
Knowing now what I do about the human race it would not surprise me if homosexual pederasty had been practiced by most of our heterosexual male ancestors. It may have evolved from rather savage behavior - dominant adult males raping boys out of the will to dominate or just plain horniness.
I am inclined to think that the "missing link," a few million or more years ago, was not that different from his ape forebears and practiced quasi-homosexual dominance tactics on their upstart youths. Perhaps, like apes, the youths would surrender to the dominant males by presenting their rumps.
Introduce the human tendencies for willfullness and lust and it does not take much imagination to see that what once may have been merely a quasi-sexual act of dominance and surrender could easily have become savage man-boy rape.
As mankind began to develop tribal communities this behavior would have to be codified and ritualized. When studying the Melanesians one gets a glimpse into what may have been a way of life for most of our ancestors as well as the Greeks' ancestors.
When agricultural settlements began to demand more co-operation, laws would be needed to curb anti-social behavior. Savage lust and self-centered willfulness had to be controlled and ritualized. Did the ritual homosexuality among the Melanesians, where pederasty is a part of a youth's initiation into adulthood, evolve from less civilized boy-rape?
Of course, it is also possible that this behavior may have been a devious rationalization of male appetites, an excuse to use boys for sexual pleasure. However the Melanesians do seem to think of semen in religious terms as did the ancient Sumerians. Semen was involved in many a fertility ritual. We will probably never know how ritualized pederasty arose or evolved. All we do know is that some form of it existed before the ancient Greeks practiced it.
The Athenians knew that the Cretans still practiced a ritualized form of boy rape. An older man, with the co-operation of the boy's father, ritually kidnapped a boy and took him to a remote region to live with him for a few months. Zeus, who had been an ancient Cretan god, was behaving in accordance with Cretan culture when he raped Ganymede. Cretan boy-rape traditions had evolved from earlier Minoan rituals.
By the time Plato walked the streets of Athens homosexual pederasty had been highly refined. The Greeks did not invent homosexual pederasty but they did perfect it, legislate it and the poets and philosphers idealized and romanticized it.
The Greeks were not homosexual in the same way as we understand it nowadays. Though they practiced homosexual pederasty they were basically a heterosexual society. They were the evolved descendants of ancestors who, like the Melanesians, had begun to tame and ritualize the dominant and domineering heterosexual male's savage urge to rape pretty young boys.
Even today pederasty seems to be the domain of otherwise heterosexual males while true homosexuals prefer their adult peers. It seems that a heterosexual male can only find another male sexually attractive if he is like a woman - hairless, smaller and powerless. Primitive adult heterosexual males could only have sex with their inferiors - women, prostitutes, slaves and boys.
