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The symbolic revolution: A sexual conflict model
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Subject: Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience
Online Publication Date: Mar 2021 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198813781.013.13
The symbolic revolution: A sexual conflict model
Camilla Power, Ian Watts, and Chris Knight
The Oxford Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution
Edited by Nathalie Gontier, Andy Lock, and Chris Sinha
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter presents a Darwinian account of how humans became the symbolic species.
It challenges the widely held idea that symbolic culture did not emerge until long after
our African speciation. Red ochre use appears as a cumulative cultural tradition emerg
ing prior to modern humans, becoming ubiquitous with modern Homo sapiens. One argu
ment for the evolution of within-group cooperation has been inter-group conflict, but this
is unlikely to result in sexual morality. An alternative model of “reverse dominance” or
“gender” warfare is explored, generating playful, ritual contest between the sexes. As a
reproductive strategy, women in coalitions resisted dominant male attempts to monopo
lize fertile females without providing adequate investment. Ritual bodypaint perfor
mances established symbolic culture, morality, kinship, and the sexual division of labor.
Investor males drove the success of this symbolic strategy through sexual selection of rit
ually decorated females, linked to the plateau of encephalization in modern humans.
Keywords: reproductive strategy, ochre, ritual, bodypaint, encephalization, morality, symbolic culture, sexual se
lection
But in acknowledging play you acknowledge mind, for whatever
else play is, it is not matter
(Huizinga, 1949, p. 3)
Introduction: What is revolutionary about sym
bolism?
There has been significant progress in assimilating cultural evolution into a Darwinian ex
planatory framework (e.g., Mesoudi, 2011; Whiten et al., 2017). Since this evolutionary
framework applies to cultural transmission in humans and nonhumans alike, it seems to
call into question whether we need to explain the emergence of distinctively symbolic
culture at all. We think it is important for two key reasons. Firstly, language, often taken
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as the epitome of the symbolic, presents special paradoxes for Darwinian approaches
(Knight, 2016). Secondly, if culture is defined as “information that is acquired from other
individuals via social transmission mechanisms” (Mesoudi, 2011, p. 2), this does not dis
tinguish between information about “brute” facts of nature and information about shared
fictions treated as objective facts.
Symbolic culture, says Chase (1994, p. 628), “requires the invention of a whole new kind
of things, things that have no existence in the ‘real’ world but exist entirely in the symbol
ic realm. Examples are concepts such as good and evil, mythical inventions such as gods
and underworlds, and social constructs such as promises and football games.” To explain
what is involved, Searle (1996) draws a distinction between “brute facts” and “institution
al facts.” Birth, sex, and death are facts anyway, irrespective of what people think or be
lieve. These, then, are brute facts. Phenomena such as legitimacy, marriage, and inheri
tance, however, are facts only if people believe in them. Suspend the belief and the facts
correspondingly dissolve. But although institutional facts rest on human belief, that does
not make them mere delusions. Take two five-pound banknotes. Their monetary equiva
lence to one ten-pound note is not only a subjective belief: it’s an objective, indisputable
fact. But now imagine a collapse of confidence in the currency. Suddenly, the various bits
of paper are worthless—the former facts dissolve.
Institutional facts do not exist outside the realm of human symbolic culture. They exist
only for those involved in a kind of “let’s pretend” game. Think of toddlers pretending
that a banana is a telephone, taking turns to hold it up to their ear (Leslie, 1987). Each
knows the difference between a banana and a telephone, but the pleasure comes from
sharing the imaginative game. Each child has the cognitive capacity to hold in mind two
conflicting representations at once: the object is and is not a banana. Just as children in
the telephone game share their intention that “the banana counts for us as a phone,” so
social institutions, roles, and rules rest on the collective intention of a community that “X
counts for us as Y”—a communal pretend-play (Searle, 1996; Tomasello & Rakowczy,
2003; Wyman, 2014).
Wild-living juvenile apes can certainly be playful, but their games do not involve treating
one object as another. Our great ape relatives appear reality-bound, with no motivation to
repress their individually perceived true representations of the world in favor of socially
shared, false ones (Tomasello & Moll, 2013). While there is some evidence that encultur
ated great apes can grasp false beliefs in others (Krupenye et al., 2016)—so passing the
main diagnostic test for theory of mind—they do not adopt others’ “wrong” beliefs posi
tively, treating them as interesting fictions. Since they have not reached this first step in
symbolic usage, wild-living chimps clearly cannot take the next step, special to humans—
to delight and collude in one another’s patent imaginings.
What, then, brought about the ability to share fictions, i.e., to tolerate others’ literal un
truths? The most revolutionary aspect of symbolism is its overthrow of brute reality. All
other forms of animal communication are constrained by the brute facts of the world,
causally linked to bodily states and emotions (Zahavi & Zahavi, 1997). For the observers
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and receivers of signals that link is the guarantee that a signal is reliable and therefore
worth attending to. Why then attend to patent fictions?
One key to understanding this is metaphor:
Generally it is only when a sentence is taken to be false that we accept it as a
metaphor and start to hunt out the hidden implication.
(Davidson, 1979, p. 40)
The “hidden implication” is a chosen aspect of reality that for joint purposes we take as
“truth.” The aspect selected is not concrete but abstract, and it follows that what we call
“abstract thought” is actually a product of metaphorical thinking (Lakoff & Johnson,
1980). When a metaphor becomes common currency, we forget its original incongruity,
which was the quality necessary to provoke the abstract, creative thought. The cyclical
logic through which metaphors arise, fade, die, and are replaced by novel metaphors ac
counts quite generally for the creativity of language and its restless unfolding over histor
ical time (Deutscher, 2005).
