“A most important, novel, well-argued and monumental piece of work.”
J. D. Lewis-Williams, Rock Art Research Unit, University of the Witwatersrand

“This book may be the most important ever written on the evolution of human social organization. It brings together observation and theory from social anthropology, primatology, and paleoanthropology in a manner never before equalled. The author, Chris Knight, who teaches social anthropology at the University of East London, is up to date on all these fields and has achieved an extraordinary synthesis. His critiques of Claude Lévi-Strauss on totemism and myth are a sheer tour de force.”
Alex Walter, Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University

“Blood Relations is an extraordinary work, in which imaginary creatures and magical events are orchestrated on a global scale, from Australia to Amazonia, into a single vision of how humans created humanity….Though Knight does tend to resemble a shaman with a spread-sheet, he is not concocting some syncretic religious brew of Darwinism and tribal initiation rites. He is every bit as materialist as Dennett or Dawkins – ultra-Darwinian, in Stephen Jay Gould’s terms – but unlike them, he has an intuitive understanding of the sacred. The trick here is to retain one’s sense of magic after one stops believing in it. Blood Relations appreciated the importance of sacred ritual, and of sociobiology, the better for being able to stand outside them. Writing under the influence of Primate Visions, Donna Haraway’s feminist interpretation of primatology, Knight felt able to refer to his own narrative as myth, and free to bring his own props to the sociobiology show. ‘If you could have calculating, maximising capitalists operating in human origins narratives, why could you not also have militant trade unionists?’ he asked. ‘If you could have profits and dividends, why not also industrial action, pay bargaining and strikes?’ Culture, he proposed, was the settlement that followed the world’s first strike.”
Marek Kohn, Science correspondent, Independent on Sunday

“The Most Brilliant Anthropological Study Ever Written. The many words used to describe Chris Knight’s ‘Blood Relations’ include, monumental, encyclopedic, brilliant, original, ingenious, and a tour-de-force. It is all of these and more! This work is simply the most brilliant and imaginative book about human cultural development ever written. Its range is astonishing. Its arguments are cogently made with great detail. Its synthesis of primatology, sociobiology, and anthropology are compelling. Where others have depicted women as the victims of a dominant male hierarchy, Knight reveals how the sex roles and behavior of both men and women developed together in a dialectic relationship. Where others have stressed the loss of oestrus and continuous sexual receptivity in the female, Knight spotlights menstruation and its associated marital and other cultural taboos. Where others stress man the hunter and woman the gatherer, Knight envisions paleo-women as evolving an increasing solidarity to shape the structure of both hunting and gathering. Women are not the passive creatures that are so often depicted by the radical feminists who have an interest in portraying women as the victims of dominant males. Females have been active participants in shaping culture, behavior, and human destiny…Somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000 years ago, Knight believes, a massive social, sexual, and cultural explosion occurred and he does an ingenious job of providing us with insight into how this may have happened. A major change in reproductive strategy had to take place before males could take off as hunters and leave their women behind. Women synchronized their ovulatory cycles with one another; the concept of the “sex-strike” is the heart of the book. Blood as a symbol of menstruation provides a key to much of human culture and Knight uses it to explain the inner logic of many of mankind’s myths and taboos. Because the disruptive effects of sex can be enormous, these controls have played an important role in the development of human culture. The riches of this deeply learned book cannot simply be conveyed in a brief review. It is a work to be read over and over and contemplated. The many insights into human culture and the relationships among the sexes will surely provide any open minded person with a new perspective as to why we are the way we are”.
Amazon.com reviewer Dec 25 2000 (Cincinnati, Ohio U.S.A.)

“Chris Knight’s model is one of the rare successful attempts to solve the many apparent contradictions between anthropological universals and what we expect from evolution through natural selection. His great achievement is to put logic in what, otherwise, looks like a vast mess of anecdotal anthropological facts.”
Jean-Louis Dessalles, Télécom ParisTech

“This book was a revelation to me. Having struggled through numerous turgid anthropological works by the likes of Lévi-Strauss, Róheim etc., it was thrilling to read such an ambitious clear-sighted and compelling account of the origins of human culture, together with an excellent critique of much current anthropological thinking. ….a wonderfully stimulating book”.
Mick Hartley, Amazon.com

“A man writing about menstruation as empowering not polluting; a Marxist analysis in which sex solidarity and class analysis assume equal explanatory power; a fully social and revolutionary account of our human cultural origins that privileges women; an explicitly political narrative of science in the first person; an interweaving of anthropology, biology, history of ideas, and philosophy; an attempt not just to interpret the world but to change the world: Blood Relations is all this and more”.
Diane Bell, American Ethnologist

“Ignoring this book is a mistake. It is a very readable, witty, lively treasure-trove of anthropological wisdom and insight….Chris Knight has taken on the task of explicating not only the whys and hows of human cultural evolution, but also vast constellations of cultural behaviour covering Australia, Africa, Europe and all of the Americas.In this endeavour he is extraordinarily cross-disciplinary in his approach, utilizing insights from cultural anthropology, sociology, sociobiology and palaeo- and ethno-archaeology.In short,Knight is a complete anthropologist, one who realizes the value of exploring all corners of his field to synthesize disparate work into a cohesive whole. His deep commitment to such synthesis should give pause to those of us who refuse to look outside our own areas of expertise for support or contradiction of our theories. His Marxist perspective, while of questionable practical value, is metaphorically rich. And his scholarship is impeccable. While many of us rarely bother to read ‘the greats’ of our field any more, Knight delves deep into Durkheim, Frazer and Lévi-Strauss and many others, coming up with long-forgotten insights and providing his readers with an enormously useful review of a century of evolutionary theory and ethnographic data…In fact, as a feminist, I would very much like it if Knight’s story turned out to be true, since it gives so much credit to women’s collective solidarity, strike power and biological and intellectual creativity…. Best of all, it’s a story that’s ‘good to think with’. It made me review in my mind everything I ever learned about evolution and rethink it in a new way.”
R. E. Davis-Floyd, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

