Ulrich J. Frey, Charlotte Störmer and Kai P. Willführ (eds) 2010. Homo Novus – a
Human Without Illusions. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, pp. 193-211
Chapter 14
The Origins of Symbolic Culture
Chris Knight
Abstract 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.
‘Symbolic culture....requires the invention of a whole new kind of things, things that
have no existence in the ‘real’ world but exist entirely in the symbolic 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’. (Philip Chase 1994, p. 628)
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 subjective belief. In this chapter, I
attempt to bridge the gap between Darwinism and the human sciences by providing
a materialist account of our species’ puzzling reliance on moral, religious, and other
cultural illusions.
193
14.1 Two Kinds of Fact
‘Brute facts’, in the terminology of John Searle (1996, p. 27), are facts which are
true anyway, regardless of human belief. Suppose you don’t believe in gravity: jump
over a cliff and you’ll still fall. Natural science is the study of facts of this kind.
‘Institutional facts’ are fictions accorded factual status within human social
institutions. Monetary and commercial facts are fictions of this kind. The
complexities of today’s global currency system are facts only while we believe in
them: suspend the belief and the facts correspondingly dissolve. Yet although
institutional facts rest on human belief, that doesn’t make them mere distortions or
hallucinations. Take my confidence that these two five-pound banknotes in my
pocket are worth ten pounds. That’s not merely my subjective belief: it’s an
objective, indisputable fact. But now imagine a collapse of public confidence in the
currency system. Suddenly, the realities in my pocket dissolve.
For scholars familiar with Rousseau, Marx or Durkheim, none of this is
especially surprising or difficult to grasp. Some facts are true anyway, irrespective
of human belief. Others subsist in a virtual realm of hallucination or faith. For
Saussure (1983 [1915], p. 8), it was the parallel between linguistic meanings and
currency values – all in some sense hallucinatory – which made a scientific
linguistics so problematical:
“Other sciences are provided with objects of study given in advance, which are then
examined from different points of view. Nothing like this is the case in linguistics… The
object is not given in advance of the viewpoint: far from it. Rather, one might say that it
is the viewpoint adopted which creates the object”.
It was in rebellion against such troubling notions that Noam Chomsky (2000, pp.
106-133) redefined ‘language and similar phenomena’ as ‘elements of the natural
world, to be studied by ordinary methods of empirical enquiry’. Linguistics, within
Chomsky’s new paradigm, ceased to be social and became instead a natural science.
Ideologically hostile to Marx, Durkheim and what they termed ‘Standard Social
Science’, a generation of Darwinians (Tooby and Cosmides 1992, 1995, Pinker
1994) embraced Chomsky’s naturalistic approach. Somehow, language had now to
be explained as an innate cognitive module without any animal precursor. Its
emergence had also to be explained if possible without reference to social selection
pressures (e.g., Hauser et al., 2002; Fitch et al., 2005). The consequence of all this
was to render language’s very existence an insoluble mystery (Knight 2004, 2009).
Far from yielding to Darwinian explanation, the evolutionary emergence of
language is nowadays considered ‘the hardest problem in science’ (Christiansen and
Kirby 2003).
14.2 Four Positions on the Origins of Symbolic Culture
Within the past fifteen years, archaeological revelations from the African Middle Stone
Age have transformed our picture of the timing of symbolic culture’s emergence. Until
the early nineties, the prevailing view of the ‘human revolution’ (Mellars and Stringer
194
1989) was notably Eurocentric, focused on the Upper Palaeolithic Revolution as
humanity’s ‘Great Leap Forward’. Recent discoveries from Africa have at least
doubled the time-depth of acknowledged and accepted evidence of symbolic
activity. This has left us with four main positions concerning the timeline
for symbolic culture’s emergence:
1. Francesco D’Errico. Multispecies transition across Africa and Eurasia.
Symbolic capacities already in place with Homo heidelbergensis 300,000 400,000 years ago. Sporadic behavioural expressions of symbolism among
ancestors of both Neanderthals and ourselves (D’Errico 2003).
2. Sally McBrearty and Alison Brooks. Down with the revolution! African
ancestors of modern humans undergo gradual, sporadic build-up of modern
cognition and behavior spanning 300,000 years. Symbolism presents no
special theoretical difficulties, emerging as part of the package of modern,
flexible, creative behaviours within Africa (McBrearty and Brooks 2000;
McBrearty 2007)
3. Christopher Henshilwood and Ian Watts. The human revolution occurred as
part of modern human speciation in Africa. Evidence for symbolism in the
form of cosmetics and personal ornamentation is the archaeological
signature of this transition. Symbolism was not an optional extra – life
following the transition became fundamentally organized through symbols
(Henshilwood and Dubreuil 2009; Watts 2009)
4. Richard Klein. Recent interpretations of the African Middle Stone Age
record are wrong; the original ‘human revolution’ theory remains correct.
Middle Stone Age humans evolving in Africa may appear anatomically
modern, but did not become cognitively modern until the Late Stone
Age/Upper Palaeolithic. Symbolic culture emerged some 50,000 years ago,
caused by a genetic mutation that re-wired the brain (Klein 1999; Klein and
Edgar 2002).
14.3 The Archaeological Evidence
In the African archaeological record, the earliest persuasive evidence for
symbolic culture includes certain engraved pieces of ochre (Henshilwood et al.,
2002) associated with marine pierced shells (Henshilwood et al., 2004; d’Errico et
al., 2005). Dated to around 70,000 years ago, these were recovered from Middle
Stone Age levels at Blombos Cave, South Africa. Mounting evidence for symbolic
behaviour at still earlier dates includes a South African coastal site (Pinnacle Point)
yielding mollusc remains, bladelets, and red ochre pigments dating to at least
164,000 years ago (Marean et al., 2007). Use of ochre pigments extends back
between 250-300 ky at some sites in the tropics; regular and habitual use dates back
to the time of modern speciation (Watts 1999, 2009).
Most archaeologists now accept that the shells and pigments were used for
personal ornamentation. Often, the shells were strung together to form a necklace.