The most basic social condition for metaphor is an audience prepared to tolerate appar
ent falsehood as a prompt to search for meaning. Shared understandings—abstract con
cepts—could never emerge in a world where everyone insisted that signals be literally
true. In a Darwinian world of competition over mates and resources, what had to change
to make the listener ask “What does she mean by that?” and be willing to spend time
probing for the hidden implication? In what conditions are communicative intentions as
sumed to be cooperative rather than manipulative? How, in short, did we become the
symbolic species, spending valuable time and energy exploring each other’s fantasies?
In the context of animal communication, symbolism is so unprecedented that influential
theorists have chosen to abandon Darwinism in accounting for its emergence (e.g.,
Berwick & Chomsky, 2016). But we cannot just set aside general evolutionary constraints.
In the case of human evolution, this means that, while symbolic culture is a novel phe
nomenon, any explanatory theory should treat the novelty as a special consequence of
Darwinian evolution. A good scientific theory will also be parsimonious, able to make pre
dictions across fields of data previously unrelated.
In this chapter, we outline a model meeting these conditions. We attribute our anatomi
cal, social, and cultural origins to new social strategies, led primarily by females, which
reversed the ancient logic of dominance, in particular male sexual dominance (cf. Boehm,
1999). This transition did not happen overnight; many of these changes were based in the
emergence of cooperative breeding from early genus Homo (Hrdy, 2009). In later stages,
this led to such rapid and radical shifts in communication and social organization that we
revive the concept of a “human revolution” establishing a symbolic domain of morally au
thoritative collective representations (cf. Durkheim, 1912; Knight et al., 1995). Social an
thropological traditions (Durkheim, 1912; Rappaport, 1999) have persistently maintained
that symbolic culture is premised on collective ritual action. A ritual/speech coevolution
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model (Knight, 1998) allows us both to find continuity between nonhuman and human
communication systems (cf. Rappaport, 1999) and to bring archaeological evidence to
bear on the special case of language. Here, we will not deal with language directly, ad
dressing instead the wider domain of institutional reality on which language depends
(Knight & Lewis, 2017).
The “Human Revolution” as a mismatch para
digm
The time-depth of symbolic culture as inferred from the archaeological record has been
critical in forming the research paradigms into “modern human” origins. This has focused
debate onto a paradoxical distinction between “modern bodies” and “modern minds.”
Thirty years ago, the first genetic study suggesting that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa
sometime around 200,000 years ago (200 ka) was published (Cann et al., 1987). This was
much older than the then earliest agreed evidence for symbolic culture. The original idea
of the “Human Revolution” (Mellars & Stringer, 1989) arose in response to the perceived
mismatch in the evolution of modern bodies and modern minds. The evidence used to in
fer symbolic culture was best documented in Europe and the Near East from around ~40
ka, when Homo sapiens began replacing Neanderthals in the Middle/Upper Paleolithic
transition, the Upper Paleolithic being associated with personal adornments, abstract and
figurative representations, and elaborate burials. The Middle to Later Stone Age transi
tion in sub-Saharan Africa, not associated with population replacement, was seen as
broadly comparable in timing and the initial appearance of symbolic associations. Both
transitions appeared contemporary with the sea-going colonization of Australia. This
seemed to present a fundamental “sapient paradox” (Renfrew, 1996) with the cognitive
Rubicon only being crossed ~40 ka.
Explanations for the paradox came in two forms: mentalist and materialist. Mentalism im
plied that the onset of symbolic culture must have been triggered by decisive changes in
the structure of the brain. Prominent archaeologists readily accepted the proposal of lin
guists Chomsky (1988, p. 183) and Bickerton (1990, p. 190) that a single mutation in
stalled the human language faculty, leading to a whole new level of cultural and symbolic
sophistication (e.g., Mellars, 1991; Klein, 1995). The trouble is that the reverse argument
is equally plausible: symbolic culture is the more basic innovation and prerequisite for
language evolution.
Materialist approaches by contrast set out from constraints on behavior such as varying
resource availability, environmental effects on subsistence strategies, time and energy
budgets, food-sharing practices, reproductive strategies, risk, and unpredictability.
Among the supposed factors responsible for triggering the emergence of symbolism were
changes in resource distribution and exchange; associated reproductive strategies; and
population expansion leading to increased social density or network size.
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Since the late eighties, the dating of archaeological evidence for symbolic material cul
ture has been significantly pushed back, from ~40 ka to ~100 ka, most of the early data
coming from Africa (d’Errico & Stringer, 2011); but this revised date still falls short of our
speciation by tens of millennia, possibly two-thirds of our species’ lifespan (Hublin et al.,
2017). While Late Pleistocene Neanderthals also show symbolic behavior (e.g., Zilhão et
al., 2010; Hoffman et al., 2018a, b), and genetic findings indicate our respective lineages
interbred, our direct evolutionary history is still seen as presenting a discrepancy. What
ever the problems with biological “species” concepts, the rooting of the mtDNA tree of
humanity in Africa, around 200,000 years ago remains a landmark, with current esti
mates placing “African Eve”—our last matrilineal common ancestor—between 134–188 ka
(Fu et al., 2013). This places Eve’s lineage in a population coeval with early Homo sapi
ens’ fossils. More recently, it has been found that Homo sapiens’ facial morphology was
established by ~300 ka (Hublin et al., 2017), but a modern globularized brain-case re
mains a later development.