“Revolutions in science seldom appear ready made…. But I suspect that the basis of a new synthesis between anthropology and biology may well lie within the pages of this book.”
Robin Dunbar, Times Higher Educational Supplement

“Imagine a time when women lived together, worked together, sang and danced together, and our lives, work rhythms, songs and dance rhythms were all governed by the cycles of the moon. Imagine a time when all our skins were dark, Europeans having newly arrived from Africa. Imagine a time when women had the power and solidarity to make men leave their warm hearth-sides, go out into the howling wastes of Ice Age Europe to hunt giant and ferocious mammoths and then transport their kills proudly back to the women’s camp.This is not a feminist matriarchalist dream. This happened somewhere between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago, according to the latest scientific account of human cultural origins given by male Marxist anthropologist Chris Knight in Blood Relations. The ‘Human Revolution’, as archaeologists call it, sparked an explosion of symbolic culture that was carried from Africa into Europe, Asia and all the way to Australia 40,000 years ago, and later all over the planet.”
Camilla Power, Everywoman

“No, this is not another Man the Hunter origins myth, with man simultaneously inventing technology, culture and the nuclear family, and teaching it all to his dumb wife sitting at home with baby, waiting for the bacon. On the contrary. First it is not about Man or even Woman: it is about women organising in solidarity with one another. Yes, it is about culture: how women’s solidarity was at the core of it. And yes, it is also about the family: how women’s solidarity exploded the ‘natural family’ of most primate societies, in which the females are the sexual possessions of the male or males. Knight argues that the first human societies were communist. For him, as for Friedrich Engels, this means something historically specific (and nothing whatsoever to do with the monstrosity of Stalinism). Communism meant a society in which women – as never before or since – were free. Women collectively said No to rape, and men obeyed. Responsibility for children belonged to the whole community. Women’s rule – matriarchy – in this sense meant freedom for everyone. Language, co-operation and science replaced physical coercion, animal individualism, and the rule of genes.”
Liz Dalton, Sulfur Magazine

“Read this book and be changed. It is another of the great books of our time whose far-reaching influence in modern culture has not even begun to be felt. BLOOD RELATIONS is beautiful.”
Earl Hazell, Amazon.com

“Chris Knight has produced a book of absorbing interest. The author likens himself to the palaeoanthropological storytellers and it is a fascinating tale that he has to tell. His setting is some 40,000-45,000 years ago…Recommended for health sociologists and students, especially those interested in the gender order of society and in the social significance of biological processes. The book is a narrative, best read through from cover to cover, and this is an agreeable and thought-provoking task.”
Agnes Miles, Sociology of Health and Illness

“One of Knight’s chapters is headed ‘The Revolution’…, but his whole book might well have had this in the title for his thesis has revolutionary implications for modern scholarship as well as hypothesising a revolution in the remote past.”
Emily Lyle, School of Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh

“A refreshing alternative to the plethora of prosaic and sexist variations on the ‘Man-the-Hunter’ theory of the origins of human culture.”
Cris Shore, Dept. of Social Anthropology,Goldsmiths’ College London

“Blood Relations is magnificent. Comprehensive in design, powerfully informed in execution – this book clarifies not only the problems of the past, but posits the need for a new cultural leap if we are to survive the present.”
M.R.A.Chance, Department of Anthropology, University College London

“Chris Knight in Blood Relations has this ‘extraordinary resolve’. His is an immense work of documentation and close argument. For all its obvious risks, the model offers no hypothesis which is not rigorously testable. Not only this, but it appears to solve most of the outstanding conundrums in contemporary anthropology.”
Peter Redgrove, Times Literary Supplement

“Blood Relations points us all in a refreshingly new direction.”
Clive Gamble, Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton

“Encyclopaedic in scope, this is a seminal work that will certainly stand as a classic example of the application of the Marxist anthropological model to an examination of the origin of human culture…”
Choice, American Library Association

“Chris Knight has a political agenda, and he is not going to hide it from us. He is a good Marxist (‘old fashioned’ as some readers are bound to conclude), believing in class struggle, trade-union activism, workers’ solidarity, and most of all in Engels’s version of primitive communism and the early matriarchate….This theory is designed to cock a snook at every premise which sleeps undisturbed in our current assumptions….The result is an exhilaratingly original edifice of astonishing range.”
Caroline Humphrey, London Review of Books

“Blood Relations is an incredible work of scholarship, and in particular of Marxist scholarship – a vindication of scientific socialist theory at a time when Marxism is supposed to be dead. Here we have the actual proof that Marxist theory works. Not by ignoring facts that don’t fit – but by putting the facts first. The facts are sacred. The theory must fit the facts. We’re so used to having paraded before us Marxism and Marxism-Leninism as it was prostituted by the Soviet Union – where if the facts didn’t fit they were ignored – that we’ve forgotten what Marxism really means.Chris’ book is based on the facts. These facts were well-known within a variety of scientific disciplines – sociology, anthropology, archaeology. You look at these facts, and a lot of them seem completely inexplicable. They appear bizarre. Why do women co-ordinate their menstrual cycles? Why do so many religions have taboos onmenstruation? Why do they have taboos on eating bloody meat? And this is not just in one or two societies, but all round the world, in societies which appear to have very little else in common.Now, men were not very interested in these facts. They just seemed to be bizarre things that primitive societies did. Their importance is that they’re the key to understanding how we became human….Chris’ theory may not be 100 per cent correct. But so far, it explains all the known facts. None of the other theories did. And I don’t think it’s too strong to say that in time to come it will be seen as significant perhaps in the way Darwin was seen as significant, in really changing the way we look at what it is to be human.”
Dorothy Macedo, Vice-Chair, Campaign for Labour Party Democracy

