Over much of Aboriginal Australia men exercise ritual power through ceremonies (stated in myths once to have been the prerogative of women) in which they symbolically “menstruate” and “give birth.” The resultant power is conceptualized as a rainbowlike snake, which is said to be the source of life and which “swallows” humans and then “regurgitates” them, now “reborn.” This chapter discusses examples of such rituals and beliefs. It suggests that Australian Aboriginal culture in certain regions exhibits a phenomenon known in Western medical science as “menstrual synchrony,” and that such synchrony has been conceptualized traditionally as “like a rainbow” and “like a snake.”

It is shown that Australian menstrual synchrony is also conceptualized as “like a Mother” and “like a womb.” The chapter culminates in a hypothesis that links the origin of the Rainbow Snake ritual complex with menstrual synchrony. In a coda to the chapter I present some comparative evidence from ancient Greece, the ancient Near East, Western Europe, and East Asia which suggests speculatively a possible parallel to the model of linked menstrual synchrony and snake/dragon symbolism as offered in the chapter.

The discussion in this chapter forms part of a wider argument (see Knight 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986) that menstrual synchrony was once a basic experience of many of the world’s women and a source of female power in society. When for various reasons menstrual synchrony in traditional cultures broke down, its formal structures may have been preserved ritually by men, with secret initiation rites (which included men ritually “menstruating” together) and male-controlled versions of the Rainbow Snake being among the results.

MENSTRUAL SYNCHRONY IN ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA

Direct evidence of menstrual synchrony in Aboriginal Australia is scattered and sparse. We have no report comparable with, for example, Shostak’s (1983:68) note on the !Kung, who “believe … that if a woman sees traces of menstrual blood on another woman’s leg or even is told that another woman has started her period, she will begin menstruating as well.” Nor is there an Australian counterpart to the recent reconstruction of menstrual norms among the California Yurok, among whom it has been hypothesized that in some descent groups “all of a household’s fertile women who were not pregnant menstruated at the same time” (Buckley, this volume; also see Lamp, this volume). The !Kung and Yurok reports, however, are recent; in both cases the ethnographers were aware of the recent medical literature documenting menstrual synchrony among closely associated women (Burley 1979; Graham and McGrew 1980; Kiltie 1982; McClintock 1971; Quadagno et al. 1981; Russell, Switz and Thompson 1980). What indirect evidence we do have for Australian menstrual synchrony, from both early and relatively recent reports (see later discussion), was gathered at a time when menstrual synchrony was not acknowledged as a concept by social anthropologists in the field.

Yet enough exists even in the published record to indicate that Aboriginal culture acknowledged menstrual synchrony long before McClintock (1971) first documented it for Western science. Direct evidence appears in four domains:

1. cat’s cradle string figures and an associated myth of two sisters, called the Wawilak [Wauwalak, Wauwelak, etc.] Sisters;
2. certain other versions of the Wawilak Sisters myth;
3. images of apparently menstruating dancing women from the Pilbara region of Western Australia;
4. mythological images of collective menstruation from the Central Australian Aranda.

Scattered items of additional mythological evidence exist (see, for example, later descriptions in this chapter). Indirect evidence is more abundant but requires the reader’s acceptance of a theoretical interpretation of male ritual and its associated mythology.

[photopress:men_sync_fig_1.jpg,full,centered]

Among the Yolngu of northeast Arnhem Land (formerly known as the Murngin), menstrual synchrony is an acknowledged, ritually potent possibility. For example, at Yirrkalla, women traditionally made cats’ cradles that were said to represent, among other things, “menstrual blood of three women” (McCarthy 1960:466; see figure 10.1). “The women,” writes McCarthy (1960:424), “make their figures amongst themselves, and not in front of the men, particularly the old men, as a rule. The men walk past and do not look because the game belongs to the women’s sphere of life.” A woman may not make such figures with her husband. “Menstrual blood of three women” is not reported as a subject more frequent than topics such as “three vulvas,” “birth of a baby” and many others (McCarthy 1960:419). However, the theoretically possible male counterparts of these (“three men urinating,” “three penises,” etc.) are not listed as subjects; moreover menstrual synchrony is stressed in the string figure origin myth: “String first made by the two Wawilak sisters at Mudawa, near Buckingham Bay. They saw a lot of honey, about which they made a string loop.” Later the elder sister made a figure of the yams in her sister’s hands: “She then looked inside the latter’s vagina and made another string figure.” Later still, “The sisters sat down, looking at each other, with their feet out and legs apart, and both menstruated. Each one made a loop of the other one’s menstrual blood, after which they put the string loops around their necks.” They were subsequently swallowed by “a Snake” (McCarthy 1960:426).

Some of the remaining direct evidence for Aboriginal menstrual synchrony will now be surveyed. R. Berndt’s (1951:22) version of the Wawilak myth states that ritual dancing was used by two “incestuous” women to synchronize their blood flows. With one sister already shedding quantities of afterbirth blood, the other began to dance: “She moved her body gracefully, shuffling her feet, swaying her body from side to side, and holding in her hands feathered string from which she made cats-cradles as she danced.” This, then, was a cat’s cradle ritual of the “secret” kind noted by McCarthy (1960) among living Yolngu women. It was also a puberty celebration — in the words of the mythical younger sister, “a very happy time, for this is my first menstruation” (R. Berndt 1951:27). The younger sister danced on, “and as she swayed from side to side the intensive activity caused her menstruation to begin” (Berndt 1951:22—23). Blood from both women was now flowing simultaneously, and it was precisely at this moment that “the Snake” also flowed from its own womblike “waterhole” and coiled around the Two Sisters and their child. “There is the suggestion,” comments Berndt (1951:22 n.), “that the snake found the blood attractive.” Certainly it is a noticeable feature of the myth in all its versions that blood must be flowing if “the Snake” is to appear; where there is no blood, there is no Snake.

Rock engravings from the Pilbara region of Australia include images of dancing pairs of women “suggesting the sisters in some Aboriginal mythologies” (B. Wright 1968: figures 99-115). Various of Wright’s (1968) figures may show menstruating women (e.g., figs. 85, 88), two of them dancing together (fig. 112). One drawing (fig. 383) depicts dancers beneath an arc (rainbow?) and beside what may be a snake. Wright’s figure 100 more clearly shows two figures with a snake, and figure 845 is reminiscent of the scene in which the two Wawilak Sisters “sat down… and both menstruated” (McCarthy 1960:426). If the parallel is valid, this image depicts two women conjoined by the same menstrual flow. Figure 105 again seems to show women linked by streams of their own blood, and figure 648 seems to connote cyclicity in the form of a snake. (We regret that the Wright figures were not available for publication in the present volume. — Eds.)

In western Arnhem Land women knew how to bring on their menstrual flows, if late in arriving, by “steaming, massage or violent exercise” (Berndt and Berndt 1951:45). We may speculate that dancing might have been the mythologically sanctioned form of “violent exercise” used to bring on the flow. Although there is little direct evidence for this, other regions of Australia repeat the notion as a mythological theme. Among the Aranda, for example, deposits of red ochre “blood” were formed by the mythical Unthippa women: their sexual organs dropped out from exhaustion, caused by their uninterrupted dancing over the spots where the ochre now lies (Spencer and Gillen 1927, 1:345).

Synchronous feminine bleeding appears in other Aranda myths. At a point along the Finke River is a traditionally used red ochre pit. At this spot two kangaroo women “caused blood to flow from the vulva in large quantities, and so formed the deposit of red ochre.” Traveling away westward, “they did the same thing in other places” (Spencer and Gillen 1899:463-464). In Aboriginal Australia (Flood 1983:46, 238) red ochre was a much-used symbol of ritual power.[1]

In many Aranda myths women who are referred to as alknarintja are recognized by the fact that they are constantly decorating themselves with red ochre, are associated with water, and are “frequently represented as menstruating copiously” (Róheim 1974:150). The alknarintja women of Aranda songs

…cut their breasts.
On their breasts they make scars.
They slap their thighs …
They are menstruating.
Their flanks are wet with blood.
They talk to each other.
They make a bull-roarer…
They are menstruating.
The blood is perpetually flowing. (Róheim 1974:138-139)

Such women possess bull-roarers and other symbols of power, and have solidarity — evoked in one song through the image of a clump of bushes “so thick and so pressed against each other that they cannot move separately” (Róheim 1974:144).

Indirect evidence such as this lends strong support to wide spread menstrual synchrony among Aboriginal women of Australia. In the next section I consider the phenomenon of mythological snake women and rainbow snakes and explore their relationships to menstruous women.