The Human Revolution 1.0 debunked
The notion of a 40,000-year-old human revolution has been swept away, largely by find
ings in African archaeology over the past two decades where most of the kinds of evi
dence previously considered restricted to Upper Paleolithic and Later Stone Age (LSA)
contexts have been pushed back to between ~75 ka and ~110 ka (d’Errico & Stringer,
2011; Henshilwood et al., 2011; Coulson et al., 2011). The new evidence includes geomet
ric engravings on ochre, ochre-stained shell beads, ochre-paint manufacturing kits, and a
possible “serpentine” zoomorphic sculpture. Reanalysis of older finds—an infant burial
with a perforated Conus shell—shows the shell probably contains ochre residues (d’Errico
& Backwell, 2016). Taken together, this implies symbolic culture was in place from
around the time of Homo sapiens’ early migrations beyond Africa.
In their pioneering review “The Revolution that wasn’t,” McBrearty and Brooks (2000)
made the case for gradual, episodic accumulation of a package of modern human behav
iors in Africa—including “art and decoration”—already by the time of initial migrations.
They could not identify any innovations between ~140 ka and ~250 ka (McBrearty &
Brooks, 2000, Figure 13), but placed “the main behavioral shift leading to
modernity” (McBrearty & Brooks, 2000, p. 529) in the Acheulean to Middle Stone Age
(MSA) transition, from ~300–250 ka. This, they argued, could be aligned with a slightly
broader definition of Homo sapiens. Subsequent findings have confirmed their view that
symbolic culture was present before migration beyond Africa, while their broader defini
tion of Homo sapiens is supported by the Jebel Irhoud redating (Hublin et al., 2017). The
technological transition, however, is now known to have begun in some regions at least
200,000 years earlier (Johnson & McBrearty, 2010; Wilkins & Chazan, 2012). Pigment
use, an innovation which McBrearty and Brooks associated with this transition, has been
similarly backdated (Watts et al., 2016). This appears to rule out direct bearing on our
speciation.
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Current thinking is that the addition of points and/or blades struck from prepared cores
to Acheulean biface and flake technology, and the eventual demise of bifaces should be
understood in the wider behavioral context of the stabilization and generalization of a
hearthside-focused form of local social organization (Chazan, 2009; Roebroeks & Villa,
2011; Barkai et al., 2017), although this remains largely conjectural in Africa (Watts et al.,
2016). These changes concern all daughter lineages of Homo heidelbergensis (or the
“Last Common Ancestor of ourselves and Neanderthals;” see Stringer, 2016, Figure 2c)
rather than being lineage specific. In sum, a campsite-focused form of social organization
was a necessary but not sufficient condition for symbolic material culture.
Two decades after McBrearty and Brooks’ review, after intensive MSA research in north
ern, eastern, and southern Africa, little has emerged to support a gradual accumulation of
innovations before migration beyond Africa. Reviewing the MSA in southern Africa, Wurz
claims that no spatial or chronological patterns can be identified in the Middle Pleis
tocene—while in the earlier Late Pleistocene, complexity simply comes and goes (Wurz,
2013, S305). A similar review in eastern Africa could also only identify clear chronologi
cal change in the Late Pleistocene (Tryon & Faith, 2013; but see Douze & Delagnes,
2016). If correct, this would be at odds with the very premise of cultural evolution: the di
rectional and cumulative character of change in hominin technology.
The portmanteau category of “behavioral modernity” has generally been abandoned in fa
vor of focusing on the strategic underpinnings of behavioral variability (Shea, 2011; see
Majkić, this volume). Methodologically embedded in behavioral ecology, this claims vari
ability was as much a feature of Homo sapiens at ~200 ka, and possibly earlier, as it was
at ~30 ka. This approach permits distinguishing the varying strategies of post Homo hei
delbergensis lineages in Europe, the Near East, and Africa, without attributing these to
innate cognitive differences (e.g., Roebroeks & Verpoorte, 2009; Power et al., 2013).
The Human Revolution 2.0: Symbolization and
the overthrow of dominance
The “Human Revolution” at ~40 ka is dead, but the gradualism claimed by McBrearty
and Brooks also seems unconvincing. Few now believe our speciation associates with be
havioral or technological innovations, or marks the onset of symbolic culture (Stringer &
Buck, 2014, p. 316; d’Errico et al., 2017, p. 7870; Shea, 2011). Before ~100 ka, the only
repeated material cultural evidence primarily involving signaling behaviors in the Homo
lineage is the record of earth pigment use (Kuhn, 2014; Watts et al., 2016; Brooks et al.,
2018) going back at least 500,000 years. This overwhelmingly comprises blood-red iron
oxides—ochre—used by both African and, more sporadically, Eurasian lineages (see Pow
er et al., 2013; Watts, 2014; Watts et al., 2016 for review). Ochre use per se may not be a
proxy of symbolic culture, but the model we build here predicts the emergence of red cos
metics as traces of a tradition of ritual display in a timeframe ~700-150 ka. At first spo
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radic, this shifts to become habitual towards the end of this period, permitting us to infer
symbolism.
On “root causes of evolutionary change” Shea (2011, p. 25) comments that “the first
place to look is among variation in reproductive strategies.” He considers language and
symbolism as probably “epiphenomena … in service of those strategies.” His main reason
for ruling out a species-specific innate basis to symbolic culture is the disappearance of
acknowledged symbolic traits (together with the disappearance of significant innovations
in lithic technology—such as the Howiesons Poort) first identified in Africa during the ear
lier Late Pleistocene, only for these to reappear tens of millennia later. As he claims, “a
strategic perspective offers a credible and parsimonious explanation,” while an innatist
hypothesis does not (Shea, 2011, p. 13).