“A quite remarkable contribution to our subject.”
Marilyn Strathern, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester

“From the evidence of burials and symbolic objects, rituals and religious beliefs probably go back more than 100,000 years, but could they actually have been central to the origins of modern humans? A British anthropologist, Chris Knight, certainly thinks so, and in a wide-ranging synthesis of data from present-day anthropology, primatology and sociobiology, together with archaeology, he and his collaborators have argued that women collectively produced a social revolution in Africa over 100,000 years ago. The symbolic use of red ochre began as part of a female response to accumulating social and reproductive stresses caused by the increasing demands of pregnancy, infant and child care, and the need for male provisioning. The blood-red pigment was deployed by menstruating and non-menstruating women, speared on their bodies to spread the taboo on menstruation across alliances of female kin. This instituted a “sex-strike”, which could only be broken when the men returned from collaborative hunts with food to share. Female rituals evolved around the sex-strike, male rituals around the hunt (begun under a dark moon, returning at full moon, thus linking menstrual and lunar cyucles and the blood of women and of animals), and tribal rituals of celebration and feasting would follow the return of the successful hunters.”
Chris Stringer, London Natural History Museum

“From apparently modest beginnings, this is the most ambitious project on the origins of culture to have emerged for decades.The effort to establish a collectivist point of departure for the theory of human communication has had to struggle against the individualist assumptions that dominate cognitive science, but this very struggle makes the book original and important”.
Mary Douglas, C.B.E., F.B.A.

“I suspect that it will be a slow burning classic, revived from time to time, but then discarded because it repudiates bourgeois metaphysics.” Keith Hart, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge

“As women all over the world fight for control over their own sexuality and fertility, Chris Knight in Blood Relations has performed a service. We can now prove that we’re demanding nothing new. We once had collective control over our own bodies; our fight now is to regain it.”
Leonora Lloyd, Secretary, National Abortion Campaign

“Chris Knight is reconstructing a human revolution that occurred many thousands of years ago. Whether his argument is true or not I am not qualified to judge. But what I want to convey here is the excitement – and the quite extraordinary sense of homecoming and comradeship – which this magnificent book has caused me. But also relief, such relief: as if I am at last in the presence of an understanding which allows something hard and knotted and perverse and intrinsically unshareable, to unfold, stretch, breathe. The release of tension as I read page after page of the detailed, passionate and ironic argument was extraordinary, and something for which I still feel great waves of gratitude.”
David Holt, Lecture to The Guild of Pastoral Psychologists

“This book is a revolutionary textbook for socialists and feminists. It turns upside down the reactionary developments in biology and evolutionary theory that dominated the1980s….Communism – the ideas of revolutionary change, of solidarity, of feminism and of a society organised for the benefit of everyone – is not only still the spectre that haunts Europe, but it is the very thing that created us as human beings…”
Keith Veness, Labour Briefing

“How did human language and culture first emerge? The answer has now been found. It points us back to the very place where we all learned our craft. Human solidarity and culture began on the picket line.”
Jim Perry, Secretary, Cannock Chase & Littleton National Union of Mineworkers

“Blood relations is a bold, panoramic and, in my opinion, easily the most persuasive account of the human revolution. Like any great work there are gaps and unfinished lines of thought – doubtless they will stimulate scholars in the years to come. However, Knight has made the decisive breakthrough which anyone who wants to be taken seriously must develop … or decisively disprove.”
Jack Conrad, Weekly Worker

“What we find most remarkable in Knight’s work is precisely this effort to bring together genetic, archaeological, paleontological and anthropological data in a ‘theory of everything’ for human evolution, analogous to the efforts of the theoretical physicists who have given us super-string or quantum loop gravity theory.”
‘Jens’, International Review

“Knight offers us a model of the birth of culture which, born in practices and needs which are firmly rooted in our biological nature, nevertheless takes form in the real will of our ancestors to impose a collective and liberatory solution to a common problem.”
Timothy Mason, University of Paris

             Full text of this review       

BY MAREK KOHN

For centuries the origin of language has divided scientists. Now a new Darwinian theory is being proposed. But how can this make sense when our ability to talk depends on co-operation, and not competition?

SEVEN thousand tongues are spoken today, it’s said, and half a million may have come and gone since humans acquired the faculty of language, according to the Oxford biologist Mark Pagel. In their attempts to work out how that transformation might have occurred, scholars seem to have deployed comparable numbers of theories, perspectives, papers and bits of jargon. There are noun phrases, generative grammars, voice onset times and fricatives. There’s the question of the descent of the larynx, the heated debate over the Neanderthal hyoid bone, and the bitter controversy over the australopithecine lunate sulcus. But, according to anthropologists Chris Knight and Camilla Power, the questions that mattered most to our distant ancestors, as they hesitantly entered into the domain of language, were much the same as those which matter most to us: ‘Do you really mean it?” and “Can I rely on you? First and foremost, language is a matter of trust.