AUSTRALIAN SNAKE WOMEN AND RAINBOW SNAKES

The Alawa Aborigines of western-central Arnhem Land say that certain mythic females, called “Mungamunga girls,” when they go into the water, become merged in the corporate identity of their “mother,” the “Kadjari.” (“Kadjari” and “Kunapipi” are alternative names for this mother figure.) This awe-inspiring woman emerges from the water: she “comes out as one person, but as she stands on the dry land she is manifested as a Kadjari with a group of Mungamunga girls” (R. Berndt 1951:189-190).

The Mungamunga girls, when diving into the water, may be called Kilji:ringkiljiring. When the Wawilak Sisters have been swallowed by a Snake in a waterhole (see earlier) they change their names to Ka’lerika’lering—a name derived from the Ma:ra term (the Ma:ra are neighbors of the Alawa). “This would suggest,” as R. Berndt (1951:173) comments, “that the Mungamunga and Wauwalak are identical.” Ka’lerika’lering means “having been swallowed” (R. Berndt 1951:35). The sisters now “belong to the Kunapipi side — the side of the great ancestral “Mother.” Becoming “at one” with “the Mother” in the water, whose all-swallowing uterus is the “inside” of “the Snake” (R. Berndt 1951:32, 43, 54), and becoming “at one” with “the Snake” in its waterhole therefore appear to be different ways of saying the same thing. This is confirmed by the fact that synchronous menstruation is practiced by the Mungamunga girls, too. In one song from the Ma:ra, a man called Bananggala “comes over and wants to copulate with the Mungamunga, but they are menstruating. They each say to him, ‘I’ve got blood: you wait for a while” (R. Berndt 1951:164). Another song from the same area concerns two men who encounter a group of Mungamunga girls by a lagoon: “No sooner do they seize a Mungamunga and put her on the ground, ready for coitus, than she slides away, jumps up and runs down to the lagoon, and dives into its water; then she emerges and joins the rest” (R. Berndt 1951:174). These women, then, have two ways of avoiding sex with a man: diving into the water, and menstruating. It seems that whether they are menstruating, diving into water, becoming submerged in the identity of a mother figure, or being “swallowed” by a snake, women are repudiating heterosexual intercourse and returning into a symbolic womb instead.

The mythology of western and northern Australia focuses centrally upon “swallowing” episodes of this kind. A Yolngu myth ends by describing how two sisters “decided to go into the waterhole and become a rainbow.” It is explained: “They wanted to be a snake, like the rainbow, when she is standing up in the waterhole and makes lightning” (Groger-Wurm 1973:120). These sisters, then, change their form into that of a rainbow snake, just as the Wawilak Sisters change their names to Having Been Swallowed and the Mungamunga girls submerge their separate identities into the corporate one of “the Mother/Snake.” The positive attitude of the women who “wanted to be a snake” is significant. The women desired to lose their separateness in the formation of a larger whole. There is no evidence to suggest that they would have welcomed the arrival of a monster slayer to “rescue” them from this fate (see the Coda).

Robinson (1966:61-66) provides a dramatic Murinbata story that is worth dwelling on at some length. It is reminiscent of myths from other parts of the world concerning a conflict between a winged snake or “dragon” and a male hero for the hand of a woman — except that the dragon (in the form of the rainbow snake) wins.[2] The rainbow snake Kunmanggur was in the water with a number of water-women or “Murinbungo.” A man called Ngalmin approached and tried to catch one; at first they had been lying along the riverbank in the sunlight, but they saw him coming and “ran and jumped into the water.” Ngalmin went away, disguised himself in mud, approached again and succeeded in seizing a young woman. He went off with her, camping at various places but always carefully avoiding “any big water.” The woman kept asking for water, but Ngalmin insisted on keeping to dry places. Eventually she went off, looking for water on her own, and found a billabong (pool), where she drank:

And when she drank, all the Murinbungo, the water-lubras, rose up out of the billabong. They had long streaming hair and they called out to her: “O, sister, sister, where have you been? We cried for you. Come back to us, sister.” The water lubras reached out their arms to her. They pulled her down to them into the water.

When Ngalmin discovered his loss he cried, cut his head, and lost all interest in life. He returned to the billabong and tried to recover his wife, but she resisted and the rainbow snake frightened him away. Again he attempted life without her but could not stop pining and crying. He returned to the water for a final time, saw his woman lying in the water and cut his head with a stone. He called out to the rainbow snake: “You have to give me your child. I cut myself. You see this blood belonging to me? You have to be sorry for me.” The rainbow snake just lay still, watching Ngalmin; the girl did not move despite the man’s pleas. At last Ngalmin jumped into the water to catch a fleeing woman. Kunmanggur the rainbow snake lashed out from the water, grabbed Ngalmin, crushed and drowned him.

This, then, is a dragon-slaying myth in reverse. The heroine wants to stay with her dragon protector; it is her would-be suitor who is killed. Another myth — from the Kimberleys — makes clear that to try to detach a woman from “the Snake” is to attempt to sever bonds symbolized not only by water but above all by the presence of blood:

A man called Purra was looking for a wife. One day he was crossing a creek when he noticed that its water was red. “Look,” he said, “a girl must be around here. She is at the time of the passing of blood and went into the water. That is why the creek is red.” He followed the water right up to its source. There he found a girl. Her lower half was in the water, but the rest of her was lying on the bank. “She is Tira’s [ rainbow snake’sI daughter,” Purra said to himself. He took the girl, “but he knew that her father, the serpent, would be after him.” He tried to run away but the Serpent followed. Purra kept lighting fires to keep the Serpent away, but one day “the big rain came”; it extinguished Purra’s fire-stick and caused a flood into which Purra’s wife disappeared. (Adapted from Bozic and Marshall 1972:121-123)

This myth eloquently links the notion of being wet or in the rains with a woman’s menstrual state and consequent non-availability as a wife. At the same time, it emphasizes that to be “wet” and menstruating is to be under the guardianship of the serpent.

These are consistent mythological equations and themes. The great snake of the Wawilak myth “swallows” the incestuous sisters as they shed blood into a pool (R. Berndt 1951:23; Warner 1957:254). The Yolngu say that not so long ago a man took his two wives in a canoe for a trip from one island to another. One of them was menstruating. When they had gone for a short time, Yurlunggur the rainbow snake “smelt the unclean odour, came out of the Subterranean depths, and swallowed them all” (Warner 1957:76). In western Anthem Land among the Gunwinggu a menstruating woman should avoid associating with other Women around waterholes or streams; she should stay in seclusion with a fire burning “to keep the Rainbow away” (C. Berndt and R. Berndt 1970:180). In Western Australia the Wagaman snake, Djagwut,

lives in deep springs, rivers and billabongs. His spit is the “secondary” or “high” rainbow. He is the source of spirit-children and the protector of human life. He is especially dangerous to menstruating women, being able to smell them from afar (Stanner 1966:87).

Von Brandenstein (1982:58) suggests that “Muit” and similar names for the rainbow snake in Western and northern parts of the continent derive from a Kariera root meaning “blood & red & multi-coloured & irridescent” When Yolngu neophytes are shown “the Snake” for the first time, it is in the form of two immense white “Muit emblems” consisting of padded poles “with the rock pythons” painted in blood on the white surfaces gleaming in the light of the many fires” (Warner 1957:304). “The Snake,” then, may appear as a line of blood. The Wikmungkan of Cape York confirm this: the snake “is believed to be responsible for women menstruating” (McKnight 1975:95); seeing the red band in a rainbow, people say, “Taipan the-rainbow-snake-has-a-‘sore inside’ i.e. has her menstrual pains” (McConnel 1936, 2:103). The rainbow’s red band, the “snake,” and the menstrual flow are, then, explicitly one and the same.

THE “SNAKE” IN AUSTRALIA

Marshack (1977:286), referring to prehistorians’ difficulties in interpreting Upper Paleolithic “serpentine”/“meander” designs, notes that “what we ‘see’ or recognise conceptually are usually ‘units’ and ‘patterns’ in terms of our culture, units and patterns which are relevant to us in terms of equations derived from our West European training.” It is central to the project of social and symbolic anthropology to escape from ethnocentrism of this kind, yet it is not certain how far we have succeeded.

Radcliffe-Brown (1930:342) argued that the rainbow snake “represents the element of water.” On the basis of native statements that “the Snake” is embodied in seasonal wet/dry alternations, Warner (1957:378) concluded that it is “a weather-symbol.” On the basis of other native statements that “the Snake” is identified with the production of babies, R. Berndt (1951:12-13, 31) argued that it symbolizes “the Penis,” being the counterpart of the “All-Mother,” who symbolizes “the uterus.” For Elkin (1951:9), “no deep analysis is needed to show that the mythical Snake is a sexual symbol.” For Schmidt (1953:909, quoted by Maddock 1978a:2), the creature represents “the male element (membrum virile),” or “the male idea of the penis.” For Triebels (1958:129-130, cited by Maddock 1978a:2), in its snake aspect it symbolizes the spirally formed cosmic power that lay in the world’s virgin waters, while as rainbow it is an emanation of the snake.