Traces of red pigment have been found on a set of 82,000 year-old perforated shells
from the Grotte des Pigeons in North Africa, suggesting that the wearer’s body was
195
perhaps already ochred (d’Errico and Vanhaeren 2009, plate 2). Traces of red ochre
pigment have similarly been found on some shells from Blombos in South Africa
(d’Errico et al., 2004). At Blombos, several modified pieces of ochre have a sharp
bevelled edge, as if designed to produce a clear outline of colour on a surface (Watts
2009, Plate 4). Ochres yielding the most saturated dark reds – especially ‘blood’
reds – were subjected to the greatest intensity of grinding and use (Watts 2009).
Pinnacle Point nearby yields similar ‘crayons’ dated to 164,000 ky (Marean et al.,
2007). Geometric engravings found on Blombos pieces (Henshilwood et al., 2002)
add to the suggestion that many of these delicately shaped ‘crayons’ were used to
produce abstract designs, probably on the human body (Watts 2009). This cultural
tradition can be traced back to at least a hundred thousand years ago (Henshilwood
et al., in press). Such evidence suggests that cultural traditions involving body
painting were already being established with the speciation of Homo sapiens.
14.4 Explanatory Scenarios
To Christopher Henshilwood and Benoit Dubreuil, the cosmetic evidence
indicates that Middle Stone Age people were capable of symbolic communication
(Henshilwood and Dubreuil 2009). For individuals to wear cosmetics or a necklace,
they must care about how they look. To adorn oneself appropriately, it is necessary
to imagine one’s appearance from the standpoint of others. The requisite capacities
for multiple perspective taking are distinctively ‘modern’ and underlie all symbolic
communication including language. Henshilwood and his colleagues on that basis
conclude that the producers of the Blombos pigments and ornaments already had
language-ready minds.
Ian Watts (2009) arrives at similar conclusions concerning language, but on
different theoretical grounds. Since my own theoretical position converges closely
with that of Watts, and since we both support Camilla Power’s Female Cosmetic
Coalitions model (see discussion below), I will avoid repetition at this point and
turn directly to Klein, who is the main archaeological opponent of the idea that
African Middle Stone Age findings from sites such as Blombos have anything to do
with symbolism.
The argument for a mutation generating language and then triggering symbolic
culture (e.g. Klein 1999; Chomsky 2005) has little to recommend it. We should be
suspicious when a puzzle regarding our own species is addressed using ‘special’
methods – methods without parallel elsewhere in evolutionary science. No specialist
in, say, elephant or social insect communication would invoke a single mutation to
explain its evolution. We would be equally astonished at an appeal to elephant or
honeybee psychology fixed by an ‘environment of evolutionary adaptedness’
(Tooby and Cosmides 1992, 1995) in the remote past. Evolution is not driven by
mental phenomena. In the case of any natural species, we explain cognition and
communication by reference to reproductive strategies, foraging strategies and
other behavioral adaptations to environmental and social conditions as these
196
fluctuate and change over evolutionary time. We need a theory of the evolution of
Homo sapiens faithful to the methods of behavioral ecology which have proved so
successful elsewhere in the living world.
It might be thought that by now we would have a number of theoretical attempts
in this direction. Sadly, this is not so. If we are looking for hypotheses which are (a)
based in behavioral ecology (b) focused on the emergence of symbolism and (c)
testable in the light of relevant archaeological data, the range of suggestions is
limited. Camilla Power’s Female Cosmetic Coalitions model (see discussion below)
meets all three conditions. But before presenting it, I will survey an array of models
which meet at least some of these basic preconditions.
14.5 Costly Versus Cheap Signals: Cooperation Between Strangers
1. Philip Chase: Symbolism enforces co-operation between strangers. During
the later phases of human evolution, humans began to invent entities lacking
any existence in the real world – intangibles such as underworlds, promises and
totems. Symbolic culture arose because its coercive rituals and associated belief
systems provided the only mechanisms of punishment and reward capable of
enforcing cooperation between strangers, in turn a prerequisite for the
establishment of institutional facts. The term ‘cooperation between strangers’
means cooperation on a scale transcending the limits of Darwinian kin-selection
or reciprocal altruism (Chase 1994, 1999).
2. Richard Sosis: Costly ritual enforces cooperation between strangers.
Religious communities are networks of ‘strangers’ held together by costly
ritual. The supernatural entities that help to inspire allegiance don’t
spontaneously replicate in human brains: they must be coercively installed.
Painful ordeals such as initiation rites perform this function. The only way to
reliably demonstrate religious commitment is to undergo rituals so demanding
of personal sacrifice that the benefits of subsequent defection are likely to be
outweighed by the costs (Sosis 2003).
3. Merlin Donald: Mimesis. Symbolic culture became established as Homo
erectus came under communicative pressure to exercise cognitive control over
previously hard-to-fake, emotionally expressive body language. Mimetic
culture took the form of learned, culturally transmitted, simulated versions of
such body language. Through dance, song, pantomime and ritual, evolving
humans bonded with one another and became increasingly equipped to express
in public their emotional and cognitive states (Donald 1991, 2001).
4. Dan Sperber: To qualify as symbolic, a signal must be false. To determine
whether a signal or statement is ‘symbolic’, a simple rule can be applied. Is it
patently false? If so, it may qualify as a symbol. Falsehood is intrinsic to
symbolism. Linguistic utterances are symbolic to the extent that they are patent
falsehoods serving as guides to communicative intentions. Metaphor, irony,
197
sarcasm and humour illustrate the principle. Language began to evolve when
humans started reciprocally faking in communicatively helpful ways (Sperber
1975, 2005; Sperber and Wilson 1986).
5. Roy Rappaport: In the beginning was the Word. Words are cheap and
unreliable. Costly, repetitive and invariant religious ritual is the antidote. At the
apex is an ‘ultimate sacred postulate’ – an article of faith beyond possible
denial. Words may lie, so it is claimed, but ‘the Word’ emanates from a higher
source. Without such public confidence upheld by ritual action, faith in the
entire system of interconnected symbols would collapse. During the evolution
of humanity, the crucial step was therefore the establishment of rituals capable
of upholding the levels of trust necessary for linguistic communication to work
(Rappaport 1999).
6. Jerome Lewis: Hunting, mimicry and play. Antelopes, monkeys and other
animals hunted by Central African forest people treat vocal signals as intrinsically
reliable. Forest hunter-gatherers routinely exploit such gullibility, faking animal
cries to lure their targets within range. When these same hunters subsequently recall
a particular hunting episode, they act out the story drawing on the same
sophisticated capacities for faking, mimicry and pantomime. Story-telling, ritual,
play and religion in such societies is the in-group, co-operative and correspondingly
honest redeployment of capacities for deception initially deployed in the forest.