Knight, at the University of East London, and Power, at University College London, are developing a model which sets human language in a modern Darwinian framework. In the process, they are drawing together some of the most dynamic lines of argument in current British evolutionary thought. They will be presenting their latest ideas in London next week at the Second International Conference on the Evolution of Language. Taking place at City University, the event has been organised by James Hurford, of Edinburgh University, Jean Aitchison, the Oxford professor who gave the 1996 Reith Lectures on “The Language Web”, and Chris Knight.

From a Darwinian point of view, language is tricky to explain because it brings up the problem of altruism. Language depends on co-operation, but natural selection is a matter of competition. Modern Darwinism is based on the principle that evolution doesn’t take place for the benefit of the group. Natural selection acts on individuals, not groups. If a trait is good for an individual — that is, it helps the individual get more of its genes into the next generation —it will be selected, even though it may be bad for the group as a whole. Yet everywhere one looks, one sees co operation flourishing in co-existence with competition. Modern Darwinism has devoted enormous effort to working out how self-interest can encourage one individual to help another. Its theories revolve around two concepts. One is inclusive fitness, the extent to which individuals share genes and therefore genetic interests. The other is reciprocal altruism, the technical term for exchanges in which A scratches B’s back and B scratches A’s.

The trouble with such arrangements is that they are vulnerable to cheating. If B suddenly refuses to scratch A’s back in return, the sensible thing for A to do is to refuse to scratch B’s back any more. Not only has the cheat come out ahead, but the system has broken down. The relative advantages of co-operation and cheating have been explored in extensive mathematical modelling exercises: these have shown that increasing the benefits of co-operation is not an answer, because this just increases the potential pay-off for cheating.

Backscratching. in the literal rather than the metaphorical sense, has proved to be a stable system of behaviour among primates, who devote a large amount of their time to mutual grooming. Primates that groom each other are primates who are well disposed to each other. Grooming can therefore communicate valuable information about the relationships between individuals in a group — who’s grooming whom — and can serve to maintain social bonds with in it. According to Robin Dunbar of the University of Liverpool, language is, in fact, a superior form of backscratching. As groups increase in numbers, however, the time needed to carry out all the necessary grooming becomes impracticably large. In humans, Dunbar argues, language evolved as a means of “grooming” more than one individual at a time. The information it carried was similar in theme to that conveyed by grooming: who’s friends with whom, who’s fallen out with whom, who’s doing what with whom. In other words, the prime purpose of talking is gossip.

Dunbar’s model is part of a broader tendency to emphasise the role of social factors in the evolution of human mental capacities. Traditionally, human intelligence was assumed to have been driven by the relationship between humans and their artefacts, mainly those assumed to have been used to kill animals for food. We became what we are, it was felt, largely because of men and their tools. Now, women and relationships have moved to centre stage. Approaches to the Evolution of Language, the book of the first Evolution of Language conference (edited by James Hurford, Michael Studdert-Kennedy and Chris Knight; to be published later this year by Cambridge University Press) observes that scientists have historically tended to see language through the lenses of societies preoccupied by technology, as a means of communicating information about tools, hunting and similar practical matters. The new book sees itself as a product of the age of mass democracies, and human intelligence as essentially social. It treats language as a means of communicating about desires and motives, forming alliances and making friends; with successful feeding and mating as the end result.

In sum, it’s what life is all about. The perspective is not trivialised by pointing out that it is also the product of the age of mass market soap opera, whose concerns are identical, apart from the feeding.

The attraction of gossip as an alternative to grooming is that it reaches more individuals at lower cost. But therein lies its great weakness, as Camilla Power points out. Grooming works as a system of exchange because choosing to groom an individual indicates both preference and commitment. The more individuals you can “groom” at a time, the lower your commitment is to any one of them. The cheaper the signal, the less reliable it is, and vice versa.

This axiom has been put to bold use by Amotz and Avishag Zahavi, radical Darwinian thinkers who have derived what they call the Handicap Principle from their field studies of birds in Israel, and since the mid-1970s have applied it to almost every conceivable form of communication. A peacock’s tail is an “honest indicator” of fitness and genetic quality, because a bird has to be fit in order to be able to thrive while carrying such a massive burden. Similarly, primate grooming is a reliable signal of friendliness precisely because it takes time and effort. The trouble with words is that they are cheap.

Social intelligence is often called “Machiavellian intelligence”, which was the title of an influential book published 10 years ago. Its editors, Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten, noted in last year’s sequel (known to them as Mach II) that they mean more by Machiavellianisrn than simply deception and exploitation. Rather, it refers to “relatively complex strategies fulfilling [ultimate] personal gain”. These strategies can easily include co-operation, or behaviour from which other individuals gain greater benefits than costs. Whiten and Byrne draw on the authority of The Prince, in which Niccolo Machiavelli states that it “is useful, for example, to appear merciful, trustworthy, humane, blameless, religious — and to be so — yet to be in each such measure prepared in mind that if you need to be not so, you can and do change to the contrary”.

For a prince among men, language is the perfect Machiavellian instrument. It is cheap and infinitely flexible. It is also highly efficient, because it is established on a basis of trust. The solidity of this foundation is attested by the amount of deception and cheating that the system can contain without collapse. Chris Knight suggests that even if a group of particularly clever chimpanzees were to work out a set of signals equivalent to words, they would fail to establish a stable language system. The opportunities for deception would be too great. Every time one of these superchimps said “There’s a leopard over the hill” — or “I’ll give you some meat if you have sex with me” — the reaction would be “Why should I believe you?” For any statement which could not be immediately verified, “you have my word for it” would be the only possible response. And words, being so inexpensive to the speaker, would be next to worthless on their own. Since the cost of paying attention could so easily be higher than advertised, nobody would listen to what anybody else had to say.

