Because sexual intercourse between members of the same sex cannot result in pregnancy, the toleration or encouragement of homosexuality and lesbianism can be regarded as a means of population control, if not birth control. Almost all humans have a bisexual potential, and how this is allowed to be expressed would, at least theoretically, have an effect on the number of children conceived. Thorkil Vanggaard, utilizing mostly unexplored Scandinavian material, hypothesized that all Indo-Europeans practiced at least initiatory pederasty until their dispersal among the various regions of Europe and Asia. Jan Bremer claimed that all European people, not just Indo-Europeans, engaged in same-sex practices and he traced the initiatory pederasty present in some Melanesian societies to ancient practices and customs. Bernard Sargent found the practice widespread among the Hellenes (Greeks), the Taifales of the Arabian peninsula, the Macedonians, the Albanians, more vaguely the Celts, as well as among many non Indo-European peoples.
The Greeks of the fifth century, who institutionalized pederasty, traced the origin of their custom to the ancient Minoans. Aristotle argued that the people on Crete institutionalized pederasty to cut down on the population explosion. This concept has been adopted by William Percy, who maintains that the system was deliberately instituted as a method of population control. A young man in his twenties took over the education and guidance of a young teenager of his own class and background, regarding himself as the boy’s lover, and this relationship lasted until the age of thirty, when the older partner by law was required to marry. The younger man in return took another teenager into his care and guided him until he himself reached thirty. In some places such guardianship emphasized the development of the warrior individual but in Athens it became the vehicle of cultural transmission. It became an intense type of male bonding. It also acted as an effective population control because, as indicated elsewhere, the frequency of sexual intercourse is an important factor in pregnancy.
There were of course other alternatives to boys as loving companions, and the ancient world had a large variety of prostitutes, both female and male, to satisfy the man if he no longer sought sexual companionship with his wife and mother of his children.