Marshack’s (1977:286) note of caution is appropriate here. Snake symbolism in Australia, as elsewhere, is associated with the innermost mysteries of secret rites and cults. Because the “meaning” of the symbols is that given by these religious systems themselves, it is hardly likely to consist of a mental or physical reality — “water,” “weather,” “penis,” or “male idea of penis” — immediately recognizable or familiar to those whose belief system is rooted in the scientific rationalism of Western culture. Maddock (1974:121) suggests “that what is called the Rainbow Serpent is but a visually striking image of force or vitality, a conception that cannot adequately be given figurative expression.” As evidence he cites the Dalabon term bolung, which signifies not only “rainbow,” “snake,” and “the mother of us all” but also “ambiguity in form, creativity, power and time long past” (1974:122-123). The reality in mind “cannot be more than partially and misleadingly conveyed in visual and psychological images like rainbow or snake or mother.” In fact, Maddock concludes, no Western concept or expression can hope to convey the notion of what is meant. The rainbow snake is paradoxical to the core. As Yurlunggur of the Yolngu, he “is both in the heavens. . . and in the subterranean depths” (Warner 1957:386). “He is the highest in the sky and the deepest in the well” (1957:255 n.). Although “he” may be male, he is both “man and woman” (p.383). Likewise the rainbow snake of the Murinbata, Kunmanggur, is bisexual: “Even those who asserted the maleness of Kunmanggur said that he had large breasts, like a woman’s” (Stanner 1966:96). “It is as though paradox and antinomy were the marrow in the story’s bones,” comments Stanner (1966:100) on the basic Kunmanggur myth. Eliade (1973:115) writes that the rainbow snake is able to relate “to women’s mysteries, to sex and blood and after-death existence” because “his structure has permitted the Rainbow Ser pent to unite the opposites.”

What “the Snake” is cannot be simply stated. I propose that an understanding of it may presuppose an understanding of the rhythmic core and structural basis of human culture as such. The meaning of the snake refers us to the logic of Aboriginal Australian culture — and perhaps of all human culture, if we are to trace it to its source; consequently to understand the one may be to fathom the genesis of the other (see Knight 1986). In any event, we need an explanation of the fact that the rainbow serpent “is not confined in Australia to any particular ethnological province, but is very widespread and may very possibly be practically universal,” forming “a characteristic of Australian culture as a whole” (Radcliffe-Brown 1926:24). Indeed, on archaeological grounds, Flood (1983:134) speculates that the snake complex in northern Australia may represent “the longest continuing religious belief documented in the world,” stretching back seven or nine thousand years.

For Maddock (1978a:1), rainbows, snakes, sisters, and related images are “a host of fleeting forms in and through which a fundamental conception of the world is expressed.” As a first approach to an understanding of the Dalabon term for rainbow snake, bolung, he suggests that we should “lay stress on the cyclicity embedded in the concept and. . . draw attention to the role of cyclical thinking in Aboriginal thought generally” (1978b:115). Why should snakes and rainbows be used to conceptualize the force behind the changing of the seasons, the movements of the celestial bodies, the breeding times of animals and plants, and the cycles of life, death, and afterlife? “The curvilinear imagery of snakes and rainbows,” Maddock (1978b:115) answers, “might be considered apt to express the abstract notion of cyclicity.”

In accordance with Marshack’s (1985:141—142) interpretations of serpentine symbolism cross-culturally, let us take it, then, that “the Snake” in one of its aspects connotes cyclical time. It would then be an Australian version of “the serpent of time, of process and continuity, the serpent of self-birth and origins, the serpent of death, birth, and rebirth, the cosmic serpent, the serpent of such processes as water, rain, and lightning, the ouroboros that bites its own tail in perpetuity, the guilloche serpent of endless continuity and turns” (Marshack 1985:142). “The Snake,” like seasonal or any other form of cyclicity, would in this aspect express the logic of alternation, metamorphosis, and change, perpetually incorporating within itself its own opposite: it would be wet season and dry, the highest and the lowest, male and female, and so on.

THE HYPOTHESIS: MENSTRUAL SYNCHRONY AS “SNAKE”

Why were the two Wawilak Sisters “swallowed” by “a Snake”? Were they swallowed by “cyclical time”? I suggest that in a sense they were. It will be remembered that in McCarthy’s (1960:426) version of the Wawilak myth, the sisters sat down face to face “and both menstruated.” They then (a) encircled each other’s necks with “loops” of “menstrual blood” and (b) were swallowed by “a Snake.” Cyclical time seized (“encircled”) the Wawilak Sisters in the form of their own menstrual flows. Being “encircled” by blood and being “swallowed” by a snake were not two separate experiences but are alternative metaphors for expressing the same experience. What, then, is the Snake? On the basis of the evidence so far, the following hypothesis suggests itself.

The Snake is in the first instance a ritual phenomenon. In one of its aspects it is an all-female ritual presence (the opposite aspect is male and is discussed later). As female, I suggest, it is the ritual synchronization of women’s reproductive cycles and menstrual and/or afterbirth flows. It is a way of describing women in such close intimacy that they feel as if they are “one flesh,” “one blood”—or “one Mother.” As the Aranda song put it, they resemble a clump of bushes “so thick and so pressed against each other that they cannot move separately.” With their blood flows conjoining, they form a single flow or stream — its elements as harmoniously conjoined and as inseparable as those of a snake. The Two Sisters who in the myths “turn into a rainbow” or are “swallowed by a Snake” are in reality entering the “wet” phase of the menstrual cycle and becoming engulfed in their own blood-derived unity with each other. Like water-women diving into a river, they are being “swallowed up” in a collective medium that transcends the boundaries of each. Whenever an out-of-phase woman is brought back into synchrony, it is as if her “water-sisters” were claiming her back into their realm (see earlier discussion). These women are indeed “like a snake,” for no creature on earth more closely resembles a river or flow, or can coil itself up into so many repeated cycles. And women are indeed “like a rainbow” — because, given the ubiquity of menstrual seclusion rules in Australia, the blood flow carries them as if from world to world. They move from dryness to wet, and also from marital life to the world of seclusion, just as the rainbow moves cyclically between sunshine and rain, dry season and wet, earth and sky.

TESTING THE HYPOTHESIS

To be of value a hypothesis should make specific predictions and be testable. It should be possible to conceive of types of evidence that, if verified in the ethnographic record, would disprove the hypothesis. The model should also prove fruitful as a research guide, enabling us to seek out evidence that the hypothesis would predict but that had not been “seen” before.

If the hypothesis is correct, we could expect that everything that can be said of menstrual synchrony would be equally true of the (rainbow) snake. We may expect synchronized women to be termed “snake women,” with half of their being in a “wet” phase or element and half in the “dry.” Meanwhile, so-called snakes would turn out to be human mothers. They should menstruate, give birth to human offspring, and copulate with human partners. Assuming that menstrual blood is thought of as “wet” rather than “dry,” menstrual seclusion should be depictable as a snake’s drawing of women into a watery world. In terms of detailed mythological imagery, the “swallowing” episodes would be associated with pools, streams, marshes, rains, storms, wet season, and so on, while the “regurgitations” would be linked with dryness (fire, dry earth, sun, dry season, etc.). A “dry” swallowing and a “wet” regurgitation would disprove the hypothesis. Menstrual seclusion in the real world is a withdrawal from exogamous sex into “one’s own blood,” so no union with a snake should have the characteristics of legitimate exogamous marriage. Snake marriage should be a union of blood with blood — that is, an intimacy comparable with the incestuous relationships of the Wawilak Sisters. A “correct” marriage with a snake would invalidate the hypothesis. Given that menstrual blood is taboo and is also reminiscent of the blood in meat (Warner 1957:278, McKnight 1975:85; compare Knight 1983:41-42), the snake should connote the sanctity of both women and animal flesh during the “raw” or menstrual state.