Within the limits of an immediate frame of reference, however, a rudimentary symbolic signalling system could arise. Merlin Donald, a psychologist, has suggested that in the earlier stages of human evolution, vocal sounds and gestures would have been combined in a system which depended heavily on mime. These would have been very costly compared to words. As anybody who has played charades will recall, it takes an awful lot more effort to convey the message by mime than it does by speech. In a system like this, communication would be held back by the need to maintain high cost as an indicator of reliability Where the truthfulness of such messages could be checked on the spot — “look, there’s a leopard” — such a system could work. But there would be no way of communicating reliably about things that were not visible. That would have excluded objects which existed but were out of sight, things which no longer existed or had yet to come into existence, abstractions, or entities which existed only in the imagination. No past, no future, no dead people, and no gods.

Several religious traditions link language to divinity. In the beginning was the Word, says the Bible; the Indian deity Indra is said to have created articulate speech; similar themes occur in Norse mythology while Plato has Socrates saying that the gods gave things their proper names. Chris Knight also maintains that the relationship between language and the divine is fundamental. In order for a stable, fully developed system of language to arise, he argues, the cheap signals of words needed to be backed by a set of costly signals. These, he believes, were provided by ritual. Language and ritual evolved together.
Here Knight is building upon the theory he has been developing for many years, an extraordinary vision of the origins of culture in the symbolism of meat, moonlight and menstrual blood. Based on the idea that females exerted collective, ritualised pressure on males to provide them with the meat needed to raise their young, it combines the hallucinatory imagination of a shaman with the cost-benefit rigour of a Treasury economist, and unsurprisingly the world was not really ready for it when it was published as Blood Relations in 1991. Seven years later, the advance of neo-Darwinian theory has made it seem a lot less outlandish as a means of examining problems in human evolution, if not as an account of actual events. With the new work on language, Knight and his colleagues are at last threatening to break into the mainstream. There are intriguing connections to be made with other strands of evolutionary thought. At next week’s conference, for example, a paper to be given by Derek Bickerton of the University of Hawaii will propose that language depends on a mental apparatus which evolved to detect cheating, a faculty which the prominent evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby have suggested to be a significant influence on our thought processes.

Rituals are worthless if they are not difficult and costly. In our society, the principle is better appreciated by Muslims, obliged to pray five times a day, or Orthodox Jews, with their complicated and demanding observances, than by the remaining Anglicans, glancing at their watches if the sermon lasts more than five minutes. Many religions insist upon initiation rites, which may be extremely painful. Subincision, for example, practised by certain Australian Aboriginal groups, entails slitting the underside of the penis up to the urethra. In the light of signal theory — not to mention the Handicap Principle — this extreme form of ritual mutilation makes sense.

The group imposes ritual on its members to verify their commitment, and to bind them in bonds of mutual trust With trust guaranteed, it becomes possible for the members of the group to communicate using cheap signals. It also becomes possible to create symbols which do not correspond to things in the physical world — such as gods. The ritual is fundamentally an enactment at moral authority. In making language possible, this moral authority reappears as the Word, and, of course, the Word is God. Knight compares words to bank notes, which “promise to pay the bearer on demand”. Ritual guarantees the value of words in the way that banks, backed by the law and other institutions. guarantee the promises made by banknotes, which would otherwise just be pieces of paper. As it says on every dollar bill, “In God We Trust”.

The Second International Conference on the Evolution of Language takes place at the Tate Building, City University, Goswell Road, London EC1. The event runs from 12.30 to 6pm on Monday 6 April, 8.30am to 5pm on Tuesday and Wednesday and ends at 1pm on Thursday 9 April. Admission is £70 for the whole event; £15 for Monday or Thursday alone; and £20 for Tuesday or Wednesday alone.

The Possible Origin of Culture [PDF 244KB]

IT ALL began with cosmetics. What did? The human success story. How we came out of Africa about a hundred thousand years ago, beat up all our rival species and invented language, art and religion. And we were able to do all this because of make-up.

But cosmetics were just the starting point, according to the latest theory. Two other key ideas about human development suggest that menstruation lies behind our earliest ideas about gods and the supernatural, and that at some time in the not-so-distant evolutionary past — say 100,000 years ago — women went on a sex strike to force men to go hunting and bring back the meat.

The theory is the work of Dr Chris Knight of the University of East London and this week he is presenting a paper at a major conference at Edinburgh University on Evolution and Language.

“Many language researchers believe that myth and art were the result of language,” he says. “But that’s the wrong way round. You only need language if you already have an experience of myth.” And that is where cosmetics come in.

But to begin at the beginning, we all know that humans have bigger brains than any other primate, and also that human males are driven by a relentless urge to have sex with as many females as possible, Both of these facts present problems for our female ancestors. Babies’ increasing brain size meant that they had to come out of the womb sooner and so were around as helpless infants for longer. Mothers therefore needed more help but men were not much use because they were always looking out for someone else to impregnate.

Females’ first solution was to make sex available all the time The swellings and other signs of fertile periods that monkeys display disappeared in humans, so men never knew the best time for conception and stayed around longer.

But menstruation then became the give-away. The sign “fertile time coming” made a menstruating female more attractive to a male than one who was pregnant, or breast feeding. As the male helped provide food, a new mate would be a threat to the existing women and their resources. So at some point all the women in a tribe hit on a group deception. When one or two began to bleed they all marked themselves with blood-like make up. Now they all might be fertile too.