This converges with the people’s indigenous view of their signs, songs and rituals
as echoes of the forest’s own voices and spirits (Lewis 2009).
14.6 Symbolism: Puzzles and Paradoxes
Turning now to a review of these ideas, archaeologist Philip Chase asserts that
Darwinism alone cannot explain co-operation between strangers. He also reminds us
that symbolic culture enforces just this kind of cooperation. But how did symbolic
culture itself emerge? Having posed the question with admirable clarity, he leaves
the evolutionary emergence of symbolic culture unexplained.
Behavioural ecologist Richard Sosis does offer a Darwinian model in which
individual strategies of alliance-building enforce cooperation between strangers. To
explain the mechanisms at work, Sosis relies on costly signalling theory (Zahavi
1975; Zahavi and Zahavi 1997). Religious communities hold themelves together by
insisting that each individual member pays admission and continued membership
costs so heavy as to deter freeriding. The threshold of costs will be set by the
probability of social defection. This explains why rituals of initiation are so often
painful, and potentially why there should be variability in costliness. A ritual
involving no hardship or sacrifice cannot signal commitment: it would allow
freeriders to flourish.
Sosis has done his main studies on contemporary or recent historic religious
communities, who are already immersed in symbolic culture. In principle, however, the
model can apply to the evolutionary emergence of ritual and religion. Indeed Alcorta
198
and Sosis (2005) discuss the African Middle Stone Age archaeological record,
mainly the ochre evidence, in relation to this model. The value of this work is that it
suggests a bridge between animal signalling and symbolic cultural display: the same
body of theory can be applied in both domains. But why exactly must hard-to-fake
ritual generate what Chase (1994) terms ‘things that have no existence in the “real”
world’? Hunter gatherer ritual and religious landscapes are populated by animal
spirits, tricksters and other such fictional entities. What is the connection between
these two apparently incompatible properties of ritual – its intrinsic reliability on the
one hand and its trickery on the other?
In stark opposition to the hard-to-fake costly signal model stand Merlin Donald
and Dan Sperber. For symbolism to evolve, if we accept their positions, evolving
humans had to stop probing signals for their reliability and instead collude with
patent fakes. At first sight, this seems wholly incompatible with Sosis’ argument
that symbolically constituted communities hold themselves together by resorting to
signals whose reliability is underwritten by their costs. If Donald and Sperber are
correct, symbolism seems to presuppose signals which are not just unreliable but
patently false. But perhaps the cheap signals and the costly ones perform distinct
functions, operating on quite different levels?
This is essentially the argument of Roy Rappaport, a social anthropologist who
rejected modern selfish-gene Darwinism but independently converged on the costly
signalling idea. Social acceptance of symbols presupposes high levels of trust
already in place. Sosis in fact follows Rappaport’s argument that costly ritual is
designed to generate trust where none existed before. Integrating these lines of
reasoning, we might conclude that ritual is needed to cement bonds sufficiently
trusting to permit communication on the basis of cheap fakes.
Let me put this another way. A distinction can be drawn between signalling costs
of two kinds (cf. Grafen 1990; Guilford and Dawkins 1991). Either the signaller
must generate trust signal by signal, using intrinsically convincing features to do so.
Where this is the case, the costs involved in eliminating perceptual ambiguity won’t
suffice: added costs will have to be incurred to ensure reliability as well. A strong
case can be made that all animal signals fall into this category, such that both kinds
of costs (‘efficacy costs’ plus ‘strategic costs’) are always involved. The reason for
this is that animal signals must always carry at least some of the burden of
generating the trust necessary for communication to work.
But what if the signaller doesn’t have to generate trust at all? Trust could be
assumed, leaving the signaller free to concentrate only on perceptual
discriminability. If it were possible to reduce the strategic cost of proving
reliability to zero, all signalling effort could be poured into efficacy. Carried to its
conclusion, this should permit digital signalling – the cheapest and most efficient
kind of communication. We know that human language is in fact digital on a
number of levels, both phonological and semantic, and that this is one of its most
remarkable and biologically unprecedented features (Burling 2005: 25-7, 53-5).
Animal signalling is never like this for the same reason that it doesn’t have the
luxury of being patently false or fictional. Costly signals of any kind can only be
evaluated on an analog scale. Putting all this together, it seems that language is
digital for the same reason that it consists of social fictions. Signals of this kind
199
are acceptable only under highly unusual conditions – such as those internal to a
ritually bonded community whose members are not tempted to lie.
Combining the insights of Chase, Sosis, Donald, Sperber and Rappaport, we
might summarize by defining symbolic culture as a domain of transparent
falsehoods whose social acceptance depends on levels of trust generated through the
performance of costly ritual. We might add that once such fictions are accepted, they
qualify as ‘institutional facts’ (Searle 1996). Human social institutions perpetuating
facts of this kind evolved in associated with the uniquely human phenomenon of
‘cooperation between strangers’. But it remains to be explained just how and why.
Following Maynard Smith and Harper (2003, p. 3), we may define a ‘signal’ as
any act or structure which alters the behaviour of other organisms, which evolved
because of that effect, and which is effective because the receiver’s response has
also evolved. If one animal pushes another away, that is not a signal. If one animal
bares its teeth and the other retreats, it’s a signal because the response depends on
evolved properties of the brain and sense organs of the receiver. The signal must
carry information of interest to the receiver. This need not always be correct, but it
must be correct often enough for the receiver to be selected to respond to it. Krebs
and Dawkins (1984) view signal evolution as an ‘arms race’ between signallers as
‘manipulators’ and receivers as ‘mind-readers’. Zahavi (1975) proposed ‘the
handicap principle’ to explain why signal selection favours extravagance and
apparent wastefulness as opposed to utilitarian efficiency. Receivers on guard
against deception force signallers to compete in producing signals so costly that they
cannot be fakes.
