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

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.

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’.

This thesis presents and tests a new theory of human cultural origins. The point of departure is an economic finding: unlike non-human primates when they engage in hunting, human hunters normatively do not eat their own kills. This apparent self-denial, it is argued, is best seen as an expression of a cultural universal, the sexual division of labour, in which women obtain meat which their sexual partners have secured. It is suggested that the female sex may have played a part in the establishment of this arrangement, and – in particular – that menstrual bleeding may have been central to its symbolic underpinnings.

THE ORIGINS OF SOCIETY was written in 1988, three years before the publication of my Blood Relations: Menstruation and the origins of culture. It still provides a good basic outline of my argument. With hindsight, this rendering appears to me as one of several early "mythical" versions of my story – although by no means the worst of these. Scientifically speaking, it is now somewhat out of date. Thanks largely to the work of Ian Watts, it is now known that the human revolution occurred well before the Europe Upper Palaeolithic, and that the location (almost certainly) was sub-Saharan Africa. In the light of this knowledge, this pamphlet’s many references to "the Ice Age" no longer seem very appropriate. Writing today, I would also amend my style of argumentation, which in this pamphlet is hardly Darwinian. Shortly after Blood Relations was published, Camilla Power recast the theory in more rigorously Darwinian ("selfish gene") terms, making it rather more persuasive to scientists working in this field. Despite these shortcomings, I have found that newcomers to the whole topic appreciate the brevity and conceptual simplicity of this particular version, so it seemed worthwhile to reprint it in the form in which it was written.