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Sexual selection models for the emergence of symbolic communication: why they should be reversed

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This book is the first to focus on the African origins of human language. It explores the origins of language and culture 250,000-150,000 years ago when modern humans evolved in Africa. Scholars from around the world address the fossil, genetic, and archaeological evidence and critically examine the ways it has been interpreted. The book also considers parallel developments among Europe's Neanderthals and the contrasting outcomes for the two species. Following an extensive introduction contextualizing and linking the book's topics and approaches, fifteen chapters bring together many of the most significant recent findings and developments in modern human origins research. The fields represented by the authors include genetics, biology, behavioural ecology, linguistics, archaeology, cognitive science, and anthropology.
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... 108-127) even argued that some basic aspects of symbolic culture are already present in wild chimpanzees. Several theorists hypothesize that group ritualization played a key role in the emergence of fully symbolic culture by establishing and stabilizing the necessary relationships of trust between signalers and receivers and generating a shared domain of meaning (Deacon, 1997;Durkheim, 1912;Henrich, 2009;Knight, 1999Knight, , 2014Power, 2009Power, , 2014Rappaport, 1999). If a large proportion of the red ochre from the African MSA does indeed manifest past ritual behavior, then it might represent a material remain of this very critical transitional process in human evolution, one which allows us to glimpse the gradual emergence of symbolic material culture. ...
... From an evolutionary perspective, the human collective ritual is a special mode of behavior composed of different psychologically active building blocks, some older, some younger. Like other theorists (Deacon, 1997;Dissanayake, 2018;Power, 2009Power, , 2014Rossano, 2012Rossano, , 2016, we assume that the oldest components are traceable to non-symbolic ritualization and costly signaling. These behaviors are observable in many non-human species today (Huxley, 1966;Krebs & Dawkins, 1991;Maynard-Smith & Harper, 2003;Zahavi & Zahavi, 1997). ...
... If it is true that trustenhancing and meaning-generating collective rituals were needed to establish the first jointly shared fictions (i.e., symbolism) by solving the cooperative dilemma, then the emergence of habitual collective rituals was one important prerequisite for the evolution of symbolic communication (Deacon, 1997, pp. 402-407;Durkheim, 1912;Power, 2009;Rappaport, 1999, pp. 54-56;Rossano, 2016;Watts, 2009). ...
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Over the last two decades, red ochre has played a pivotal role in discussions about the cognitive and cultural evolution of early modern humans during the African Middle Stone Age. Given the importance of ochre for the scholarly debate about the emergence of ‘behavioral modernity’, the lack of long-term spatio-temporal analyses spanning large geographical areas represents a significant gap in knowledge. Here we take a continent-wide approach, rather than focusing on specific sites, regions or technocomplexes. We report the most comprehensive meta-analysis of ochre use to date, spanning Africa between 500 and 40 thousand years ago, to examine data from more than a hundred archaeological sites. Using methods based on time averaging, we identified three distinct phases of ochre use: the initial phase occurred from 500,000 to 330,000; the emergent phase from 330,000 to 160,000; and the habitual phase from 160,000 to 40,000 years ago. The number of sites with ochre increased with each subsequent phase. More importantly, the ratio of sites with ochre compared to those with only stone artifacts also followed this trend, indicating the increasing intensity of ochre use during the Middle Stone Age. While the geographical distribution expanded with time, the absolute number of ochre finds grew significantly as well, underlining the intensification of ochre use. We determine that ochre use established itself as a habitual cultural practice in southern, eastern and northern Africa starting about 160,000 years ago, when a third of archaeological sites contain ochre. We argue that this pattern is a likely material manifestation of intensifying ritual activity in early populations of Homo sapiens . Such ritual behavior may have facilitated the demographic expansion of early modern humans, first within and eventually beyond the African continent. We discuss the implications of our findings on two models of ritual evolution, the Female Cosmetic Coalitions Hypothesis and the Ecological Stress Hypothesis, as well as a model about the emergence of complex cultural capacities, the Eight-Grade Model for the Evolution and Expansion of Cultural Capacities .
... The Female Cosmetic Coalitions (FCC) model (Power, 2009;Power et al., 2013) fills out this reverse dominance dynamic and makes specific predictions about the type of signal ing that would arise. It focuses on female collective strategic resistance to dominant males who refuse to invest. ...