The exhaustive testing of these aspects of the hypothesis is beyond the scope of the present chapter (for further testing see Knight 1983, 1985). However, other predictions based upon the hypothesis seem already to have been validated in previous sections of this essay. Notably, if our hypothesis is correct, the Snake should be an immense blood-red cyclical phenomenon, analogous to the changing of the seasons, responsible for women’s periodic “death” to marital life, embodying all opposite phases in itself and associated in the first instance with women, pregnancy, fertility, and “wet” things such as rain, storms, floods, and menstrual or other blood. It should prove hostile to marital or exogamous sex, “swallowing” women and their offspring into “incestuous” blood unity whenever and wherever blood was flowing. It should be “sacred,” representing the “tabooed” state of game animals and women alike (compare Knight 1983:41-42). It should be incompatible with fire and cooking (as these destroy visible blood — Knight 1983:41-42; 1986). Although a great deal of this is substantiated by the available myths, there is a further probability not yet raised: the Snake should be a ritual entity beyond the power of men to usurp or control — except in the event that men were able to simulate menstruation and childbirth themselves.

THE SNAKE AS “PENIS” AND MALE POWER

Despite its being a “fantastically painful” operation (Gould 1969:112), subincision is practiced over an immense area of traditional Australia (fig. 10.2). The penis is cut along the underside, the incision reaching to the urethral canal; the organ then opens out wide. During rituals the wound is re opened to produce a flow of blood. The more sacred the ritual (as a general rule), the more bloody — and the more taboo it is to women.

In 1937 Ashley Montagu (1937:320-325) first put forward the theory that “subincision in the male was originally instituted in order to cause the male to resemble the female with respect to the occasional effusion of blood which is naturally characteristic of the female.” He admitted that the idea “must appear fantastic” but provided ample supporting evidence. According to Róheim (1945:171), subincision ritual restrictions look “like a simple inversion of the menstruating taboo, the men saying: ‘We are not allowed to see your bleeding so we shall not allow you to see ours.” The Pitjandjara call the subincision hole a “penis womb” (Róheim 1945:164). Róheim (1945:171) notes further that subincision in general produces [photopress:men_sync_fig_2.jpg,full,centered]
“a penis that is also a vagina,” adding, in agreement with earlier writers, that the bleeding men “are playing the role of menstruating women.” More recently, Berndt and Berndt (1964:145) confirmed Montagu’s original interpretation to this effect.

If the operation is so painful, why do men do it? In keeping with the view of cultural origins that informs this analysis (Knight 1986), I suggest that culture begins with a tendency toward menstrual synchrony; that this determines the symbolic language on the basis of which ritual power is expressed; and that when — in certain regions or at certain epochs — the synchrony breaks down, its formal structures are ritually preserved by men, whose tendencies toward dominance cannot now so effectively be checked. C. Berndt (1965:274) writes of menstruation as “a rite performed more or less automatically by women (although imitated artificially, in various regions, by men).” This chapter has suggested that it is the factor of synchrony that transforms the private experience of menstruation into the collective realm of “rite.” In Aboriginal Australia men’s “menstrual periods” are elaborately synchronized with each other, and there is evidence that the phasing was connected with the periodicity of the moon (Berndt and Berndt 1970:131, 133, 141; Maddock 1974:159; Warner 1957:296; compare Knight 1985, 1986). For example, Berndt and Berndt (1945:309-310) watched a male initiation rite in the Ooldea region of western south Australia, during which ten men simultaneously began puncturing their penis incisures:

The blood was sprinkled on the thighs of the men, either by holding the penis at each side and letting it drip, or by moving so that the bleeding penis flopped from side to side, or upwards and downwards, the blood touching the lower buttocks and loins.

The Berndts (1945:308 n.) note that “the actual initiation was held during the period of the new moon.”

Yolngu men, while not subincising, cut themselves to produce blood. The Wawilak myth tells of how men gained the necessary blood and dancing instructions from the Two Sisters, and this is how Warner (1957:278) presents an interpretation of the blood-letting phase of the corresponding Djungguan reenactment of the myth:

Native interpretation. — The blood that runs from an incision and with which the dancers paint themselves and their emblems is something more than a man’s blood — it is the menses of the old Wawilak women. I was told during a ceremony: “That blood we put all over those men is all the same as the bloodBut really we have been stealing that came from that old woman’s vagina. It isn’t the blood of those men any more because it has been sung over and made strong. The hole in the man’s arm isn’t that hole any more. It is all the same as the vagina of that old woman that had blood coming out of it.”

Rituals of a similar kind are a condition of male ritual potency throughout Aboriginal Australia. To acquire ritual power a youth or man has always to “die” and “be reborn,” and the symbolic language is that of pools and waterholes, wombs, blood, rainbows, and all-swallowing Mothers who are Snakes. Men not only “menstruate”; they are also the agents of their own kind’s “rebirth,” and they “give birth” by taking youths or boys into their collective “womb” — which may be a deep pit — and subsequently expelling (“regurgitating”) them. The original womb is depicted to the uninitiated as having been a monstrous, cannibalistic Mother or Snake, always thirsty for blood. This “bad dragon” — usually associated with the evils of womankind — is said, however, to have been killed and replaced with a more benevolent male-controlled symbolic substitute that does not permanently kill those it “swallows” (Hiatt 1975).

In terms of the model presented in this chapter, it seems clear that the “bad dragon” is the menstrual synchrony and power of women; the “good” one, the male substitute. Male myths justify the usurpation of women’s menstrual power by describing the female version in lurid terms as a cannibalistic monster from which humanity had to be rescued (Hiatt 1975).

Interestingly, however, these male myths are rich with ambivalence and a sense of tragedy at the loss of the original Mother/Snake. The Murinbata snake-woman Mutjingga, for example, had to be killed when she swallowed ten children alive; men cut open her belly and rescued the still-living victims, thus providing the model for contemporary male ritual rebirth (Stanner 1966:40-43). Men regard this tale as “a sorrowful story”; the Old Woman, they say, was once “truly human” and had “primal authority.” With her death a disaster of almost incomprehensible dimensions had occurred. “The loss to man,” say the Murinbata, “was irreparable.” The symbolic substitutes for her are felt to be inadequate. “Because she died,” they say, “men now have only the bull-roarer, which was made in order to take her place… stand for her and … be her emblem, symbol and sign” (Stanner 1966:43, 54, 56). The sound of the bull-roarers — heard across Australia at moments when ancestral blood is flowing — is, among the Ma:ra, explicitly thought to be the sound of the dying ogress’s blood (R. Berndt 1951:150-151).

When Mutjingga swallowed the ten children, she took them down into the waters of a river (Stanner 1966:40-43). When the Wuradjeri medicine man wishes to acquire power from the water-dwelling rainbow snake (called, in this case, Wawi) he has to paint himself in red ochre, follow a rainbow to where it enters a pool, and dive down under the surface (Elkin 1977:87).

Countless other examples could be cited. In this chapter I have suggested that all such processes of immersion in water, all such intimate encounters with a Snake or Rainbow or Mother, are male replications of the female potentiality to conjoin, through menstrual synchrony, in a blood-union transcending the boundaries of the self. The Snake, as Aboriginal paintings from the Oenpelli region of Arnhem Land make clear (fig. 10.3), is a rhythmic line, a flow inseparably associated with the body of womankind. It is a symbol of periodicity — or of “the abstract notion of cyclicity” itself (Maddock 1978b:115). An implication is that the entire structure and language of ritual potency is derived by men from the opposite sex. As Yolngu men say in reenacting the myth of the two Wawilak Sisters,

But really we have been stealing what belongs to them (the women), for it is mostly all women’s business; and since it concerns them it belongs to them. Men have nothing to do really, except copulate, it belongs to the women. All that belonging to those Wuwalak, the baby, the blood, the yelling, their dancing, all that concerns the women; but every time we have to trick them. Women can’t see what men are doing, although it really is their own business, but we can see their side. This is because all the Dreaming business came out of women — everything; only men take “picture” for that Julunggul [i.e., men make an artificial reproduction of the Snake]. In the beginning we had nothing, because men had been doing nothing; we took these things from women. (R. Berndt 1951:55)

To this Aboriginal analysis I add only that I am not suggesting that universal, or near-universal, patriarchy is caused by men’s menstrual envy, resentment, or desire to appropriate
[photopress:men_sync_fig_3.jpg,full,centered]
women’s menstrual synchrony or its associated power. What I have been trying to show is that the formal structures of men’s rule in the Australian Aboriginal societies considered bear the stamp of feminine menstrual ritual.

CODA: SNAKE MOTHERS AND THE ORIGINS OF RITUAL POWER

“I will put enmity between thee and the woman,” said God to the Serpent (Genesis 3:15), “and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head and thou shalt bruise his heel.”

Blacker (1978:113) has explored “the manner in which, in many parts of the world and particularly in the Far East, this commandment of God has been ignored. We find on the contrary a close and mysterious identification between serpents and women.” Blacker is referring to the snake women of Asian folklore — creatures whose appearance is human until they are spied upon while in seclusion and discovered to be a snake. A Japanese version tells of a woman whose husband spied on her while she was giving birth. Within her parturition hut on the seashore, she had turned into a sea snake or dragon. Angry at having been discovered, she returned to the sea, leaving her baby behind. Her human sister then adopted the boy, married her “son” when he had come of age, and produced from this incestuous union the first imperial ruler of Japan (Daniels 1975:12).