This was the first use of cosmetics and it is Knight’s claim that you can actually trace when this idea took off. The best supply of a blood-red pigment is a sort of red ochre rock. If you look in caves prior to 130,000 or so BC there is little sign of it, but then comes an “ochre explosion”, at a time when anatomically-modern humans were beginning to emerge in Africa. Some busy decorating was going on and sham menstruation was the cause.

The female solidarity that all this body painting created then provided a solution to a looming food crisis. The climate was changing and the women and children could no longer find enough food by foraging around the camp, so the men had to go hunting further away.

But how to make them go in the first place, and how to make sure they did not eat their kill on the way back? Here the female collective had their second brain wave — a sex strike. Instead of sex all the time the message now was: “No meat, no sex.” The scene was set for a female-driven cultural lift-off.

The women developed a series of rituals involving animals and yet more elaborate make up to signal what they wanted the men to do. Language grew up as part of that female conspiracy within these ritual groups.

“Many conventional language theories link it with male activity like hunting,” says Knight, “but the whole point about language is that it is a way of talking about an imaginary world outside space and time. You don’t need all the complexity of syntax and past and future tenses if you are dealing with the here and now. Gestures work pretty well. Language refers to the world of the imagination and that was what was going on with these sex-strike rituals.”

What tethers Knight’s scenario to the ground are the predictions his theory makes. The cosmetic link is one, others are the hunting and menstrual traditions among hunter-gatherer groups such as the Khoisan in South Africa, who have apparently arbitrary rules about when to hunt and have sex, and taboos about food and menstruation that make sense in terms of his model.

“If you found cave art paintings showing men and women copulating,” says Knight, “that would blow the theory out of the water because it says art is to do with the mythic realm. So far, however, we seem to be on the right track.”
Jerome Burne

Chris Knight, Michael Studdert-Kennedy & James R. Hurford (eds.), The evolutionary emergence of language: social functions and the origins of linguistic form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xi + 426.

Reviewed by PHILIP LIEBERMAN, Brown University

Over the course of decades spanning a century, linguists avoided addressing the question of how human linguistic ability might have evolved. The apparent problem was the tendency towards unsupported speculation in the heady period in which evolution first became part of the conceptual framework of human thought. This remained the case until the last decade, even through the Chomskian ‘revolution’, although the centerpiece of the theories promulgated by Noam Chomsky is a hypothetical innate ‘Universal Grammar’ that determines the syntax of all human languages. And syntax was taken to be the defining quality of human linguistic ability. An innate organ of the mind governing syntax must be instantiated in the brain through the expression of genes. Although this amounts to a strong biological claim, the evolution of the putative Universal Grammar was, like most aspects of biology, ignored by virtually all linguists and consigned to fringe groups outside the mainstream of linguistic inquiry.

In recent years that situation has changed and a series of conferences on the evolution of language has been organized by linguists. The volume in question is a collection of some of the contributions to the Second International Conference on the Evolution of Language, which took place in 1998. Not surprisingly, the focus of the conference was on syntax, which since Chomsky’s early publications has generally been taken by linguists to be the factor that differentiates human language from the communications of other species. However, though the conference papers were delivered by many intelligent scholars, for the most part the studies reported in this volume exemplify the hermetic nature of linguistic research. The findings and procedures that have exemplified evolutionary biology since the time of Charles Darwin, and which one might expect to be applied to the study of the evolution of human language, are conspicuous by their absence. Unfortunately, this absence results in claims that have little or no grounding in data, often contravened by facts that are biological certainties.

Virtually all aspects of the theory that Darwin proposed in 1859 are consistent with current data. One of the principles introduced by Darwin amounts to the claim that, unless there is compelling evidence to the contrary, one should not assume that events in the past followed different principles. Historical evidence shows that languages slowly metamorphose into different forms over time, that the connections can be traced, and that changes do not derive from genetic distinctions. It is, for example, clear that the indigenous inhabitants of China are no more genetically predisposed to learn a Chinese language than English, Latin, Walpiri or Sanskrit. And within any given group of human beings who live in a particular region and speak a particular language a range of genetic diversity exists. As Darwin (1859) noted, natural selection acts upon the variation that is always present in the state of nature. We know that natural selection will act to enhance fitness in human populations. Tibetans, for example, generally are adapted to extract more oxygen from air at high altitudes than other human populations. Natural selection over the course of 40,000 years has resulted in the survival in Tibet of those individuals who had the genetic disposition for more efficient oxygen transfer. If the hypothetical genetically determined Universal Grammar actually existed, we should have found that natural selection for the particular parameters which yield Tibetan linguistic competence should also have occurred within the same time span, given the indisputable contributions of language to biological fitness. In light of the substantial differences between Tibetan and English we would expect some delays or deficiencies in the acquisition of English by children of Tibetan ancestry who are born and raised in the United States, if their ‘language’ genes had been optimized for Tibetan, but that is not the case.

It is possible that the common elements that one can see in seemingly unrelated languages may derive from cultural transmission and from the indisputable fact that all human beings have a common ancestor. Except for a few isolated scholars, evolutionary biologists generally accept the theory that modern human beings evolved in the last 200,000 to 150,000 years in Africa. The first human group must have had a particular language. Over the course of time the group or groups of people speaking the ancestral language dispersed and different languages gradually formed. The human groups who left Africa and populated most of the world took this original language or group of related languages with them. A concerted attempt to reconstruct the vocabularies of languages in prehistory has been underway for decades. Unfortunately the findings of this endeavor (e.g. Ruhlen 1996), namely that words rather than syntax appears to be conserved, are absent in this volume except for peripheral citations in two papers whose focus is syntax, namely those by Mark Pagel (‘The history, rate and pattern of world linguistic evolution’) and Frederick J. Newmeyer (‘On the reconstruction of “Proto-World” word order’).