... Following the logic of concealing ovulation, they might try to hide the menstruant's condition so that males would not know. But because the signal has economic value in attracting male attention, rather than hide it, we predict females will do the opposite-flaunt it (Knight et al., 1995;Power, 2009). Whenever a coalition member menstruated, the whole coalition joined in advertising and amplifying the signal to attract outsider males and their labor to the coalition. ...
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This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online. For more information, please read the site FAQs.
... Evolutionary questions include: What selection pressures motivated this novel behavior, and should it be considered a costly or relatively cheap form of signaling (Power 2009;Kuhn 2014;Watts et al. 2016)? Under what conditions might pigment use be considered symbolic (Knight et al. 1995 General Characterization Cornell and Schwertmann (2003) provide an overview of the properties of iron oxides (oxides, hydroxides, and oxide hydroxides). ...
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... Finally, it meant finding new ways of dealing with menstruation which, with ovulation effectively concealed, had become salient as a cue to imminent fertility. The eventual solution involved the use of cosmetic substitutes to prevent real menstrual blood from triggering dangerous levels of inter-and intra-sexual competition and conflict (Power 2009(Power , 2010(Power , 2014Power and Aiello 1997). Against this background, we attribute the metaphors and equivalences of ekila and its cross-cultural variants in the first instance to women's collective action in their own reproductive interests (see Finnegan, this volume). ...
... Females within coalitions would begin to use blood-coloured substances as cosmetics to augment their signals. This is the Female Cosmetic Coalitions model of the origins of art and symbolic culture (Power 2009;Power, Sommer and Watts 2013). ...
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Lionel Sims’ work has illuminated how Neolithic ritual communities ‘solarised’ the moon, deceptively transforming a lunar syntax into a solar one. But where did the ‘time-resistant’ lunar syntax come from? It is unlikely that patriarchal Neolithic societies invented this form of time-keeping. Yet it persists even in modern patriarchal ‘world’ religions derived from Neolithic forebears. Marx said ‘All forms of economics can be reduced to an economics of time'. How a society organises time reveals what it truly values. The question of the earliest human economy cannot be solved without a focus on women, the moon and menstruation. African hunter-gatherer cosmology takes the lunar cycle as the crucial timeframe for ritual, sex and economic activities. The shared sources of this cosmology carry us back to earliest human symbolic culture, the very origins of art and ritual itself, over 100,000 years ago. Contrary to presumed Neolithic gender relations, these hunter-gatherer societies are among the most gender egalitarian on earth. But how does such egalitarianism work? Women especially assert power through their bodies collectively to resist any threat of male exploitation. As the moon waxes and wanes, the dynamic of power switches in more or less playful battles between the sexes. Rather than patriarchy or matriarchy, we observe lunarchy – rule by the moon, expressed in a pulse of waxing and waning, ritual power ON, ritual power OFF.
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This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online. For more information, please read the site FAQs.
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Public ritual acts convey strategic information about the qualities of ritual actors. Although a prolific literature has examined their role in coordinating collective action in a variety of contexts, one of the most common communicative functions of ritual behavior in nature, i.e. its role in signaling mate quality, has received limited empirical attention in humans. Moreover, some of the particularities of human mating, such as the difference between short- and long-term pair bonding and the role of family pressure in mate selection, have also been relatively neglected in the context of ritual. We conducted an experiment to study mate preferences among Tamil Hindus in Mauritius. We found that men who practice religious rituals are perceived as better potential short- and long-term mates by young women as well as by parents, and that the latter prioritize those who practice more costly rituals.
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Among social anthropologists, there is virtual consensus that the food-sharing practices of small-scale non-agricultural groups cannot be understood in isolation from the broader repertoire of leveling strategies that prevent would-be dominants from exercising power and influence over likely subordinates. In spite of that widespread view, quantitatively rigorous empirical studies of food sharing and cooperation in small-scale human groups have typically ignored the internal connection between leveling of income and political power, drawing inspiration instead from evolutionary models that are neutral about social role asymmetries. In this paper, I introduce a spatially explicit agent-based model of hunter-gatherer food sharing in which individuals are driven by the goal of maximizing their own income while minimizing income asymmetries among others.Model simulation results show that seven basic patterns of inter-household food transfers described in detail for the Hadza hunters of Tanzania can be simultaneously reproduced with striking accuracy under the assumption that agents selectively support and carry on sharing interactions in ways that maximize their income leveling potential.
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