Because structurally similar myths are to be found worldwide, and because they are particularly prominent in Aboriginal Australia, it is worth dwelling on their common features. The myths link (a) women in seclusion with (b) water, (c) incest, (d) snakes, and (e) the origins of ritual power or divine kingship. In Greek mythology Echidna, Delphyne, and Keto “are different names for the same monstrous snake woman or sea monster” (Fontenrose 1959:95-97). Echidna was half young woman, with bright eyes and fair cheeks, “and half snake, dwelling in the depths of the earth, eating raw meat.” She was the “sister-wife” of the monstrous multi colored winged or feathered hundred-headed snake known as Typhon, who still rumbles beneath Mount Etna (Fontenrose 1959:73-74, 95-96). Under another name she was Skylla, a woman from the waist up and a fish from the waist down, described in the Odyssey as living in a cave opposite Etna and seizing and eating sailors as they passed through the straits of Messina (Fontenrose 1959:97). The Sumerian counterpart was the snake woman Tiamat, out of whose defeated body were created earth, sky, and the world we know (Fontenrose 1959:150).

Like the Sumerian Marduk, mythological divine kings and gods the world over are said to have acquired their power through a cosmic battle with the forces of evil or helpless femininity in association with a monstrous snake. The legend of St. George and the Dragon is, of course, a variation on the theme. Womankind, according to patriarchal ideology, stands in dire need of rescue from her original connection with sin in dragonlike or snakelike form (Frazer 1911, 2:155; Fontenrose 1959:469; Ingersoll 1928:194-195). Only once the evil has been slain is the world made safe for marriage as a sacred bond. Only then is the stable world order known today secured (compare Knight 1983).

A recurrent theme, however, is that the male hero, having slain the Dragon, usurps its extraordinary potencies for himself. A Japanese version illustrates this clearly:

A man came to a house where all were weeping, to learn that the last of seven daughters was to be given to a seven-headed dragon, which yearly came to the seashore to claim a victim. The man assumed the girl’s form, and induced the dragon to drink sake from seven pots. He then slew the drunken monster. From the end of its tail he took out a sword which is today the Mikado’s state sword, and married the maiden himself. (Adapted from Ingersoll 1928:105)

Ingersoll (1928:148, 149) notes the dragon reputedly worn on the crest of King Arthur’s helmet, and the dragons used as ensigns by Roman soldiers in their wars with the Britons; he also notes the red dragon as the current emblem of the Prince of Wales. The gold mask of Tutankhamen features a snake with two heads — one birdlike, the other that of a cobra — on the ruler’s forehead (Daniel 1981: facing page 13).

It is beyond the scope of this chapter to detail the world’s royal lineages whose power is symbolized by winged snakes or “dragons.” It is worth noting, however, that the early emperors of China were born from a human woman’s copulation with a dragon. “Such a stupendous affair,” writes Schafer (1973:23), “occurred in the dawn of time when Shun’s mother conceived after a visitation by a rainbow dragon.” In China and Japan the emperor was termed “dragon-faced”; in view of the fatal consequences of seeing such a face, visitors granted an audience were suitably protected, hearing only a voice emanating from behind a bamboo screen (Ingersoll 1928:100).

“In China,” writes Schafer (1973:28), “dragon essence is woman essence.” But it should be appreciated that “the dragon” was not safe, sexually available femininity, but womankind in her ritually potent “wet” and “dangerous” phase when she was anything but “feminine.” The dragon is always ferocious and therefore in a certain sense “male.” “Masculine femininity” and “feminine masculinity” express the core of this creature’s being. It was Frazer (1900, 3:204), following hints from Durkheim (1897), who first drew attention to a seemingly incongruous parallel that illustrates this point and with which this discussion may conclude. The divine kings of much of the ancient world were subjected to taboos that included two in particular: they were not to see the sun and not to touch the ground. “Now it is remarkable,” writes Frazer (1900, 3:204), “that these two rules — not to touch the ground and not to see the sun — are observed either separately or conjointly by girls at puberty in many parts of the world.” The dragon-empowered kings were treated as if they were “menstruating men” (compare Hogbin 1970), being subjected to seclusion rules uncannily like those imposed upon menstruating women throughout most of the traditional world.

10. MENSTRUAL SYNCHRONY AND THE AUSTRALIAN RAINBOW SNAKE

Acknowledgments. An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the World Archaeological Congress in September 1986 (Southampton, England).

Note. Readers should be aware that much of the previously published material cited by Knight in this chapter is deemed both sacred and secret by the Aboriginal peoples of Australia. We republish these readily available ethnographic materials respectfully, for scholarly purposes only, and in hopes that our doing so may ultimately serve the interests of the native peoples of Australia. —Eds.

[1] This was also the case in Upper Paleolithic Europe (Leroi Gourhan 1968:40, Shimkin 1978:271; Klein 1969:226).

[2] I deal with non-Australian “dragon,” “snake,” and other serpent myths in the Coda. It seems clear that use of the term “snake” in reference to the Australian rainbow serpent is a matter of cultural conditioning (and perhaps bias). The mythological creature is a flying serpent — as easily called a “dragon,” in English, as a “snake.” For this reason I use the English “snake” and “dragon” interchangeably in the following discussion.

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From The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: social function and the origins of linguistic form, eds Chris Knight, Michael Studdert-Kennedy & James R Hurford. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. ISBN 0 521 78696 7. 2000

The theme of language as play suggests inquiries into non-cognitive uses of language such as that found in riddles, jingles, or tongue twisters — and beyond this into the poetic and ritual function of language, as well as into parallels between language and ritual, language and music, and language and dance. It also provides an explanation for the obvious fact that so much in language is non-optimal for purposes of communicating cognitive information. Morris Halle (1975: 528)

Primate vocalisations are irrepressible, context-bound indices of emotional states, in some cases conveying additional information about the sender’s condition, status and/or local environment. Speech has a quite different function: it permits communication of information concerning a shared, conceptual environment — a world of intangibles independent of currently perceptible reality.

A suite of formal discontinuities are bound up with this fundamental functional contrast. Whereas primate vocalisations are not easily faked, human speech signals are cognitively controlled, linked arbitrarily to their referents and ‘displaced’ – hence immune from contextual corroboration (Burling 1993). The meanings of primate gestures/calls are evaluated on an analog, ‘more/less’ scale; speech signals are digitally processed (Burling 1993). When combined, primate signals and associated meanings blend and grade into one another; the basic elements of speech are discrete/particulate (Abler 1989; Studdert Kennedy 1998). Primate recipients evaluate details of signalling performance; in speech, the focus is on underlying intentions, with listeners compensating for deficiencies in performance (Grice 1969; Sperber and Wilson 1986). Primate vocal signals prompt reflex responses; in speech, computational processes mediate between signal and message (Deacon 1997).

If primate calls do not reflect details of cognition, we may ask how it became possible in the human case for vocalisations to express conceptual processes? Insofar as a chimpanzee may be said to think in concepts, conveying these will involve facial expression, position, posture and bodily motion (Köhler 1927; Menzel 1971; Plooij 1978). Humans intuitively use the same method: when an initially functional action is replayed for purposes of communication, success is achieved through direct iconic expression of the thought (McNeill 1992). For either species, it is much simpler and more effective to involve any or all manipulable parts of the body rather than accept restriction to just hands, or just voice.

Against this background, one school of thought concludes that in the absence of a conventional code, humanity’s earliest signs can only have worked as gestural replicas or icons (Hewes 1973; Kendon 1991; Armstrong, Stokoe and Wilcox 1995). During the course of human evolution — so runs the basic argument — thought gestures of the kind occasionally observed among apes (Köhler 1927; Plooij 1978) become habitually deployed. Through frequent use, these become curtailed and conventionalised, leading eventually to a system of arbitrary signs.

Recently established sign languages illustrate how iconic gestures become reduced to conventionalised shorthands, sometimes within a generation (Kegl, Senghas and Coppola 1998). Even following conventionalisation, sign languages remain more iconic than spoken ones. Yet they exhibit essentially the same hierarchical, embedded structure as spoken language, and are acquired by children just as naturally (Bellugi and Klima 1975, 1982). It appears, then, that the ‘language organ’ central to Chomskyan theory works as well with visuo-manual gesture as with sound. Had the evolution of syntactical competence been driven by motor control for vocal communication, as argued by Lieberman (1985), this outcome would seem difficult to explain. Even in spoken language, syntax remains to a significant extent iconic (Haiman 1985), leading Givón (1985: 214) to treat iconicity as ‘the truly general case in the coding, representation and communication of experience’, arbitrary convention being ‘a mere extreme case on the iconic scale’. Acceptance of this principle logically excludes a vocal origin for the representational functions of language: apart from the special case of sound symbolism or onomatopoeia, it is not easy to see how iconic resemblances can be made using sound alone.

