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.

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.

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.

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”.

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.

From a Darwinian standpoint, ‘symbolic culture’ is an unsettling notion. Modern science became established in opposition to the idea that culturally accepted fictions can be equated with facts. Yet the concept of symbolic culture requires us to grasp just that paradoxical possibility. Long before the late twentieth century invention of the Internet, evolution allowed humans to flit between two realms: reality on the one hand, virtual reality on the other. Symbolic culture is an environment of objective facts—whose existence depends entirely on collective belief. To use language is to navigate within that imagined world.

Together with Roy D’Andrade (1981; 1995), Bradd Shore (1996) and other ‘cultural models’ thinkers, Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn have risen to prominence within a movement straddling the divide between anthropology and psychology. In seeking to unify these disciplines, such scholars repudiate what they see as outmoded doctrines about ‘the psychic unity of mankind’. Cognition, they assert, is ethnographic (Shore 1996). ‘Neural network theory’ – alternatively known as ‘connectionism’ (Rumelhart et al. 1986) – forces abandonment of naïve ideas about innate cognitive architecture. The brain self-organizes during maturation and development, acquiring structure by internalizing local cultural models (Laughlin et al. 1992). Imagine, for example, relying only on Roman numerals in attempting complex arithmetical calculations. As strategies were devised, the mind would settle into a pattern quite unlike that based on arabic numeracy. There is clearly a sense in which ‘mind’ is internalized culture.

Chris Knight is a professor of anthropology at the University of East London, and the author of the highly acclaimed and controversial book, Blood Relations: Menstruation and The Origins of Culture, which outlines a new theory of human origins. Chris gives regular talks at the Radical Anthropology Group in London, and will also be speaking at the Communist University in London in August. Chris was talking to regular RSB contributor Stuart Watkins and Dave Flynn.

The chief value of the study of human origins is that it nails the myth that ‘no revolution can ever change human nature’. It shows, on the contrary, that everything distinctively human about our nature – our ability to speak, to see ourselves as others see us, to aspire to act on moral principle – has come to prevail in our species thanks precisely to the greatest revolution in history, ‘the revolution which worked’.

What applies in academic life applies wherever language is used. Protocols always exist. Compared with academic discourse, informal gossip may be livelier, more relaxed, less abstract and more intimately bound up with non-linguistic modes of expression. But despite such obvious differences, the same principles apply. Civilised intercourse depends on respect for the law. This has nothing to do with any behavioural dominance of certain individuals over others. Legality is a contractual entity, genuine insofar as it is collectively agreed. Once contractual understandings are in place, then and then only can we ‘do things with words’ (Austin 1978 [1955]; Searle 1996, Bourdieu 1990, Deacon 1997).