In this episode Chris and Danielle explore:

• Exploring menstruation rituals and ceremonies within hunter-gatherer communities

• Significance of the full and new moons in these ceremonies

• Discussing how these ceremonies and rituals were lost over time

• Understanding the connection between menstruation and moon cycles

• Acknowledging the darkness in the lack of equity for women and the taboo around menstruation

• Examining ways to reclaim the power and significance of menstruation in modern society

• Looking at how we can evolve as a species through reconnecting to our womb and embracing our feminine cycles

It might be imagined that social conditions are irrelevant to how language evolved, since humans everywhere use language independently of social complexity or political system. Yet despite cultural differences, all human societies have certain underlying features in common. Below a certain threshold level of cooperation and trust, not even the simplest form of language could evolve.

Language has sometimes been described as a ‘mirror of mind’. Chomsky attributes this idea to ‘the first cognitive revolution’ inspired by Descartes among others in the seventeenth century. ‘The second cognitive revolution’ – triggered in large measure by Chomsky’s own work – is taken to have been a twentieth century rediscovery of these earlier insights into the nature of language and mind.

Only by misconstruing the term performative are the authors able to argue that males surpass females in “performative applications” of language. Linguistic performatives are not costly displays of quality, and syntax cannot be explained as an outcome of behavioural competition between pubertal males. However, there is room for a model in which language co-evolves with the unique human life-history stage of adolescence.

As a feature of life on earth, language is one of science’s great remaining mysteries. A central difficulty is that it appears so radically incommensurate with nonhuman systems of communication as to cast doubt on standard neo-Darwinian accounts of its evolution by natural selection. Yet scientific (as opposed to religious or philosophical) arguments for a discontinuity between human and animal communication have come into prominence only over the past 40 years. As long as behaviourism dominated anglophone psychology and linguistics, the transition from animal calls to human speech seemed to offer no particular difficulty (see, for example, Mowrer 1960; Skinner 1957). But the generative revolution in linguistics, begun with the publication of Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures in 1957 and developed in many subsequent works (e.g. Chomsky 1965, 1966, 1972, 1975, 1986; Chomsky and Halle 1968) radically altered our conception of language, and posed a challenge to evolutionary theory that we are still striving to meet.

Language has been described as a ‘mirror of mind’. Chomsky attributes this idea to ‘the first cognitive revolution’ inspired by Descartes amongothers in the seventeenth century. ‘The second cognitive revolution’ — triggered in large measure by Chomsky’s own work — is taken to have been a twentieth century rediscovery of these earlier insights into the nature of language and mind.

Nineteenth century anthropologists widely agreed that early human society was not based on the nuclear family. Lewis Henry Morgan instead championed the matrilineal clan as the first stable institutional framework for human family life. In this, he was supported by theorists who later came to include E. B. Tylor, Friedrich Engels, W. H. R. Rivers, Emile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud. Until the 1920s, most anthropologists still accepted a ‘stages’ view of the evolution of kinship, in which matrilineal descent systems universally preceded their patrilineal counterparts.

In 1844, following a four-year voyage around the world, Charles Darwin confided to a close friend that he had come to a dangerous conclusion. For seven years, he wrote, he had been “engaged in a very presumptuous work”, perhaps “a very foolish one”. He had noticed that on each of the Galapagos Islands, the local finches ate slightly different foods and had evolved correspondingly modified beaks. In South America, he had examined many extraordinary fossils of extinct animals. Pondering the significance of all this, he had felt forced to change his mind about the origin of species. To his friend, Darwin wrote: “I am almost convinced (quite contrary to the opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.”

Atran & Norenzayan (A&N) rightly criticize cognitive theories for failure to explain sacrifice and commitment. But their attempt to reconcile cognitivism with commitment theory is unconvincing. Why should imaginary entities be effective in punishing moral defectors? Heavy costs are entailed in enforcing community-wide social contracts, and behavioural ecology is needed to explain how and why evolving humans could afford these costs.