The problem is that by these standards, conventional signals such as those of
language appear to be theoretically impossible – a point explicitly made by Zahavi
(1993). Machiavellian primates can produce tactical deceptions, but these are
frequency-dependent: they only work if most signals are honest. To explain the
emergence of human cultural symbolism, we need a theory which addresses this
difficulty: How can we imagine fakes becoming so prevalent as to dominate social
life? How can we imagine Machiavellian evolving humans, by definition resistant to
deception, allowing themselves to become immersed in whole realms of patent
fiction and illusion?
Here is a possible solution. Whether a given signal is deceptive or reliable, costly
or cheap, analog or digital depends on one’s perspective. We need to know who is
doing the evaluating and from what standpoint. Imagine a coalition of individuals
cooperatively aiming deceptive signals at an external target. Viewed from inside the
coalition, those patent deceptions will have positive value. Instead of being resisted,
from this standpoint they should be celebrated and embraced. To quote Saussure
(1983 [1915]: 8) once again: ‘The object is not given in advance of the viewpoint:
far from it. Rather, one might say that it is the viewpoint adopted which creates the
object.’
Drawing on his work with the Mbendjele forest people of Central Africa, social
anthropologist Jerome Lewis offers a proposal along similar lines, rooting human
vocal deception capacities in hunting. Human volitional control over vocal
200
signalling, he suggests, did not evolve initially in contexts of human social
interaction. Instead, it was used initially to deceive prey animals who would prove
vulnerable again and again to such fakes. Humans co-operating with one another to
deceive external targets would be predicted not to resist one another’s deceptions
but on the contrary to echo and amplify them. In Lewis’ account, vocal simulations
re-deployed internally within the community laid the basis for vocal humour,
children’s games, choral singing, narrative fiction, metaphor, religion and so forth.
Humans successfully ‘deceived’ the forest and then constructed the symbolic
domain as that forest’s own echo, now directed back into the human social world.
We now need to consider how hunter-gatherer strategies of this kind might have
beome established in the evolutionary past.
14.7. Counterdominance, Egalitarianism and Collective
Intentionality
1. Michael Tomasello: The cultural origins of human cognition. Cultural
evolution can proceed rapidly, helping to explain the accelerated pace of
evolution associated with the emergence of Homo sapiens. It presupposes the
‘ratchet effect’, in which innovations are preserved and accumulated
intergenerationally. This would have been fostered by cooperative strategies in
which individuals subordinated their private purposes to collective future goals.
Apes are not capable of this kind of cooperation, which explains why they don’t
even point. Declarative pointing presupposes ‘we’-intentionality: a shared
subjectivity rendering things interesting or relevant ‘for us’. It involves a triadic
structure of representation in which signaller and receiver share the same focus
of attention. If ape cognition is poorly adapted to such tasks, the explanation is
ultimately that they are just too competitive (Tomasello 1999, 2006).
2. Andrew Whiten: The evolution of deep social mind. Primate selfishly
Machiavellian cognition reflects the fact that reproductive success is likely to be
secured by harassment and deception as much as by cooperation. In humans,
strikingly different cognitive developments reflect novel strategies of
cooperation whose roots lie in ‘counterdominance’ – resistance to being
physically dominated by others. Within increasingly stable coalitions, status
began to be earned in novel ways, social rewards accruing to those perceived by
their peers as especially cooperative and self-aware. Selection pressures
favoured such psychological innovations as imaginative empathy, joint
attention, moral judgment, project-oriented collaboration and the ability to
evaluate one’s own behaviour from the standpoint of others. Underpinning
enhanced probabilities of cultural transmission and cumulative cultural
evolution, these developments led to the establishment of hunter-gatherer-style
egalitarianism in association with ‘deeply social’ minds (Whiten 1999).
3. Christopher Boehm: From counterdominance to reverse dominance. During
the later stages of human evolution, counterdominance tipped over into ‘reverse
dominance’. Humans became so resistant to being intimidated or dominated
201
that they remained constantly on guard, ready at any moment to band together
in countering perceived threats. As coalitions organized in this way regularly
defeated all opposition, they established themselves collectively as the
dominant force. Society became ‘moral’ when everyone was embraced within
the same coalition, evaluating the behaviour of its individual members from this
new collective standpoint (Boehm 2001).
4. Robin Dunbar: Social brain, gossip and grooming. Seeking safety in
numbers, evolving humans formed larger groups. Among primates, larger group
sizes lead to greater internal competition, raising levels of harrassment and
associated stress. Negotiating larger groups also selects for a larger neocortex,
placing females in particular under more reproductive stress. Increase of
Machiavellian intelligence is a specifically female problem, in terms of meeting
reproductive costs. Dunbar proposes a strategy for cutting costs of time budgets
– the vocal grooming and gossip model which offers a precursor to language.
Subordinates buffer themselves by forming defensive alliances, maintaining
friendships through manual grooming. But as such alliances became
progressively larger, pressure mounted to find a cheaper, more efficient way of
maintaining social bonds. The solution was to switch to vocal grooming. By
using sounds instead of fingers, evolving humans could service multiple allies
at once while leaving their hands free for practical tasks. Vocal ‘gossip’ had its
origins here (Dunbar 1996).
8. Dominance and Reverse Dominance
Psychologist Michael Tomasello studies the cognitive interface between humans and
other primates. The special thing about humans, in his account, is cooperation in
pursuit of a goal held jointly in mind. An element of contractual understanding is
involved, since commitment would collapse without confidence that future gains
would be shared. Resource sharing is in this way bound up with an orientation
toward the future. There has to be a dream or vision, those sharing it committing
themselves to whatever forms of collaboration are needed to secure its practical
implementation.
So how and why did Homo sapiens begin collaborating in this special way? The
fact that wild-living apes don’t even point things out to one another shifts attention
from cognitive mechanisms to competitive and cooperative strategies. Declarative
pointing presupposes individuals so trusting and cooperative that they are willing to
decide collaboratively on the perspective to be adopted toward the world. Humans
during the course of evolution established such ‘we’-intentionality. Linguistic rules
and symbols – complex elaborations on the simple theme of pointing – are in
Tomasello’s view culturally inherited patterns which evolved and became
transmitted from the moment when this development occurred. As to why it
occurred, Tomasello offers no evolutionary explanation, remarking with refreshing
candour ‘I really have no idea’ (Tomasello 2003, pp. 108-09).
