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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.