This ambitious volume is the sequel to an earlier work (Lawson & McCauley 1990) in which the authors 'launched the cognitive science of religion' (McCauley & Lawson 2002, ix). Adopting a linguistics-inspired 'competence' approach and assimilating ritual to the Agent-Action-Patient structure of propositional speech, they make a series of scientific predictions. Where it is the Agent who is 'Special' in the sense of 'closest to God', it is predicted that the Patient will participate just once in a vivid, memorable event. By contrast, where only the Action, Instrument or Patient is special - that is, where God himself is not responsible for what happens - we may expect performances to be impermanent in their effects and correspondingly repeatable.

Cetacean cultural transmission is associated with lengthened postmenopausal life histories and relatively stable matrilineal social structures. Although Homo erectus was not marine adapted, broadly comparable selection pressures, life history profiles, and social structures can be inferred.

My field of research is human cultural evolution. Palaeoanthropological strategic modelling (Tooby & DeVore 1987) requires generalised, cross-species research into how and why animals might pursue cultural strategies. With their excellent overview of the cetacean literature, Rendell and Whitehead (R&V) have contributed significantly to this endeavour.

‘Selfish gene’ Darwinism differs from earlier versions of evolutionary theory in its focus on one key question: Why cooperate? The faculty of speech which distinguishes Homo sapiens from other species is an aspect of human social competence. By inference, it evolved in the context of uniquely human strategies of social cooperation. In these chapters, therefore, Darwinism in its modern, socially aware form provides our theoretical point of departure.

Darwinism is setting a new research agenda across the related fields of palaeoanthropology, evolutionary psychology and theoretical linguistics (Dunbar 1993; Hurford 1989, 1992; Pinker & Bloom 1990; Steele & Shennan 1996). It is now widely accepted that no other theoretical framework has equivalent potential to solve the major outstanding problems in human origins research. Rival paradigms from the human and social sciences — Freudian, Piagetian, Chomskyan, Lévi-Straussian — cannot explain evolved human mentality because they already assume this as a basic premise. Tried and tested as a methodology applicable to the social behaviour of all living organisms (Dawkins 1976; Hamilton 1964; Trivers 1985), Darwinism makes no such assumptions, thereby avoiding circularity.

The neanderthals were probably displaced, according to Cavalli-Sforza et al. (1988: 6006), because they were “biologically provided with speech of more modest quality than modern humans.” Bickerton (1990; cf. Mellars 1991) extensively elaborates this theme, postulating “a single genetic event” which gave modern Homo sapiens the competitive edge, launching the human revolution by turning “protolanguage” into “syntacticized language”.

Absent-mindedness is a human speciality. Professors in particular are known to get lost in theoretical problem solving, unaware, perhaps, that they are crossing a busy road. Or think of a Siberian shaman, lost in trance, forgetting entirely to eat.

Traditional healing rituals in many parts of the world seem to derive from a model of cyclical renewal provided in the first instance by menstruation. Health is seen as dependent upon a correct balance between polar opposite states such as ‘heat’ and ‘cold’, ‘dryness’ and ‘wetness’ etc. Nature seems to achieve such balance by alternating regularly between opposites such as night and day, wet season and dry. In this way, periodic ‘death’ (night, winter etc.) alternates with ‘life’.

Thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Philosophy at the University of Sussex, December 5th 1975.

It is said that kinship is to anthropology ‘what logic is to philosophy or the nude is to art’ – it is ‘the basic discipline of the subject’ (Fox 1967: 10). To ask questions about early kinship is to return to many of the fundamental historical and philosophical issues out of which anthropology emerged.

Responding to Chomsky’s interview in Radical Anthropology in Issue 2, Chris Knight explores the paradoxical relationship between his activism and his science.

Symbolic culture is a realm of patently false signals. From a Darwinian standpoint, it is not easy to explain how strategies of reliance on such signals could have become evolutionarily stable. The archaeological record shows evolving modern humans investing heavily in cosmetics, with a particular emphasis on ochre pigments matching the colour of blood. This chapter discusses the Female Cosmetic Coalitions model of the origins of symbolic culture in the context of hypotheses sometimes considered to be alternative explanations. It is shown that these various hypotheses are not genuine alternatives. Many are not Darwinian, while others either fail to address the question of symbolism or address it but make no reference to details of the archaeological record. It is concluded that the Female Cosmetic Coalitions model offers the most testable and parsimonious way of integrating these different perspectives.