Andrew Whiten offers at least the beginnings of an idea. The struggle to resist
being dominated has an inherent tendency to bring together unrelated individuals
202
who might not previously have been allies. In Whiten’s model, humans retain their
primate heritage of ‘Machiavellian’ strategic intelligence, initially without
undergoing any psychological rupture or break. But as they developed increasingly
effective strategies of resistance, the benefits of imposing dominance on others
became matched by the associated costs. Eventually a stalemate was reached:
instead of everyone competing to find someone else to dominate, the winning
strategy was ‘don’t mess with me’ – a generalized refusal to be dominated. As this
strategy became evolutionarily stable, it altered the trajectory of cognitive and
cultural evolution, leading to the emergence of distinctively modern human
psychology.
Whiten avoids the conundrums and paradoxes associated with the topic of
symbolism. Boehm does little better, barely mentioning ritual, religion or language.
Yet Boehm takes one notable step in the necessary direction. Tomasello, as we have
seen, links the evolution of symbolism with collaboration in pursuit of a shared
vision or goal. Boehm in this context offers a concrete proposal. The vision which
really mattered was a political one. The aim was to take hold of primate-style
dominance and turn it upside down. No longer should physical violence or threat be
allowed to determine access to resources or status within the group. Humanity’s first
moral community was committed to the ideal of an egalitarian order turning
dominance on its head.
According to Boehm, the strategy of resisting dominance leads eventually to fullscale revolution. But how exactly did this happen? Boehm asks us to envisage a
coalition expanding until eventually it includes everyone. This is a demanding
concept, since a coalition by definition presupposes a boundary between insiders
and outsiders. Given that primate dominance is always in some sense sexual, it
would follow that a model of counterdominance culminating in reverse dominance
should take account of this. Could male-versus-female conflict and cooperation lead
to a coalition embracing everyone? Boehm (2001: 167-9) does consider
distinctively female strategies, but curiously only when dealing with chimpanzees.
His arguments about the evolution of human hunter-gatherer egalitarianism are
surprisingly unisex.
If we are to consider counter- and reverse dominance in human evolution, the
most critical issue becomes reproductive counterdominance. How do these models
deal with the question of reproductive skew among males? Bowles (2006) points to
reproductive levelling among predominantly monogamous hunter-gatherers as
critical to egalitarianism. To explore the evolutionary establishment of
egalitarianism on this reproductive level, we must bring into consideration the
energetic requirements of females.
According to the Social Brain hypothesis (Dunbar 1996, 2003), the factor driving
increase in neocortex size in hominin ancestors was increasing group size. In the
case of early Homo, as climate dried towards the end of the Pliocene, groups needed
to be bigger for protection in more open environments. In the case of later Homo,
during the Pleistocene, the main danger of predation was likely to have been from
other human groups. Under these pressures for increasing group size, Homo was
selected for increased Machiavellian intelligence to negotiate increasing social
complexity. Pawlowski et al., (1998) show that as neocortex size increases in
203
primates, the correlation of male rank with mating success is progressively
undermined. Selection for increased social intelligence therefore goes hand in hand
with greater reproductive levelling.
But whatever the specific selection pressures were, these larger brain sizes in
later Homo, along with their larger bodies, led to increased costs of reproduction for
females. It is now time to consider how the extra energetic requirements of mothers
of large-brained offspring were being met. We turn to models for sexual strategies
and investment.
14.9. Female Coalitionary Strategies
1. Sarah Hrdy: The origins of mutual understanding. Ape mothers are
insufficiently trusting to allow others to hold their babies. Homo erectus
mothers, facing increasingly heavy childcare burdens, enhanced their fitness by
relinquishing young offspring to trustworthy allocarers. However, this was only
possible if female kin were living close together (see Hawkes below).
Distinctively human cognition evolved in this context, as mothers probed
potential allocarers for their cooperative intentions. Infants monitoring the
intentions and feelings of mothers and others became adept at perspectivetaking and integrating multiple perspectives. Offspring more skilled in reading
the intentions of others and eliciting their help were better nourished and more
likely to survive. Female strategies of cooperative childcare can explain how
and why humans became cognitively and emotionally ‘modern’ (Hrdy 2009).
2. Kristen Hawkes: Grandmothering and show-off hunting in human evolution.
Together with her colleagues James O’Connell and Nick Blurton Jones,
Hawkes offers two key arguments for investment in offspring at different stages
of human evolution. The ‘grandmother’ hypothesis (Hawkes et al 1998;
O’Connell 1999) argues for the beginnings of humanlike life history in early H.
erectus. Burdened with increasingly heavy childcare costs, evolving Homo
mothers sought help from the most reliable source – female kin and especially
their own mothers. Post-reproductive lifespans extended as older females came
under selection pressure to invest in the offspring of their daughters. With
drying of climate in the Early Pleistocene, and scarcity of accessible foods for
weanlings, older females stepped in, providing gathered foods such as tubers to
these young offspring. In terms of life history this selected for relatively early
weaning (hence short interbirth intervals) along with longer childhood
dependency on adult provisioning, and delay in sexual maturity, along with
longer lifespans. Males were intermittently or unreliably involved in supporting
offspring at this stage, but during the Middle to Late Pleistocene(associating to
H. heidelbergensis), hunting strategies become more effective and reliable.
Males were motivated to hunt big game as ‘show offs’. Rather than hunt small
to medium game for their own offspring alone, they demonstrated quality by
generously providing big game to the whole camp (Hawkes and Bliege Bird
2002). So females gained male investment via mating effort rather than
specifically paternal strategies.
204
3. Camilla Power: Female cosmetic coalitions. The evolution of concealed
ovulation, extended receptivity and increased reproductive synchrony in the
human female forced males to spend more time in female company. Potential
philanderers were deprived of the information they needed to successfully rove
from one female to the next, picking and choosing between females on the basis
of current fertility cues. However, one signal – menstruation – was left salient,
giving away this kind of information to philanderers. As an indicator of
imminent fertility, menstruation will trigger conflict both between males, who
may compete for the cycling female, and between females, who may compete
for male investment. In the absence of countermeasures, mothers who are
pregnant or lactating may be at risk of losing male investment to the cycling
female. The rapid increase in neocortex size characteristic of human evolution
over the last half million years meant mothers could no longer tolerate such
risks; it was in their individual fitness interest to prioritise future economic
security over short-term sexual favour-seeking. Counterdominant female
coalitions on this basis responded by ‘painting up’ with false signals
representing all members of the coalition as uniformly ‘fertile’. Investor males –
whose offspring might have better chances of survival – had a fitness interest in
colluding with the corresponding fictions. The evolutionary stability of female
strategies of cosmetic bonding and adornment, culminated in the transition to
symbolic ritual, religion and language (Power and Aiello 1997; Power 1999,
2009).