Moreover, the claim that human syntactic ability is innate needs to take into account the fact that the genetic distinctions between humans and chimpanzees are slight. The common ancestor of humans and living apes lived no more than seven million years ago; the genetic distinction between human beings and chimpanzees is somewhere between 5 and 2 per cent, depending on how differences are tabulated. And advances in molecular biology confirm the continuity of evolution — much of the genetic endowment of humans is present in fruit flies. The question then arises, how could anyone account for the evolution of a detailed genetic program for complex syntax, the ‘Universal Grammar’, in this short span of time? The improbability of a genetic code that specifies the syntax of all human languages is reinforced by evidence from neurophysiological and behavioral studies, which show that the details of most motor acts, including walking, are not genetically specified — they are learned (see Lieberman 2000).

Moreover, syntax is not the unique ‘derived’ feature of human linguistic ability. Evolutionary biology differentiates ‘primitive’ features that are present in a species and species ancestral to it and related species. The possession of five digits, for example, is a primitive feature present in frogs and humans. Horses are differentiated by not having five toes. Comparative studies of living species, one of the most powerful tools of evolutionary biology, show that speech production is arguably the most derived feature of human language. The ape language studies of the Gardners and Savage-Rumbaugh & Rumbaugh show that apes can attain a vocabulary of about 150 words and can produce and comprehend simple syntax — but they cannot talk. In this sense, human lexical and syntactic ability are ‘primitive’ qualities, most likely present in the species ancestral to living apes and humans, arguing against the presence of a ‘protolanguage’ that lacked syntax.

In contrast, speech production is a ‘derived’ feature that characterizes human beings. The particular properties of speech permit communication at rates that exceed the fusion frequency of the auditory system, allowing long complex sentences to be comprehended within the attention span of verbal working memory. This would suggest that research on the evolution of the physiology and neural bases of human speech should concern linguists.

One of the papers in this volume, that of Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy (‘The distinction between sentences and noun phrases: an impediment to language evolution?’), touches on the proposal that the neural mechanisms involved in speech production may have been the starting point for syntax, a suggestion that has previously been noted and developed. In a meaningful sense, syntax codifies relationships that hold between various aspects of behavior, which in their totality achieve a particular purpose. Lashley (1951) realized that this is the case and suggested that the ‘roots’ of human syntactic ability most likely lie in the neural structures that regulate motor control. The relationship that may hold between the neural mechanisms regulating motor control and syntax is discussed in detail in Kimura (1979) and Lieberman (2000).

In the volume in question, three papers specifically address the evolution of human speech. First, Peter MacNeilage & Barbara Davis, in their paper ‘Evolution of speech: the relation between ontogeny and phylogeny’, propose that basic syllable structure derives from opening and closing one’s jaws. They further propose that the ontogenetic development of speech in infants may reflect the evolutionary pattern. Neither proposal is novel: for instance, Muller (1848) and Jakobson (1940) also pointed out the possible relationship between the sequence in which sound patterns are acquired and the frequency with which they occur in the various languages of the world. Nonetheless, the MacNeilage & Davis paper makes specific predictions that can be experimentally tested and it provides a refreshing starting point for further research.

Second, the paper contributed by Michael Studdert-Kennedy, ‘Evolutionary implications of the particulate principle: imitation and the dissociation of phonetic form from semantic function’, focuses on the ‘particulate’ nature of speech, citing phonetic transcriptions and alphabetic orthography, downplaying the fact that speech is encoded into syllable-sized units. Given Studdert-Kennedy’s long association with Haskins Laboratories, where many of the seminal studies on speech encoding originated, this omission is difficult to understand. Studdert-Kennedy cites alphabetic systems of orthography as evidence for the psychological reality of particulate phonemes, but he disregards the fact that other successful orthographic systems code entire syllables and words, as is the case for Chinese. And there is much evidence that syllables are primary units in both the production and perception of speech. For example, it is extremely difficult for monolingual speakers of English to produce words that begin with the final [ŋ] of the English word sing. Studdert-Kennedy also claims that meaning plays no role in the process by which children imitate sounds — a most unlikely conclusion. Even dogs pay attention to the meaning of a word: every dog owner knows that dogs quickly learn to respond to words such as ‘out’ or ‘biscuit’. In contrast, consider the third paper focusing on speech, by Marilyn Vihman & Rory A. Depaolis, ‘The role of mimesis in infant language development: evidence for phylogeny’. These authors disagree with Studdert-Kennedy and discuss the role of imitation in the acquisition of speech by children.

Chris Knight, in an interesting contribution on ‘The evolution of cooperative communication’, points to the role of play in the acquisition of language; however, he neglects the body of evidence documented by Greenfield (1991) which argues for a gradual transition from gestures to vocal signals in the course of human language development. Knight instead favors a model that leads to an abrupt saltation from ‘protolanguage’ to the sudden appearance of full human linguistic ability.
A number of papers propose various aspects of human behavior in which language may have enhanced Darwinian biological fitness, thereby resulting in natural selection for linguistic ability: cooperation (Knight); politics (Jean-Louis Dessalles, ‘Language and hominid politics’); ‘secret female languages’ (Camilla Power, ‘Secret language use at female initiation: bounding gossiping communities’); social transmission (James R. Hurford, ‘Social transmission favours linguistic generalisation’) and other social forces are all noted. All of these factors may have contributed to biological fitness — the survival of progeny and the ultimate evolution of human language through Darwinian natural selection. The synergy between linguistic ability and these activities may very well have enhanced fitness and led to natural selection for language. However, it is difficult to identify any aspect of human behavior (excepting suicide, protracted warfare, and tendencies in males towards misogyny) that would not profit from the exchange of information by means of language, thereby enhancing fitness.