In light of this, we think it significant that ochre use does not fit this pattern of appearing,
disappearing, and reappearing during the Late Pleistocene. It was already a continuous
and ubiquitous tradition in southern African rock shelter campsites from at least ~110 ka
(Knight et al., 1995; Watts, 1999). The question arises whether the conservative estimate
of 110 ka for a continuous, ubiquitous tradition can be pushed further back. Watts (2014,
Table 16.2) argues it can, adducing dating estimates for Border Cave (Grün & Beaumont,
2001) and findings from Pinnacle Point 13B (Marean et al., 2007), which suggest that
ubiquity in southern African campsites goes back to ~170 ka. Over half a million years,
pigment use may exemplify a unidirectional, cumulative cultural tradition, changing from
a mosaic pattern of no use, irregular use or localized regular use, to a generalized pat
tern of continuous, near ubiquitous use in campsites around the time of our speciation.
This means the consistent presence of red ochre could be a cultural diagnostic of that
speciation.
Eurasian lineages used ochre from at least ~250 ka, and possibly earlier, but only much
later and in certain places did it become continuous (Watts, 2014). Worth noting here is
Power et al.’s (2013) “seasonality thermostat” model, which explained difference in
African and Eurasian strategies of pigment use, predicting on theoretical grounds an up
surge in Neanderthal symbolic activity during the Eemian Interglacial (MIS 5e). Support
ing this prediction, Iberian colored shells and cosmetic kits have been redated to this
time (Hoffman et al., 2018b).
The apparent late onset of symbolic culture is frequently explained by a demographic
threshold effect, whereby at certain population densities or network size a ratchet effect
of cultural accumulation takes hold (Powell et al., 2009; Marean, 2016). While such mod
els may account for patterns of cultural visibility in the archaeological record, they lack
any explanatory factor in terms of what changed in reproductive strategies, fertility, or
mortality rates to bring about the postulated population increases with their greater con
nectivity.
A widely held view is that language and symbolism require unprecedented levels of trust
and cooperation to evolve in a population. Specifically, it has been argued that group
members had to exhibit what is known as “we”-intentionality, such that meanings exist for
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“us” as a stable collective. The “basic thing about linguistic symbols is that they are inter
subjective … meaning that they are comprehended and understood in the context of self-
other equivalence” (Tomasello & Rakoczy, 2003, p. 128). Because self-other equivalence
would not be fostered under conditions of dominance and subordination, or typical pri
mate hierarchy, this suggests that the human symbolic revolution was part of a wider so
cial revolutionary overthrow of dominance and hierarchy in general.
Warfare, social norms, and group-mindedness
One idea as to how this happened is that only when faced with an external enemy is an
entire community likely to drop internal rivalries and band together as one. Without that
threat, group-level solidarity, “we”-intentionality and morality will not emerge. This “belli
cose” or “warfare” hypothesis holds that group-mindedness arose out of conflict between
neighboring groups of early hunter-gatherers. This has recently been modeled by evolu
tionary economist Bowles (2009) and primatologists Wrangham and Glowacki (2012). De
veloping the idea, Tomasello et al. (2012) argue that “we”-intentionality evolved in two
steps. First, intersubjectivity arose among hominins who collaborated in foraging in
small-scale groups. But it took population growth, competition for resources and warfare
between neighboring groups (Tomasello et al., 2012, p. 681) for the second stage to be
reached, when each local population would consolidate as a united “us” pitted against
outsiders defined as “them.” Only then did group-mindedness generate language, moral
regulation, and the whole domain of symbolic culture.
Marean (2016) applies this argument to modern humans of the MSA, proposing that
dense and predictable resources became economically defensible, leading to increased in
tergroup conflict and territoriality. Building on prior use of language and symbol systems
(though how these evolved earlier without group morality remains unexplained), entry to
a coastal foraging niche led to a cascade of adaptations, including:
increased sedentariness, increasing population size and territoriality in defence of
those intertidal food sources. This sets up the conditions identified as optimal for
the multi-level selection for highly cooperative behaviours (hyperprosociality) …
and also provides the selective drive for the “group-mindedness” made possible by
an evolved “collective intentionality.”
(Marean, 2016, p. 7)
The main reproductive prize driving competition would be: “a concentration of females
and offspring, which to an antagonistic group can be viewed as potential mates, slaves or
food” (Marean, 2016, p. 7).
We have here a model in which group-on-group conflict over territory, resources, and
women formed the basis for “we”-intentionality and hypersocial cooperation. While not all
versions of the warfare model emphasize competitive rape and cannibalism as the basis
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of morality, we can derive some predictions from the general warfare hypothesis, which
are testable against archaeological and hunter-gatherer ethnographic evidence.
Warfare is not typical of nomadic bands in general (Fry & Söderberg, 2013). The main
reason why African hunter-gatherers for example do not have significant group-on-group
violence, is that nobody is in charge in these assertively egalitarian groups, so people
vote with their feet and avoid aggression. But suppose for argument’s sake that Marean’s
MSA scenario of sedentarization did lead to intensification of group competition. Are such
circumstances likely to generate morality and symbolism as we understand it in human
cultures?
We think this is an improbable outcome for five reasons. First, we do not see how sexual
morality would develop in these circumstances. Militarization has never been known to
promote rule-governed behavior over sex, exactly for the reason that Marean offers—
women being regarded as sexual prizes to be captured by force. This cannot generate the
kinds of sexual prohibitions and taboos generally found among hunter-gatherers. Second,
the emphasis on a chimpanzee-style territoriality and group boundaries calls into ques
tion the evolution of cooperation across wide networks, such that hypersociality extends
to “cooperation with strangers.” Typically for African hunter-gatherers, systems of univer
sal kinship, ritual, and gift exchange networks are extensive and far-flung. Third, we
question the viability of a ratchet effect for sociocultural norms in a situation where war
ring groups might be winners one day but losers the next. How consistently would cultur
al traditions accumulate and evolve on this basis? Fourth, it is unclear how or why signal
ing by male warrior coalitions would generate shared, virtual domains; as in the case with
nonhumans, communication would be trapped in hard-to-fake, indexical modes where any
symbolic or conventional token would be rejected outright by rivals. A fifth issue is that
societies prioritizing warfare divert male energy from childcare and provisioning of moth
ers and babies. If warfare marked the culmination of human evolution this would lead to
intensified maternal stress, increased infant mortality, and less male provisioning with
stationary or even negative rate of encephalization.