10. On Cooperative Breeding
Sarah Hrdy effectively combines the ‘grandmother’ model with Tomasello’s
arguments for intersubjectivity as the basis for human culture and cognition.
Pregnancy and postnatal childcare in Homo were such heavy burdens that they offer
the most convincing context for the development of novel cooperative strategies.
Alone of the great apes, we became cooperative breeders. Hrdy’s arguments about
the effects of alloparenting on human cognitive evolution are persuasive. Her focus
on changing female strategies and on consequences for infant psychology are
necessary and welcome. Demographically flexible cooperative breeding networks
could act as a safety net compensating for extreme variability of male commitment
to investment.
Neither Hrdy nor Kristen Hawkes, whose model she acknowledges as the initial
steps into cooperative breeding, aim to deal with symbolic culture. Both models also
keep males as investors in the margins, with female kin getting on with the job, not
expecting regular investment from males. Males enter the picture only late,
becoming more reliable hunters as female sexual choice drives them to intensified
mating effort. There is no clear argument from Hawkes as to what causes the shift in
male behavior and productivity between H. erectus and subsequent encephalized
humans. In fact, in her life history models she does not take much account of
increasing brain size even though this is critical in adding to female costs. Among
Hadza bow-and-arrow hunters to this day males are only intermittently successful,
an observation which led Hawkes to doubt the validity of the model of ‘man the
hunter’ provisioning his own offspring.
205
Camilla Power concurs with Hrdy’s and Hawkes’ initial position of female kinrelated social structures among H. erectus. Because female fertility is altered by the
grandmother strategy, since mothers with allocare support would tend to have
shorter interbirth intervals and be fertile more often, this must affect male behaviour.
More dominant males might attempt to target fertile females opportunistically,
moving from one to another, while less dominant males could pursue a strategy of
hanging around more reliably, offering provisioning and protective support to a
particular female and her kin. As interbirth intervals shortened, investor males who
waited around, rather than competed for other mates, should get more reproductive
benefits. Such a picture of variability in male commitment fits Hrdy’s observations
of stark differences among modern human fathers.
Power argues that while such variability may have been tolerable for less
encephalized early H. erectus, as brains rapidly expanded during the Late Middle
Pleistocene (from c.500,000 to 150,000 ky), female fitness was increasingly
affected by male investment. In these conditions among H. heidelbergensis,
sporadically in Eurasia, and increasingly regularly in Africa, females resorted to the
cosmetic strategy from ca. 300,000 ky. This had the effect of rejecting male
philanderers who were not prepared to work and invest, while promoting the
rewards to male investors – in the form of Hawkes’ big game hunting show offs.
An advantage of Power and colleagues’ model (Knight et al., 1995) is that the
emergence of symbolism is intrinsic to the strategy. Symbols are socially accepted
fakes, and in Power’s model that means cosmetics. But were pigments necessarily
used by women alone? Evolving human males had little Darwinian reason to alter or
transform their biologically perceptible identity. With females, matters had always
been more complex. The evolving human female had good reason to conceal
external signs of ovulation, given that philanderer males might use such information
to their advantage. The use of blood-red cosmetics to scramble menstrual signals
was in that sense nothing new. Power’s model does not exclude males from using
cosmetics; but there is no good Darwinian reason why males should ‘fake’ with
cosmetics first. At present, the Female Cosmetic Coalitions (FCC) model is the only
Darwinian explanation as to why the ochre is so prominent at Blombos and other
Middle Stone Age sites.
The FCC model posits counterdominance leading to reverse dominance. In this
case, however, both the initial dominance and its subsequent reversal are gendered.
The model applies a standard behavioural ecological approach (one distinguishing
sexual strategies and male and female trade-offs) to the suggestions of Whiten and
Boehm. Females concealing ovulation and extending sexual receptivity are already
promoting ‘counterdominance’ on a sexual level, since the strategy discriminates
against dominant males in favour of subordinates more likely to invest time and
energy. When the scrambling of reproductive signals is extended to menstruation,
the effect is to tip ‘counterdominance’ into ‘reverse dominance’. When a female
begins to menstruate, her senior female kin have every interest in surrounding her,
identifying with her attractions and ‘painting up’ to spread those attractions around.
But they also have every interest in barring male access to her except on their terms
(cf. Knight 1991).
206
Hawkes’ model of male hunting as a ‘show-off’ strategy needs to be placed in
this wider sexual and political context. After all, there are many different ways in
which males might show off, not all of them conducive to symbolic culture. Males
could resort to violence and threat, ‘showing off’ in terms of aggression and fighting
skills. The Female Cosmetic Coalitions model can explain how they were
successfully corralled into showing off productively rather than destructively.
11. Sex and Symbolism
Whereas Chase argues that symbolic culture emerges in order to enforce cooperation between strangers, Power sets out from selfish-gene theory and stays with
it throughout. “There is no reason to believe that symbolic culture was ever essential
to survival”, writes Chase (1994: 626-8). But in that case, why invest so much
energy in the necessary rituals? Chase has contributed to the conceptual definition
of symbolic culture, but in the absence of any evolutionary theory he lacks specific
predictions about exactly what taboos, what laws, what rules would be collectively
enforced. By contrast, Power and colleagues offer an array of specific predictions
testable against the archaeological, fossil and ethnographic records (Power 2009,
table 14.2, p. 273; for detailed ethnographic tests see especially Watts 2005).
But how exactly does the model generate such detailed predictions? In pursuing
their direct reproductive interests, women ‘gang up’ on anyone in their own ranks
threatening to prove a weak link in the chain. A female who has begun cycling
comes potentially into that category: in view of her special attractions she might be
tempted to break ranks. Abandoning his current partner, any would-be philanderer
will be on the look-out for a new partner signalling that she is of the same species as
himself, of the opposite sex and currently available to be impregnated. This
immediately gives us the predicted signature of ‘reverse dominance’. The defiant,
cosmetically adorned coalition must bond tightly with the target of philanderer
attention. Reversing her perceived biological identity, they signal collectively:
‘Wrong species, wrong sex, wrong time!’