In contrast, several papers take the position that natural selection played a minor part in the evolution of human linguistic ability. Although biologists — including Darwin (1859) acknowledge the role of chance events in shaping the course of evolution, natural selection acting on variation clearly is the key element in evolution, as Mayr (1982) notes. The argument that the evolution of human language is somehow different would have to be supported by compelling evidence. However, various papers in this volume present computational models rather than data to support their claim. For example, Simon Kirby, in ‘Syntax without natural selection: how compositionality emerges from vocabulary in a population of learners’, appears to claim that syntax develops because people acquire many words, but his model starts with individuals who are preloaded with context-free grammars at the start of the evolutionary process which leads to complex grammars. In short, Kirby starts with a built-in grammar to prove that grammar develops spontaneously. Bart de Boer, in ‘Emergence of sound systems through self organisation’, presents a different computational model, which claims that vowel distinctions ‘emerge’ without ‘evolution-based explanations for the universal tendencies of vowel systems’ (193). Studies that date back to Muller (1848), who noted that the vowels [i] [u] and [a] occur most frequently in human languages, refute this position. Paraphrasing George Orwell, some sounds are more equal than others. For example, Stevens’ seminal paper (1972) shows that these vowels have physiological and perceptual properties that are better adapted for vocal communication. Although de Boer references Stevens (1972), he ignores Stevens’ findings, as well as Lindblom’s and Labov’s studies of sound change. Olmsted’s (1971) study, showing that children first acquire the speech sounds which are most perceptually salient and which also occur most often in different languages, is neither referenced nor noted.

A tendency to rely on computer model studies rather than data documenting the utility of syntax characterizes other contributions. Jason Noble, in ‘Cooperation, competition and the evolution of prelinguistic communication’, makes use of game theory simulation to attempt to account for a transition from ‘prelinguistic’ to linguistic communication, disputing results from other simulations. Observations of the actual communicative abilities of apes and other animals which might provide insights into ‘prelinguistic’ communication are absent. David Lightfoot, in ‘The spandrels of the linguistic genotype’, takes as a given an innate Universal Grammar. Lightfoot claims that the putative ‘linguistic genotype’ is a ‘spandrel’ — derived fortuitously as the result of evolution directed towards a different end. Lightfoot’s linguistic analysis invokes traces — presently relegated to the dust heap in Minimalist linguistic theory. Derek Bickerton, in his contribution ‘How protolanguage became language’, discusses the transition from a ‘protolanguage’ that lacked syntax to ‘human’ language. However, as noted above, cross-fostered chimpanzees who have been raised with signed or manually expressed human language comprehend sentences with simple syntax and produce simple ‘utterances’ (Savage-Rumbaugh & Rumbaugh 1993, Gardner & Gardner 1994). It is most unlikely that any archaic hominid communicated with a ‘protolanguage’ lacking syntax. Bickerton also claims that the brains of other species are incapable of controlling actions that must be ‘maintained without external stimulation for long periods’ (272), thereby rendering them incapable of comprehending or producing sentences. A reading of Jane Goodall’s comprehensive account of chimpanzee behavior (1986) will inform the reader that this is not the case. Anticipatory tool preparation and chimpanzee warfare clearly involve long-term cognitive activity without external stimulation.

In short, the hermetic tradition of linguistic research pervades many of the papers in this volume. Computer simulations can be useful but they must take account of biological facts if they are to provide any insights on the course of evolution. And the broader framework of evolutionary biology must be considered. Studies that take account of the communicative and cognitive behavior of human beings and other species incorporating relevant anatomical, physiological, neurophysiological and genetic data as well as the archaeological record would better illuminate our understanding of the evolution of human language.

REFERENCES
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Goodall, J. (1986). The chimpanzees of Gombe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Greenfield, P. M. (1991). Language, tools and brain: the ontogeny and phylogeny of hierarchically organized sequential behavior. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14. 531-577.
Jakobson, R. (1940). Kindersprache, Aphasie und allgemeine Lautgesetze. In Selected writings (vol. I). The Hague: Mouton. 328-401. [Translated by A. R. Keiler, 1968, as Child language, aphasia, and phonological universals. The Hague: Mouton.]
Kimura, D. (1979). Neuromotor mechanisms in the evolution of human communication. In Steklis, H. D. & Raleigh, M. J. (eds.), Neurobiology of social communication in primates. New York: Academic Press. 197-219.
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Lieberman, P. (2000). Human language and our reptilian brain: the subcortical bases of speech, syntax and thought. Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press.
Mayr, E. (1982). The growth of biological thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Muller, J. (1848). The physiology of the senses, voice and muscular motion with the mental faculties (Translated by W. Baly). London: Walton & Maberly.
Olmsted, D. L. (1971). Out of the mouth of babes. The Hague: Mouton.
Ruhlen, M. (1996). On the origin of language: tracing the evolution of the mother tongue. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Savage-Rumbaugh, E. S. & Rumbaugh, D. The emergence of language. In Gibson, K. R. & Ingold, T. (eds.), Tools, language and cognition in human evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 86-108.
Stevens, K. N. (1972). The quantal nature of speech: evidence from articulatory-acoustic data. In David, E. E. & Denes, P. B. (eds.), Human communication: a unified view. New York: McGraw-Hill. 51-66.

Author’s address: Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912-1978, USA.
E-mail: Philip Lieberman@brown.edu (Received 7 April 2003)