Reverse dominance: War on the alpha male
In Hierarchy in the Forest, Boehm (1999) points out that primate coalitions come in two
kinds, those aimed at maintaining dominance and those aimed at resisting it. Only the lat
ter has the potential to recruit new members indefinitely, to the point where it finally em
braces everyone. While nonhuman primate coalitions remain transactional, sectional, and
limited, in the human case, something entirely different happened. Primate dominance
was turned upside-down as former subordinates succeeded in establishing collective
dominance over would-be alpha-males. Boehm describes how resistance to dominance
was mounted so consistently and successfully that it culminated in what he terms “re
verse dominance”—dominance exercised by the community as a whole. Since it estab
lished for the first time the notion of a moral community, this was not just an evolutionary
development but a revolutionary one.
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Boehm’s idea leaves questions unanswered: why did humans tenaciously resist being
dominated? What motivated these rebel strategies to be repeated as patterns of behav
ior? Who joined the rebel coalitions in the first place and in whose interests did they
fight? How was group cohesion maintained if, once the alpha had been overthrown, indi
viduals began to compete again? But Boehm is describing something which—unlike the
intergroup warfare model—resembles lived hunter-gatherer experience (e.g., Turnbull,
1993; Woodburn, 1982). Although he hardly integrates sex into his model, Boehm touches
on how sexual morality would be likely to emerge: “our forebears became egalitarian only
after they were able to moralistically outlaw alpha male behaviour” (Boehm, 2000, p.
212). This implies a coalition of everybody against male dominant behavior including use
or threat of force to gain sexual access. Note, this is the direct opposite of the warfare
model predicated on rape.
Here we develop a gendered version of Boehm’s reverse dominance model, exploring the
idea that female coalitions played a decisive role. In her landmark work on human cogni
tive evolution, Mothers and Others, Hrdy defends this alternative perspective against the
bellicose school:
“… what worries me is that by focusing on intergroup competition, we have been
led to overlook factors such as childrearing that are at least as important (in my
opinion, even more important) for explaining the early origins of humankind’s pe
culiarly hypersocial tendencies. We have underestimated just how important
shared care and provisioning of offspring by group members other than parents
have been in shaping prosocial impulses”
(Hrdy, 2009, p. 20).
At some point during the evolution of genus Homo, our ancestors became baby-sitting
apes. Hrdy (2009, pp. 233–272) builds on Hawkes and colleagues’ “grandmother” hypoth
esis (Hawkes et al., 1998) to show that a mother’s most reliable childcare help would
originally be her own mother. This cooperative female relationship—unique among great
apes who in general do not live with their mothers—can explain the evolution of increas
ingly long postreproductive lifespans, as older females gained fitness by living long
enough to care for daughters’ offspring.
Co-evolving with postreproductive lifespans, childhood is another unique aspect of human
life history (Bogin, 2006; see Suman, this volume). During this time, after weaning and
before eruption of adult teeth, a child requires help with finding and processing food. In
this role, grandmothers may have improved weanling survivorship, enabling mothers to
get pregnant again more quickly. This produced the characteristic “stacked” human fami
lies where—unlike other great apes—mothers care for a number of dependent offspring
simultaneously.
Hrdy’s great contribution is to explore the impact of multi-parental care in shaping our
ancestors’ unique psychology. Although cooperative childcare may start with the mother-
daughter relationship, it is easy to see how bonding with grandchildren would soon in
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volve aunts, sisters, older daughters, and other kin. From the moment when mothers al
low others to hold their babies, says Hrdy, selection pressures for new kinds of mind-read
ing are established. These give rise to an array of novel responses—mutual gazing, bab
bling, kissfeeding, and so forth—to enable the variegated triad of mum, baby, and new
helper to consolidate bonds while monitoring one another’s intentions. Associated to the
evolution of such “mutual mind-reading” would be our unique eye morphology of dark iris
set against an almond-shaped white sclera background (Kobayashi & Kohshima, 2001).
This enables us to look into one another’s eyes to read direction of gaze as a cue to inten
tions, understood as the “cooperative eye” hypothesis.
Just as they lack “cooperative eyes,” great ape mothers never needed such elaborate
bonding mechanisms with their offspring since they rarely let their babies go (Hrdy, 2009,
p. 68). Because ape mothers leave their natal group on reaching maturity, they lack fe
male relatives who can be trusted with their offspring.
Large brains confer benefits but also involve substantial costs that have to be met by the
mother during lactation. Once hominin brain size increased beyond the great ape range,
females could no longer tolerate primate-style dominance behavior in males. Hominin
weanlings, with brains still growing, would have required high-quality diets. Compared to
other great apes, evolving human mothers must have found new ways to recruit help
from others including males in meeting childcare burdens (Isler & van Schaik, 2012).
During Homo evolution where female reproductive costs increased significantly, through
both body and brain size increases (Key & Aiello, 1999), male involvement in the coopera
tive breeding system would have become critical. On the one hand, a process of male do
mestication is expected as part of the evolution of intersubjectivity; on the other, signifi
cant levels of sexual conflict with would-be dominant males remained likely. Out of these
contradictory evolutionary dynamics, revolutionary changes in communication emerged.
