By Sangeeth Sebastian

Many of you must have broken an arm or a leg at least once in your life, but how about penis? Yes, you can break that too. But not like the way you think it might happen with your other body parts.

That’s because penis doesn’t have a bone (though, ironically, an erection is also called a boner). In this, human mammals are almost an exception from their primate cousins.

Monogamy is cited as one possible reason why human mammals lost their penis bone.

As per this theory, following a shift in mating pattern, thousands of years ago, from multiple partners to a single partner, men lost the need to prolong the duration of sexual intercourse and stave off attempts from a competing male trying to get lucky with the same woman he is having sex with.

In animals with penis bone, it acted like some kind of an anti-mate poaching device, providing structural support in prolonging the duration of intercourse, to more than three minutes to be precise, according to a research published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society: a nature’s way of pissing off people in queue.

It’s interesting to think if premature ejaculation in men would have been so much of an issue if human penis still had a bone.  

A penis bone is also the most diverse bone ever to exist, varying so much in terms of length—from the size of a little finger to a war club almost two feet long. In Alaska, people used to wage wars with walrus penis bones, once upon a time. I am digressing.