But if a language of visual signs was initially adaptive, why would it subsequently have been phased out? By comparison with manual signing, vocal communication saves time and energy, liberates the hands for other tasks and is effective around corners or in the dark. Proponents of an originally gestural modality explain the transition to a vocal one in these terms. But, asks MacNeilage (1998: 232), if the advantages of vocalising are so decisive, how and why did visuomanual gesture take precedence in the first place? Why start with an inefficient modality and then switch to an efficient one? Why not resort to the appropriate modality from the outset? For MacNeilage, the gestural theory encounters ‘an insuperable problem’ at this point (1998: 232).

A further difficulty — according to MacNeilage — is that few entities in the real world allow a natural linkage between iconic gestures in both visual and vocal modalities. Admittedly, one might represent ‘lion’ by pouncing and roaring. Translation into a purely vocal medium is here straightforward: just omit the pounce. However, most referents are not iconically identifiable by sound. Iconic signing, moreover, exploits spatial dimensionality, an option not available in vocal-auditory signalling. This in turn implies very different principles of phonological organisation in the two modalities. Given the associated translation problems, how could the posited modality switch to vocal speech have occurred?

On the basis of such objections, MacNeilage (1998: 238) makes the strong claim that ‘the vocal-auditory modality of spoken language was the first and only output mechanism for language’. This coincides with Dunbar ’s (1996: 141) view that gesture was never necessary — ‘it can all be done by voice’.

Statements of this kind, however, pose the central question of precisely how it could all be done? At what point and through which mechanisms did it become technically feasible to communicate details of conceptual thinking by exclusively vocal means?

Precursors of Compositional Speech

Prominent recent models of the evolution of speech suggest a two-stage process beginning with the appearance of referentially functional ‘words’. In Bickerton’s (1996: 51) view, ‘syntax could not have come into existence until there was a sizeable vocabulary whose units could be organized into complex Structures’. Studdert-Kennedy (1998) likewise considers words to have emerged at an early stage. In his view, it was a steady increase in the size of the ancestral population’s vocabulary which necessitated the radical restructuring of the vocal apparatus characteristic of modern Homo sapiens (Lieberman 1984).

Such models begin with a simple, limited lexicon, and then derive complexity from vocabulary expansion and related challenges premised upon the prior existence of words. The basic reasoning (cf. Studdert-Kennedy 1998) is as follows. Ancestral speakers increasingly needed multiple semantic distinctions, but had only limited articulatory resources to achieve this. Some primate species possess up to 30 holistically distinct vocalisations, each with its special meaning. Humans required more than this. The solution was to independently recycle the components of formerly holistic signals. This involved reduplicating each signal with variability at only certain positions — as in ‘flim-flam’ or ‘higgledy-piggledy’. If just one component – say, the initial consonant – could be varied, while holding the remainder invariant, this would allow a vastly expanded lexicon. The argument is that during human evolution, this ‘particulate’ principle increasingly supplanted the ‘holistic’ principle of primate signalling. The development drove changes in physiology and anatomy allowing vocalisers to control lip muscles independently of tongue muscles, these independently of the soft palate and so on. The human vocal tract was in this way progressively differentiated into independently controllable parts (Studdert-Kennedy 1998: 208—209).

Note that in this scenario, ‘words’ are already being used before the evolution of the distinctively human vocal apparatus, hence prior to any correspondingly enhanced competence in differentiating syllables. Studdert-Kennedy (1998: 211) acknowledges that this evolutionary sequence bears no relationship to the stages through which children pass in acquiring speech:

If the assumption that differentiation of the hominid protosyllable evolved in response to pressure for increased vocabulary is correct, the onset of differentiation before the first words in modern children must be a relatively late evolutionary novelty, selected and inserted into the developmental sequence for whatever facilitatory effect it may have on later processes of differentiation.

Studdert-Kennedy, then, acknowledges that his model addresses one issue only to face us with an additional puzzle. If evolving humans first used words and only then began differentiating syllables, why is it that children nowadays do just the opposite, first learning to differentiate syllables and only then deploying words?

Children start babbling at an early age, when they are also displaying capacities for thinking. But at first, these two activities – babbling and thinking – remain unconnected. The infant is not thinking through its babbling. Then, at about age two, ‘the curves of development’ of intellect and transmission, previously separate, ‘meet and join to initiate a new form of behavior’ (Vygotsky 1986: 82). As the child’s cognitive faculties gain control over the former babbling vocal transmission system, thought at last becomes verbal while trans-mission becomes intellectual. Speech is the result.

By comparison with primates, birds often display remarkable vocal ability, yet outputs lack cognitive significance (Marler 1998). As in the case of animal communication generally, cognition and vocal transmission never meet. Although this can be explained by reference to neurophysiological deficits, fundamentally the reasons are social. Cognition and communication are intrinsically divergent functions, subject to radically contrasting Darwinian selection pressures (Ulbaek 1998). Cognition is likely to enhance fitness even where social strategies are individualistically competitive; this is not true of communication. Why share valuable information with competitors who may turn out to be direct rivals? Why pass over reliable sensory evidence in favour of information received only second-hand? In resisting deception, animals respond preferentially to signals whose intrinsically hard-to-fake characteristics guarantee their reliability. This sets up selection pressures against evolution in the direction of speech.

But what if the signals simply don’t matter? Suppose certain internal variations within a primate vocal sequence reflect intentional manipulation expressed only as ‘idle play’. Provided no risks are entailed, conspecifics might respond with relaxed ‘play’ vocalisations of their own. If such call-and-response exchanges served bonding functions, sophisticated capacities for detecting and producing signal variety might evolve. We would then have the paradox that signals could be intentionally manipulated, but only on condition that little of social importance was conveyed.

This idea may have wider application than has previously been suspected. Gelada monkeys accompany their relaxed, ‘friendly’ social interactions with a wide range of subtly different vocalisations (Richman 1976, 1987). These include nasalised grunts, long, melodically complex inhalations, stop consonants, fricatives and glides, a range of vowel quality differences, tight voicing, muffled voicing, pitch variations and so forth. Geladas also employ a variety of rhythms and melodies. Rhythms may be fast, slow, staccato, glissando, first-beat accented or end-accented. Melodies may have evenly spaced musical intervals covering a range of two or three octaves.

Moreover, geladas in groups accurately synchronise their complex and varied vocalisations (Richman 1978). This ability is remarkable, for it involves high- speed modulation of the signal stream in response to conspecifics’ anticipated contributions to each rhythmic sequence, with vocalisers switching between digitally contrastive alternatives. In human speech, vowels and consonants are, of course, not objective, physical units but psychologically defined entities; the fact that geladas can accurately echo and replicate one another’s vocal alternations suggests that they, too, must be processing acoustic parameters of the signal stream in a digital, categorical way (cf. Hamad 1987).

Chimpanzee males often give ‘long calls’ together in chorus, striving to match the acoustic characteristics of each other’s vocalisations (Mitani and Brandt 1994). Such chorusing and duetting leads to some local standardisation of call variants, so that neighbouring communities may even display ‘dialectical’ differences (Mitani et a!. 1992). Each such distinctive chorus might almost amount to a ‘signature’ of local group identity (cf. Arcadi 1996; Mitani et al. 1992; Ujhelyi 1998). Where calls must carry over considerable distances, there is selection for salient, discrete form (Marler 1975: 16). These and comparable primate calls may be richly structured, the capacities underlying them constituting plausible precursors of the vocal competences drawn upon by humans in speech (Ujhelyi 1998).

Still more impressive are the vocalisations of those songbirds which can generate an extensive repertoire by recombining the same basic set of minimal acoustic units — avian equivalents of ‘phonemes’ and ‘syllables’. Each species has special rules for generating songs in this way. In the case of swamp sparrows, for example, each syllable is made up of two to six different notes, themselves meaningless, arranged in a distinctive cluster. The constituent notes are all drawn from a restricted species-wide repertoire of six note types with a set of rules for assembling them into a song (Marler and Pickett 1984).

Apart from speech, the only other animal signals displaying comparable structure are the learned songs of humpback whales (Payne, Tyack and Payne 1983) and other cetaceans. ‘Phonological syntax’, as Marler (1998: 10—11) terms such combinatorial creativity, is not found among nonhuman primates. Admittedly, chimpanzees construct their pant-hoots and gibbons their songs by assembling novel sequences from more basic recyclable units. But in their case each individual adopts for life just one combinatorial pattern, not a variable repertoire (Marler and Tenaza 1977).