Over five to six million years of hominin evolution, there is no doubt that there has been
revolutionary change in mating systems compared with the great ape common ancestor,
especially in levels of male investment in offspring. Rather than view this through the
lens of the “man the hunter” pair-bond narrative, we explore how female kin coalitions at
the core of cooperative breeding would have affected male strategies (Key & Aiello, 1999;
Hrdy, 2009; Power et al., 2013).
Why sexual warfare?
Our justification for invoking gender warfare is based in standard Darwinian theory of the
evolution of mating systems, known as sexual conflict theory. Modern evolutionary ecolo
gy is premised on the idea that in all sexually reproducing species, males, and females
have conflicting strategies and reproductive trade-offs (Borgerhoff Mulder & Rauch,
2009). In this “war,” strategic conflict occurs over whether and how often to mate, degree
of parental effort, female freedom to mate again, how many young and how frequently a
female breeds. Both sexes will evolve sexually antagonistic adaptations biasing the out
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come towards their own interests. When it comes to the evolution of parental care—obvi
ously of critical importance for our ancestry—unless there really is perfect genetic
monogamy for life between the pair, there will be conflict. By default, each sex wants the
other one to work harder.
In primate mating systems, with the special vulnerability of young, risk of infanticide is
one of the most critical selection pressures on mothers. Sexual conflict in primates in
volves males seeking and females confusing information about fertility, with adaptations
in female sexual signals and strategies evolving to reduce these risks (Sillén-Tullberg &
Møller, 1993; Palombit, 2012).
Sillén-Tullberg and Møller (1993) found that, among anthropoid primates, loss of visual
ovulation signals almost always evolved in multimale contexts, indicating counter-infanti
cide was primary cause. But once evolved, concealed ovulation can then promote longer-
term pair-bonds and, consequently, increase male investment. This suggests an evolution
ary sequence in which ovulatory signals are first lost in relatively promiscuous contexts,
as a counter to infanticide, with pair-bonds evolving once ovulation had been concealed.
Women’s sexual physiology and reproductive cycles appear to have evolved to reduce
risks of infanticide and improve prospects of investment in hominin mating systems. This
happened in the context of pressures to undermine the primate “roving male” strategy of
seeking to impregnate one female before moving in quick succession to the next. A male
who mate-guarded one or more females round the clock to ensure paternity would not be
a productive hunter since he can only move as fast as females and offspring. Those fe
males would choose to mate with more successful provisioners willing to share high-quali
ty foods. This would lead to critical sexual conflict between mate-guarding dominants and
females needing food who preferred investor males.
The evidence that our female ancestors of over one million years ago won the battle
against dominant male harem organization is seen in reduced sexual size dimorphism in
Homo erectus relative to australopithecines, and significantly larger brain volumes. Our
extraordinarily long sexual receptivity (as a proportion of cycle length) combined with
concealed and unpredictable ovulation forces any male to stay with a female throughout
her fertile cycles to improve his chances. This favored males who were willing to invest
while “wasting” the time of males who aimed to rove.
As sole carers, ape mothers cannot evolve brain sizes above a “gray ceiling” of 600–700
cc without risking excessively high levels of stress and associated infant mortality (Isler &
van Schaik, 2012, S463–S464). For the evolving human female to break through this gray
ceiling—as happened with genus Homo by 1.8 million–1.5 million years ago—she needed
support from her female kin, implying co-residence with her mother. This strategic choice
of matrilocal residence challenges the assumption of many evolutionary theorists that
since the great apes are male philopatric or “patrilocal,” this must have applied through
out human evolution (e.g., Foley & Gamble, 2009). From around the beginning of the Mid
dle Pleistocene (780 ka), brain size increases with Homo heidelbergensis. The few African
fossils from 800–600 ka have cranial capacities in the range of 1200–1300 cc. However,
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the steepest increase in cranial capacities occurs later—from ~300 ka (e.g., de Miguel &
Henneberg, 2001, Figure 1). African fossils suggest that this last phase was abrupt and
coincided with our speciation (see Power et al., 2013, p. 42, Table 1; Watts, 2014).1
As female reproductive costs increased with the maximization of Homo brain sizes, those
females who gained more reliable male support would have improved their fertility rates
and reduced infant mortality. We argue that, for our ancestors in this period, the most so
cially and cognitively demanding challenge requiring systemic resolution would have
been to secure reliable male investment and coordinate resource exchange and distribu
tion between the sexes and their respective kin. We hypothesize that novel signaling
strategies arose to enforce a configuration of bride-service. Typically found among
African and other immediate-return foragers, in bride-service societies male sexual ac
cess depends on success in provisioning (Collier & Rosaldo, 1981; Lee, 1979, pp. 240–
242; Woodburn, 1968, p. 108). Bride-service associates strongly with a tendency to ma
trilocal residence, especially among African hunter-gatherers (Marlowe, 2004, p. 279;
Woodburn, 1968; Marshall Thomas, 2006, p. 78). Support of a woman’s kin obliges
hunters to surrender whatever game they catch to the bride’s family. This is an effective
mechanism of redistribution, making it difficult for men to assert dominance by monopo
lizing the distribution of food (contra. Foley & Gamble, 2009).
The social context for reverse dominance strategies was female kin coalitions. The specif
ic target of these strategies would be dominant males who attempted to monopolise fer
tile females but refused to do bride-service. Note here that among males, relatives of the
females (brothers, mother’s brothers), and those who were willing investors all share
strong interest in supporting female strategies against non-cooperative, dominant males.
We therefore have a potential coalition of the whole community asserting moral behavior,
as envisaged by Boehm. The occasion for reverse dominant coalitionary action would be
when alpha males attempted to sequester any potentially fertile female. Can we make any
further detailed predictions about what would trigger this?