Note that we now have a coalition which might in principle extend to embrace
everybody, as Boehm’s argument demands. On the one hand, the entire female
community has an interest in joining, irrespective of kinship or previous friendship
or familiarity – all should benefit over the long term by making philandering an
unplayable game. But the coalition of females should also expect much male
support. Brothers and sons might be expected to defend the interests of their female
kin. Meanwhile, investor males should have an interest in ganging up against
potential philanderers seeking to impregnate their long-term mates. On all these
grounds, we might expect the ‘reverse dominance/reverse reality’ coalition to
succeed in imposing its message.
There is cognitive hardship in believing in counter-reality. It is not easy to accept
that biological reality can be so completely reversed – that the categories of human
versus animal, female versus male, menstrual blood versus hunting blood can be
207
switched around in this way. But such tricks – the stuff of mythology the world over
– are not arbitrary cultural inventions. Reverse dominance will generate them by
conceptual necessity. The message which results is patently false. The biological
female undergoing her ‘initiatory’ ordeal is not a male, not an animal and not
mortally wounded. But if everyone accepts the reversal, it is an institutional fact.
And not just any institutional fact. If the argument is accepted, reverse sexual
dominance conjures up Rappaport’s Ultimate Sacred Postulate – the symbolic truth
underpinning all others.
12. Conclusion
In this chapter, I have tried to show how the problem of the emergence of symbolic
culture might be solved. In revisiting a set of currently prominent models – all of
which which offer insights – I have asked how they might be parsimoniously fitted
together.
My aim has not been to set up Female Cosmetic Coalitions in opposition to the
other models considered here. Chase is correct to view symbolic culture as a means
of enforcing co-operation between strangers. But we require more than a statement:
we need a Darwinian explanation. Rappaport and Sosis are surely correct about the
importance of ritual, but to construct a testable theory we need to specify which
rituals, when, where and by whom. Donald is persuasive in his arguments about
mimesis. But mimesis is ‘faking it’: if everyone is just acting, why should anyone
believe? Similar theoretical difficulties afflict Sperber: how, when, where and why
did patent falsehoods become trusted by evolving humans as valid intellectual
currency? Whiten’s model is persuasive but unfortunately avoids the topic of sex, as
does Boehm’s. What political purposes might have been sufficiently constant and
unifying to produce ‘deep social mind’? Tomasello posits commitment to shared
goals as a condition of language’s evolutionary emergence. Can we specify whose
goals? Hrdy reminds us that half the human population is female, and that novel
strategies of social cognition and cooperation are most likely to have been driven by
females and infants. But why stop there, given increasing reproductive costs
associated to encephalization after H. erectus? Why not posit the emergence of
symbolism as a continuation of the previous logic of female allocare strategies?
Hawkes brings male mating effort back into the picture, but without explaining why
symbolism had anything to do with it.
Lewis comes into a rather different category. Instead of proposing yet another
cultural origins theory, his purpose is to persuade scholars researching modern
human origins of the relevance of hunter-gatherer ethnography. The Mbendjele
forest people who inspire Lewis’ vision challenge the conceptual distinctions central
to so much western evolutionary psychology and social science. Language, play and
ritual are cut from the same cloth. Religion is not a different thing from childhood
pretend-play: it is pretend-play taken seriously and enjoyed also by adults. Hunting
is not necessarily a different thing from speaking or listening: from a Mbendjele
perspective, it is a matter of talking to and listening to the forest. Lewis argues
persuasively that such interconnections need to be borne in mind by those of us
struggling to explain the evolutionary emergence of human symbolic culture. It may
be that everything is simpler than we thought.
208
References
Alcorta CS, Sosis R (2005) Ritual, emotion, and sacred symbols. The evolution of
religion as an adaptive complex. Human Nature 16(4) 323-359
Boehm C (2001) Hierarchy in the Forest. The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior.
Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA
Bowles S (2006) Group competition, reproductive leveling, and the evolution of
human altruism. Science 314: 1569-1572
Chase PG (1994) On symbols and the palaeolithic. Current Anthropology 35: 627629
Chase PG (1999) Symbolism as reference and symbolism as culture. In Dunbar
RIM, Knight C, Power C (eds) The Evolution of Culture: An Interdisciplinary
View. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 34–49
Chomsky N (2000) New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge
Chomsky N (2005) Three factors in language design. Linguistic Inquiry 36(1):1-22
Christiansen MH, Kirby S (2003) Language evolution: the hardest problem in
science? In Christiansen MH, Kirby S (eds), Language Evolution. Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 1-15
D’Errico F (2003) The invisible frontier: a multiple species model for the origin of
behavioral modernity. Evolutionary Anthropology 12:188-202.
D’Errico F, Lawson G, Vanhaeren M, van Niekerk K (2005) Nassarius kraussianus
shell beads from Blombos Cave: evidence for symbolic behaviour in the Middle
Stone Age. Journal of Human Evolution 48:3-24.