Although categorically perceived, the minimal acoustic units of birdsong do not function in the manner of speech phonemes: that is, they play no role in selecting between overall meanings. Marler (1998: 11) describes ‘syntactical’ birdsong as ‘impoverished in referential content, but rich in idle emotional content’. The term ‘idle’ is well chosen here, testifying to the close relationship between such variability and the leisured creativity of animal ‘play’. Like play, syntactical creativity in animal signalling reflects inner realities, not functional demands or environmental stimuli. ‘The variety’ writes Marler (1998: 12),

is introduced, not to enrich meaning, but to create diversity for its own sake, to alleviate boredom in singer and listener, perhaps with individual differences serving to impress the listener with the singer’s virtuosity, but not to convey knowledge.

In this respect, such signalling differs not only from speech, but also from those other calls of birds, cetaceans or primates which do have meanings. Where alarms or other calls must convey reliable information, this can only be at the expense of ‘syntactical’ creativity or play.

‘Phonological’ Versus ‘Lexical’ Syntax

Acknowledging this dynamic, Marler (1998: 10—11) distinguishes between ‘phonological syntax’ on the one hand and ‘lexical syntax’ on the other. Phonological syntax we have just discussed. Lexical syntax in the animal world would be the rule-governed assembly and reassembly not just of phonetic representations but of semantic ones. Neither birds nor primates show evidence of syntax of this kind.

In a thought experiment, we might imagine vervet monkeys syntactically ‘playing’ with combinations of calls such as those warning of eagles, leopards or snakes (Cheney and Seyfarth 1990). Why is it that in real life, this never happens? In this and other cases, neurophysiological limitations have been invoked to explain observed or postulated deficits in the signalling of primates other than modern humans (e.g. Bickerton 1990, 1996, 1998). Such explanations, however, overlook a deeper problem. Combining carefree, ‘playful’ signalling with life-and-death functional communication is logically paradoxical. Central to the very definition of play is that no immediate function is served, no compulsion applied. If animals could freely ‘play’ with signals conveying life-and-death meanings, then the result would be more than ‘creativity’ — it would be fatal unreliability and confusion.

Against this background, the puzzle of speech is that digital alternations among low-energy signals carry weighty social consequences. Substituting a ‘d’ for a ‘t’ in English, for example, will turn ‘tin’ into ‘din’ or ‘mat’ into ‘mad’. Speakers may make such phonemic substitutions to construct utterances which, if accepted as relevant, earn corresponding social status (Dessalles 1998). Just one consonant can decide between relevance and irrelevance, or life and death — between, say, ‘We will meet you tomorrow’ and ‘We will eat you tomorrow’. While this may be conceptualised as ‘extraordinary power’ (Studdert-Kennedy 1998: 202), it is important also to appreciate the social costs. How can changes in socially contestable meanings be left to the discretion of individuals who, to secure such changes, need only substitute one low-cost signal — one vowel or consonant — for another? How can listeners vest trust in a system as apparently arbitrary and open to abuse as this?

One fact is certain: in the animal world, sceptical recipients would insist on making any such substitutions costly, precluding a role for low-energy signals in deciding between socially contestable meanings (Zahavi and Zahavi 1997). This alone rules out the idea that ‘lexical pressure’ — in advance of ritually enforced signal reliability (cf. Power, this volume) — can have driven the evolution of syllabic differentiation or the associated restructuring of the human vocal tract. In seeking to explain early vocal preadaptations for speech, then, we appear to have no alternative but to invoke ‘play’, on the model of birdsong and the song sequences of cetaceans.

Language and Animal Play

It is known that children derive substantial cognitive benefits from the sense of mastery and well-being associated with imaginative play (Piaget 1962; Vygotsky 1978; Bjorklund and Green 1992; see also Bruner, Jolly and Sylva 1976). Human infants from around 18 to 24 months start playing ‘pretend’, a critical development prefiguring more advanced levels of mind-reading competence (Leslie 1987; Dunn and Dale 1984). Representational play with realistic toys begins at about the age when children first acquire referential words (Bates 1976). Sequences of thematically related representational play roughly coincide with first use of syntactic combinations in expressive language (Bates et al. 1979; McCune-Nicolich and Bruskin 1982). From then on, young childrens’ most elaborate use of language occurs not in reality-bound, functional contexts but during make-believe play. ‘In play, as in fiction’, to quote one study (French et al. 1985: 24), ‘one has the freedom to violate the way things really are in favour of transitory transformations of reality’. As an instrument of ‘displaced reference’ (Hockett 1960), speech has exactly this function.

Maternal responsiveness is strongly correlated with complexity and preplanning in childhood representational play (Spencer and Meadow-Orlans 1996). No mother could play with her infant if she were intent on ‘winning’; she must know how to ‘lose’. In the animal world, too, if a normally dominant individual is to play with a subordinate, it must experiment with ‘losing’. Wherever inequalities exist, players must renounce physical advantages — or there will be no game. For play to flourish, safety and security must be sufficient to al-low participants freedom to explore the full range of their locomotor, cognitive and social capacities, trusting in the intentions of others. In all this, suggestive parallels with language are hard to avoid.

What makes an animal’s play gestures so different from the displays staged when under serious competitive pressure? Clearly, freedom from anxiety is decisive in making the difference. ‘Play’, as one specialist has noted (Shultz 1979: 10),

only seems to occur when the animal is essentially free of survival pressures — when it is not suffering from the heat, the cold, or the wet, when it is not being harrassed by predators, and when it is free of various physiological pressures such as hunger, thirst, drowsiness or sex.

For play to be possible, vulnerable individuals must feel able to afford the luxury of ‘losing’ without suffering the costs. Whereas male-male sexual contests or other fights focus repetitively on a narrow repertoire of locomotor routines, those engaged in ‘play fights’ may ring the changes on a varied repertoire. In play, losers and winners willingly exchange roles — a pattern reminiscent of turn-taking in conversational speech. Play participants gain cognitive benefits through identification with alternate roles in succession. Syntactical competence involves ‘playing’ with basic ‘who-does-what-to-whom’ categories such as Agent, Theme and Goal (Chomsky 1981). Social ‘pretend play’ draws on comparable capacities, and suggests a likely context for the evolution of such competence.

Where winning is not the intention, the play versions of actions need not be acted out in full — low-cost ‘tokens’ may suffice. In Kendon’s (1991) model of language origins, conceptual communication begins with the partial, tokenistic acting out of sequences whose significance was originally functional. Worden (1998) persuasively traces syntactical competence to its roots in social intelligence. Prior to the emergence of language, it would have been in the tokens of social play that such internal intelligence became externalised most fully.

The difference between a play representation and its serious functional prototype is categorical. A puppy which mistook a play bite for its real counterpart would respond inappropriately, just as would a human listener unable to ‘read behind’ the literal meanings of words (Grice 1969; Sperber and Wilson 1986; Baron-Cohen 1995). A play bite resembles a real bite. But by being patently inserted in a nonfunctional context, it acquires a wholly different meaning (Bateson 1973: 150—166). When a preliminary signal is used to indicate ‘What follows is play!’, the effect is to systematically reverse the meanings of subsequent signals. For example, a dog may solicit play by lowering its head so as to appear nonthreatening; it wags its tail while crouched on its forelimbs, hindquarters raised (Bekoff 1977). In a pattern reminiscent of grammar, such a ‘play bow’ may introduce the rest of the sequence. The fact that a preliminary signal here reverses the ‘literal’ meanings of subsequent ‘attacks’, rather than simply augmenting or blending with them, suggests a plausible phylogenetic starting point for more complex forms of transformative, discrete/combinatorial signalling such as those involved in speech.

True imitation among apes has been most convincingly documented not in contexts of technical problem solving but during play (Visalberghi and Fragaszy 1990). Juveniles in the Arnhem Zoo, for example, have been observed amusing themselves by walking single file behind an adult group member, deliberately imitating their target’s limping or otherwise distinctive gait (de Waal 1996: 72). It is in such imaginative games — in these instances suggestive of subversive humour or even ‘name calling’ — that young chimpanzees approximate most closely to the conceptual richness and creativity of speech.

Language and Laughter

‘Mimesis’ is Donald’s (1991) term for putative early human emotional displays which, in being adapted to serve intentionally communicative functions, are brought increasingly under cognitive control. Children playing chase games provide familiar examples, as they fill the air with partly simulated screams. Inevitably, on hearing distant alarms, it may be difficult for others to distinguish real from fictional danger. Among primates, selection pressures have clearly acted to minimise such risks.