Female cosmetic coalitions
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. Such males are primarily interested in locating and monopo
lizing a fertile female, before moving on to the next.
With estrus phased out during human evolution, menstruation was left as the most salient
cue indicating to males that a female was imminently fertile. A dominant male strategy
would evolve to target and guard menstrual females, monopolizing matings until that fe
male had ceased to cycle and was pregnant. Then he would look for the next one. In small
foraging groups or hunter-gatherer camps, women of reproductive age are pregnant or
nursing most of the time, making menstruation relatively rare. From the standpoint of fe
male coalitions forged to secure cooperative childcare, the last thing needed is to have
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males fighting for access to any imminently fertile, menstrual females. Menstruation is
therefore a trigger for potential conflict and competition both among females, because a
pregnant or nursing mother risks losing male support to a cycling female, and among
males, who will compete for a chance to mate such a female.
Non-cycling females have two possible responses to this dilemma. 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. We predict that females within coalitions would begin to use blood-colored sub
stances as cosmetics to augment their signals.
To clarify, the female cosmetic strategy aims to deter alpha males who try to get sexual
access without any investment. Females (with male kin help) can achieve this by physical
means of surrounding a menstrual female and refusing to let anyone near. But by the
same token, the cosmetic display encourages investor males who are willing to bring back
supplies to the whole female coalition. Those cosmetically decorated females who create
an impressive show of unity and solidarity are making life harder for the alpha males, en
suring that investor males get the fitness rewards. It will be in the interests of investor
males to sexually select females who belong to ritual cosmetic coalitions, because they
eliminate competition from non-investor dominant males.
Female cosmetic rituals generate a prototype “moral” strategy, with non-cycling females
aiming to obstruct and control sexual access to cycling females—a basis for the emer
gence of the puberty rituals, taboos, and prohibitions that surround menstruation in so
many ethnographic accounts (Knight, 1991). Earlier we noted that the intergroup conflict
scenario—supposedly the source of “group-mindedness”—cannot produce sexual morality,
rather in fact encouraging the opposite—sexual violence. By contrast, rules about sex as
the basis of human morality are intrinsic to the FCC model.
A second problem of the “warfare” model was that group boundaries and territorialism
undermined widespread networks of “cooperation among strangers.” By contrast, the
FCC strategy clearly demarcates those who belong to kin coalitions from those who are
outsiders from other kin groups—males doing bride-service. It therefore institutes chains
of connection across landscapes through sexual and economic exchange with men in fact
being exchanged between matrikin groups.
By contrast with the “warfare” scenario, the FCC model clearly prioritizes investment in
childcare, consonant with maximization of brain sizes. We queried how the ratchet effect
would take hold in a situation of “win some, lose some” between warring groups. By con
trast, in the context of ritual sexual “warfare,” male investors will be happy to “lose”
every time for the sake of their offspring, so cultural practice and tradition will be consis
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tently accumulated and replicated. We expect regular use of blood-red body paint as a di
agnostic marker of human symbolic lineages.
A final argument against the “warfare” scenario was that it failed to establish a shared,
virtual domain of fictive realities. Male warfare coalitions would perform ritualistic dis
plays, but would be constrained to indexical signals (indicative of real strength, numbers,
weaponry, etc.). In the case of cosmetic coalitions, fictiveness is a necessary feature of
the signaling. The agreement that something which is fake blood stands for blood is nor
mative and conventional. Even where cosmetic coalitionary display only occurred when
someone really menstruated, we can see how FCCs would create and share fictions by the
logic of resistance to dominance.
To refuse any male advance, female kin coalitions would signal “no” with their bodies, by
reversing the settings of the species mate-recognition system (Knight et al., 1995, p. 84).
So instead of stereotypically “female” displays, expect ritual performers to be role-play
ing “male.” Instead of “human,” expect pantomime representations of animal movements
and sounds. These song-and-dance displays where females signal “wrong species/wrong
sex” will become the signature of ritual power, establishing the inviolable, taboo, or sa
cred state of menstrual or body-painted females. The world will be turned upside down
periodically—so “wrong time”—but this negation still holds the promise of sex and fertili
ty sometime soon. The whole performance should excite male sexual desire while refus
ing access for the moment.
We can now predict what reverse dominant ritual should look like. Women collectively act
out the “world’s first metaphor,” in which their biology has been reversed (Knight &
Lewis, 2017). From the standpoint of any male seeking a mate, they will appear to him as
the wrong sex, the wrong species, and outside their fertile time—hence completely un
available to him right now. While revolutionary at the level of morality, symbolism, and
economics, the strategy emerges as an evolutionary adaptation, ultimately driven by male
sexual selection of “moral” female ritual participants. On this basis, through reverse gen
der dominance, the hunter-gatherer institution of bride-service emerges, with roughly
egalitarian chances of reproductive success for all hunters.
Ethnographic evidence for “wrong species,
wrong sex” reverse dominance
Shared ancient genetic markers connect the four major groups of African hunter-gather
ers—Khoisan Bushmen in the south, Western and Eastern Pygmies in the forests of Cen
tral Africa and, in East Africa, the small relict population of the Hadza. This allows us to
track the time-depth of their separation into distinct lineages. It is probable that they all
descend from an original Proto-Khoesan-Pygmy population living somewhere in sub-Saha
ran Africa, well before the major dispersal of modern humans outside the continent. Im
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portantly, if these groups share the same deep structure of ritual, this is likely to be ar
chaic (Power, 2017).