D’Errico F, Vanhaeren M (2009) Earliest personal ornaments and their significance
for the origin of language debate. In Botha R, Knight C (eds) The Cradle of
Language. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 16-40
Donald M (1991) Origins of the Modern Mind. Three stages in the evolution of
culture and cognition. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
Donald M (2001) A Mind So Rare. Norton, New York
Dunbar RIM (1996) Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language. Faber and
Faber, London
Dunbar RIM (2003) The social brain: mind, language and society in evolutionary
perspective. Annual Review of Anthropology 32:163–181
209
Fitch WT, Hauser MD, Chomsky N (2005) The evolution of the language faculty:
clarifications and implications. Cognition 97(2):179-210
Grafen, A (1990) Biological signals as handicaps. Journal of Theoretical Biology
144: 517-546
Guilford, T, Dawkins MS (1991) Receiver psychology and the evolution of animal
signals. Animal Behaviour 42:1-14
Hauser MD, Chomsky N, Fitch WT (2002) The faculty of language: What is it, who
has it, and how did it evolve? Science 298,1569-1579
Hawkes K, O’Connell JF, Blurton Jones NG, Alvarez H, Charnov EL (1998)
Grandmothering, menopause, and the evolution of human life histories.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 95:1336-9
Hawkes K, Bliege Bird R (2002) Showing off, handicap signalling, and the
evolution of men’s work. Evolutionary Anthropology 11, 58-67
Henshilwood CS, d’Errico F, Yates R, Jacobs Z, Tribolo C, Duller, GAT, Mercier
N, Sealy JC, Valladas H, Watts I, Wintle AG (2002) Emergence of modern
human behavior: Middle Stone Age engravings from South Africa. Science 295:
1278-1280
Henshilwood CS, d’Errico F, Vanhaeren M, van Niekerk K, Jacobs Z (2004)
Middle Stone Age Shell Beads from South Africa. Science 304: 404
Henshilwood CS, Dubreuil B (2009) Reading the Artifacts: Gleaning Language
Skills from the Middle Stone Age in Southern Africa. In Botha R, Knight C
(eds), The Cradle of Language. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 41-61
Henshilwood CS, D’Errico F, Watts I (in press) Engraved Ochre from the Middle
Stone Age levels, South Africa. Journal of Human Evolution
Hrdy SB (2009) Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual
Understanding. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA
Klein RG (1999) The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural Origins.
University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Klein RG, Edgar B (2002) The Dawn of Human Culture. John Wiley, New York
Knight C (1991) Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture. Yale
University Press, London & New Haven
Knight C (2004) Decoding Chomsky. European Review 12(4):581-603
Knight C (2009) Language, Ochre and the Rule of Law. In Botha R, Knight C (eds),
The Cradle of Language. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 281-303
Knight C, Power C, Watts I (1995) The human symbolic revolution: A Darwinian
account. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 5(1):75-114
210
Krebs JR, Dawkins R (1984) Animal signals: mind-reading and manipulation. In
Krebs JR, Davies NB (eds.), Behavioural Ecology: An Evolutionary Approach.
Blackwell, Oxford: 380–402
Lewis J (2009) As well as words: Congo Pygmy hunting, mimicry, and play. In
Botha R, Knight C (eds), The Cradle of Language. Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 236-256
McBrearty S (2007) Down with the revolution. In Mellars P, Boyle K, Bar-Yosef O,
Stringer C (eds) Rethinking the Human Revolution: New Behavioural and
Biological Perspectives on the Origin and Dispersal of Modern Humans.
McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge, 133–151
McBrearty S, Brooks A (2000) The revolution that wasn’t: A new interpretation of
the origin of modern human behavior. Journal of Human Evolution 39(5):453–
563
Marean CW, Bar-Matthews M, Bernatchez J, Fisher E, Goldberg P, Herries AIR,
Jacobs Z, Jerardino A, Karkanas P, Minichillo T, Nilssen PJ, Thompson E, Watts
I, Williams HM (2007) Early human use of marine resources and pigment in
South Africa during the Middle Pleistocene. Nature 449:905-908
Maynard Smith J, Harper D (2003) Animal Signals. Oxford University Press,
Oxford
Mellars PA, Stringer C (eds) (1989) The Human Revolution. Behavioural and
Biological Perspectives in the Origins of Modern Humans. Edinburgh University
Press, Edinburgh
O’Connell JG, Hawkes K, Blurton Jones NG (1999) Grandmothering and the
evolution of Homo erectus. Journal of Human Evolution 36, 461-485
Pawlowski B, Lowen CL, Dunbar RIM (1998) Neocortex size, social skills and
mating success in primates. Behaviour 135:357-368
Pinker S (1994) The Language Instinct. Penguin, London
Power C (1999) Beauty magic: The origins of art. In Dunbar RIM, Knight C, Power
C (eds), The Evolution of Culture. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 92112
Power C (2009) Sexual selection models for the emergence of symbolic
communication: Why they should be reversed. In Botha R, Knight C (eds), The
Cradle of Language. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 257-280
Power C, Aiello LC (1997) Female proto-symbolic strategies. In Hager LD (ed),
Women in Human Evolution. Routledge, New York and London, 153-171
Rappaport RA (1999) Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge
211
Saussure F de (1983 [1915]) Course in General Linguistics. Trans Harris R.
Duckworth, London
Searle JR (1996) The Construction of Social Reality. Penguin, London
Sosis R (2003) Why aren’t we all Hutterites? Costly signalling theory and religious
behavior. Human Nature 14:91–127
Sperber D (1975) Rethinking Symbolism. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Sperber D (2005) A pragmatic perspective on the evolution of mindreading,
communication and language. Paper delivered to the Morris Symposium on the
Evolution of Language. Stony Brook, New York (October 2005)
Sperber D, Wilson D (1986) Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Blackwell,
Oxford
Tomasello M (1999) The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Harvard University
Press, Cambridge MA
Tomasello M (2003) Different origins of symbols and grammar. In Christiansen
MH, Kirby S (eds), Language Evolution. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 94110
Tomasello M (2006) Why don’t apes point? In Enfield NJ, Levinson SC (eds),
Roots of Human Sociality: Culture, Cognition and Interaction. Berg, Oxford &
New York, 506-524
Watts I (1999) The origin of symbolic culture. In Dunbar RIM, Knight C, Power C
(eds), The Evolution of Culture. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 113-46
Watts I (2005) ‘Time, too, grows on the Moon’: Some evidence for Knight’s theory
of a human universal. In James W, Mills D (eds), The Qualities of Time:
Anthropological Approaches. Berg, New York, 95-118
Watts I (2009). Red ochre, body painting, and language: Interpreting the Blombos
ochre. In Botha R, Knight C (eds), The Cradle of Language. Oxford University
Press, Oxford, 62-92
Whiten A (1999) The evolution of deep social mind in humans. In Corballis M, Lea
SEG (eds) The Descent of Mind: Psychological Perspectives on Hominid
Evolution. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 173-193
Zahavi A (1975) Mate selection: A selection for a handicap. Journal of Theoretical
Biology 53: 205-14
Zahavi A (1993) The fallacy of conventional asignalling. Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society of London 340: 227-230
Zahavi A, Zahavi A (1997) The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece in Darwin's
Puzzle. Oxford University Press, New York & Oxford
212