African hunter-gatherer women defy dominant males to this day by forming powerful in
tergenerational coalitions. These engender intense sexual solidarity and are so successful
that they go beyond defense against harassment to actively motivating male commitment
and provisioning (Power & Watts, 1997; Finnegan, 2013). They take the form of playful
but serious battles between gendered coalitions enacting a primordial era. To test our
“wrong species/sex/time” theoretical predictions, we examine initiation ritual beginning
with the “Eland Bull Dance” of the Kalahari Bushmen. Historically widespread among var
ious northern, central, and southern Khoisan groups, this is likely to be a very ancient rit
ual indeed (Lewis-Williams, 1981; Power & Watts, 1997).
The performance is triggered by a girl’s first menstruation. She is conceived as constant
ly transforming, changing her identity from female to male, human to animal, and the rit
ual observances, including sharing of hematite, must control and distribute this potency
(Keeney & Keeney, 2013; Power & Watts, 1997). Metamorphosed into the Eland Bull, sa
cred animal de passage (Lewis-Williams, 1981), while under stringent taboos and seclu
sion, the girl is now clearly unavailable to any man. The women’s community and male
kin join her in signaling that, for the moment, they are not available for sex with human
husbands. Instead, they dance around the metamorphosing girl, playfully mimicking the
behavior of mating elands.
Among the East African Hadza, the girls’ initiation ritual Maitoko involves similar sexual
defiance (Power, 2017). While bleeding, initiates re-enact a myth about an ancestral ma
triarch who dons a zebra’s penis—clearly “wrong sex” and “wrong species.” Like the
Eland Bull, this “male” animal enjoys intercourse with numerous “wives” who make clear
their temporary unavailability to their human husbands (“wrong time”). Dressed as
hunters, Maitoko initiates chase and hunt young men armed with sticks in a dramatic re
versal.
In the forest regions of Central Africa gender reversal plays a key role in maintaining
gender egalitarianism. Among the Mbuti in the East, the girls’ initiation Elima involves
chasing young hunters with sticks in a manner highly similar to the Hadza (Turnbull,
1993). Among the BaYaka pygmies of the Western Congo Basin, women-led reverse domi
nance is part of the fabric of life. Women periodically stage a ritual performance, known
as Ngoku, during which they assume one-sided power and control. Conceptualized as
women’s communal spirit, Ngoku acts out the mythic theme of the primordial “rule of
women” (Knight & Lewis, 2017). During Ngoku, female ritual leaders signal “wrong sex”
by miming lewd and aggressive male postures, with especially graphic and mocking imi
tations of male attempts to have sex.
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Conclusion: Symbolism and ritual as play
Nonhumans come closest to symbolic communication in play (Huizinga, 1949; Bateson,
1973; Knight, 2000). Through symbolic play, children engage in a world of shared inten
tions, leading them to grasp social roles and institutions. Human culture perpetuates play
into adulthood. Typical among hunter-gatherer initiation rituals is a kind of communal
play, presenting First Creation as a realm in reverse where gendered coalitions engage in
mock warfare. Play and ritual demand special times and spaces (Huizinga, 1949, pp. 19–
20) within which, in all seriousness, one must obey the rules, which mandate a fundamen
tal—if momentary—egalitarianism where the stronger party is willing to lose. Play “cre
ates order, is order” (Huizinga, 1949, p. 10). Once the rules are accepted, novelty and cre
ativity are set free.
We have presented an account of the evolutionary emergence of symbolic culture as a
communal realm of pretend-play, and we have counterposed this to the idea that only
warfare can lead to the evolution of rule-bound groups. We locate these playful ritual
coalitions in the late Middle Pleistocene, the period of our speciation. The Darwinian
process generating symbolic communication was ritualized conflict between the sexes
over levels of investment in highly encephalized offspring. Reproductively burdened
mothers in particular were pushed to mount coalitionary resistance against dominant
male attempts to monopolize fertile females without providing adequate investment.
The resulting FCC strategy: a) initiated rule-governed sexual behavior; b) demarcated
sexual and economic exchange between kin groups; c) rewarded male hunters willing to
perform bride-service with roughly equal shares in reproductive success; and d) generat
ed a shared, virtual domain of morally authoritative or supernatural constructs of the
form “wrong species/wrong sex,” associated to real or cosmetic menstruation.
The FCC model provides a Darwinian account for the key features of the early earth pig
ment record: color selection, timing of initial use and timing of rapid onset of habitual use
in relation to encephalization. It is also capable of explaining differences between the
strategies of Neanderthal and modern human lineages. Periodic ritual performances
based in cosmetic “menstrual” display established symbolic culture, morality, kinship, and
the sexual division of labor. The revolutionary overthrow of brute reality was an aspect of
a social revolution which severed the last link between primate male dominance and re
productive success. Ultimately, investor males drove the success of this symbolic strategy
through sexual selection of ritually decorated females as part of our speciation. African
hunter-gatherer women to this day mount periodic reverse-dominant displays with archa
ic imagery of “wrong species/wrong sex/wrong time” as their signature of ritual power.
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Notes:
(1) This remains the case after readjustment for the redating on Jebel Irhoud fossils 1 and
2.
Camilla Power
Camilla Power completed her PhD under Leslie Aiello at the University of London.
She is currently Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of East London,
specializing in Darwinian models for the origins of ritual and religion, and African
hunter‐gatherer gender ritual, having worked in the field with women of the Hadz
abe in Tanzania.
Ian Watts
Independent Scholar
Chris Knight
Chris Knight was for many years Professor of Anthropology at the University of East
London. He is best known for his 1991 book, Blood relations: Menstruation and the
origins of culture. He helped initiate the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG) series of
international conferences and has published widely on the evolutionary emergence of
language and symbolic culture.