Noisy play among young primates is relatively rare, a fact which has been explained also by the danger of attracting predators (Biben 1998: 171). Where play is accompanied by vocalising, as when squirrel monkeys ‘play peep’ (Biben 1998: 171) or frolicking chimpanzees ‘laugh’ (Goodall 1986: 371), the sounds may assist in ‘framing’ other activities as ‘pretend’ versions of their serious prototypes. Instances of double-deception — deceptively signalling ‘play’ to trick and defeat an opponent — are not reported in the literature on primate ‘Machiavellian’ intelligence. Primate vocalisations, then, appear to differ from manual or whole-body gestures in one crucial respect: being reserved for reliable communication, they resist bifurcation into ‘pretend’ versions on the one hand and ‘real’ prototypes on the other. In the human case, this evolutionary constraint has evidently been overcome — a fact pointing to the impact upon social communication of distinctively human levels of safety, social security and corresponding freedom to play.

Homo sapiens possesses radically enhanced capacities for producing vocal signals which, like play bites, can be thought of as ‘displaced’ or ‘fictional’. Playful ‘screams’ are one example. Others are to be found in the games used by mothers to prompt their babies to laugh. One such trick is to hide and then suddenly reappear, to the exclamation ‘Boo!’ (Bruner and Sherwood 1976). There is a risk that instead of laughing, the baby may cry. This will almost certainly happen if the ‘Boo!’ is emitted by a stranger. But provided the context is reassuring, the baby should overcome its initial fear response, constructing an alternative referential frame which reverses the sound’s ‘literal’ meaning. Laughter gives expression to the baby’s sense of mastery and relief. Involved here is a minor revolution: the very signal most likely to cause alarm is, given sufficient trust, the surest way to elicit laughter in the child (Sroufe and Wunsch 1972).

The same principle applies to teasing, tickling and humour more generally. Young chimpanzees often engage in ‘tickling’ games, laughing all the while. The tickle gestures are aggressive actions, but only in pretend forms (Goodall 1986: 371). In humour of the human verbal kind, a train of thought in one frame of reference bumps up against an anomaly: an event or statement that makes no sense in the context of what has come before. The anomaly can be resolved by shifting to a different frame of reference, in which the event at last makes sense (Koestler 1964). Recall the baby who for a split second may have been puzzled by its mother’s ‘Boo!’ It laughs when it can place the signal in a different context, reversing its former meaning. More sophisticated jokes work in a similar way.

Pinker (1998: 552) points out that such frame shifting is not limited to the challenges of appreciating jokes. Involved here is none other than the principle of relevance (Sperber and Wilson 1986) on which the very possibility of language depends. The semantic meanings of words, taken literally, are abstract and often irrelevant. In terms of their currently perceptible contexts, they may be inappropriate — like a mother’s ‘Boo!’ to her child. But as with babies displaying a sense of humour, human listeners do not leave matters there. On hearing such inappropriate abstractions and irrelevancies, they respond by adopting whatever frame of reference is required to make sense of them, amending or even reversing literal meanings as necessary. The aim is always to delve behind surface appearance in search of the signaller’s underlying intention, which may be quite different (Grice 1969; Sperber and Wilson 1986).

According to Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1989: 138), the sounds characteristic of human laughter may be traced back to the rhythmic mobbing calls of group-living primates:

The loud utterance of laughter is derived from an old pattern of behavior of mobbing, in which several group members threaten a common enemy. Thus it is a special case of aggressive behavior and this component retains its original significance. If we laugh aloud at someone, this is an aggressive act, bonding those who join in the laughter. Common laughter thus becomes a bonding signal between those who are common aggressors.

Chimpanzees ‘laugh’ when they ‘play fight’; here, the laughter indicates that the accompanying ‘aggressive’ behaviour is only ‘pretend’ (Goodall 1986: 371). We have then, as Pinker (1998: 546) points out, two candidates for precursors to human laughter: (1) a signal of collective mobbing or aggression and (2) a signal of ‘pretend’ aggression. These, however, are not mutually exclusive: pranks which are cruelly effective in puncturing outsiders’ pretensions may amuse insiders for precisely that reason.

Laughter is contagious, irrepressible and energetically demanding. Unlike dispassionate speech, it acts as a powerful bonding mechanism. As Elbl-Eibesfeldt (1989) points out, such bonding typically reflects an in-group/out-group dynamic: collusive laughter between allies is likely to be at the expense of targets outside the group. If we assume complex structures of dominance and status to have characterised early human social life, laughter — like the antics of de Waal’s chimp juveniles in the Arnhem Zoo — is likely to have signalled outbreaks of collective insubordination to those in authority. As Pinker (1998: 551) writes:

No government has the might to control an entire population, so when events happen quickly and people all lose confidence in a regime’s authority at the same time, they can overthrow it. This may be the dynamic that brought laughter — that involuntary, disruptive, and contagious signal — into the service of humor. When scattered titters swell into a chorus of hilarity like a nuclear chain reaction, people are acknowledging that they have all noticed the same infirmity in an exalted target. A lone insulter would have risked the reprisals of the target, but a mob of them, unambiguously in cahoots in recognizing the target’s foibles, is safe.

Laughter, then, may testify to the importance of humour as a levelling device among early human hunter-gatherers (cf. Lee 1988), helping to sustain distinctively human levels of in-group trust and mutuality on which speech in turn depends.

Can this understanding of laughter be extended to explain also the emergence of speech? Might phonology and syntax have arisen as the reverse side — the in-group ‘playful’ redeployment — of ‘ritual’ behaviour evolved originally for purposes of aggressive coalitionary display? When choral chanting and other such vocal display is used simply to demarcate in-group/out-group boundaries, form becomes everything, meaning nothing (Staal 1986: 57). Let me quote Staal (1986: 57) on how Vedic literature becomes ‘meaningless’ when adapted for purposes of pure ritual:

Entire passages that originally were pregnant with meaning are reduced to long ‘o’s’. This is precisely what distinguishes mantras from the original verse: to be made into a mantra, and thus fit for ritual consumption, a verse has to be subject to formal transformations, operations that apply to form and not to meaning…

Ritual traditions have obvious social significance in that they identify groups and distinguish them from each other. They give people, in that hackneyed contemporary phrase, ‘a sense of identity’. That identity, however, is often due to distinctions that rest upon meaningless phonetic variations. Thus the Jaiminīya and Kaǔthuma Rānāyanīya schools differ from each other by such characteristics as vowel length, or because the former uses ‘a’ when the latter uses ‘o’. Up to the present time, the Vedic schools themselves are distinguished from each other by such variations of sound that can more easily be explained in grammatical than in religious terms.

If this is accepted, then in the evolutionary past, group-on-group ritual display may plausibly have set up selection pressures for vocal imitation, syllabic differentiation and control — all in the complete absence of meaning. Along such lines, one might visualise ‘war dances’ to the accompaniment of assertive choral chanting, the whole display being mounted whenever a group felt threatened by local opposition. On each occasion when danger passed, however, we need not suppose complete cessation of the performance. Instead, on the model of play fighting, we might envisage elements of the formerly ‘meaningless’ display becoming redeployed internally for more complex conceptual and communicative ends. We might even follow Pinker (1998: 551) in linking successful outcomes with outbreaks of laughter. Incipiently language-like properties of both vocal and whole-body play — discussed earlier — would now characterise in-group communication, with recently evolved mimetic skills yielding a system more complex and syntactical than anything known before.

Play and the Emergence of Language

Many Darwinian attempts to explain the evolutionary emergence of language have been gradualist. By contrast, Maynard Smith and Szathmáry (1995: 279-309) view the origins of speech — together with other aspects of symbolic culture — as a ‘major evolutionary transition’ occurring late in human evolution. Building on this idea, I have modelled this development as one culminating in revolutionary social change (Knight 1991, 1996, 1998, 1999; Knight et al. 1995). This would locate Pinker’s (1998: 551) ideas about irreverent humour within a broader context of revolutionary social upheaval. Let me now, in this new context, integrate this body of theory with the previous discussion of play.

In the scenario I favour (cf. Knight 1998, 1999), coalition members assert group identity through locally distinctive patterns of chanting and other such ritual display, coming under pressure to imitate and synchronise with ‘friendly’ signals (cf. Studdert-Kennedy, this volume). As in any choral ensemble, attention to internal cues is valued as an indication of commitment to the coalition, in-group status being conferred accordingly (cf. Power, this volume). Given enhanced choral diversification and frequent breaks or changes, maintenance of overall synchrony and coherence relies heavily on information conveyed internally through brief, low-energy signals. Discernible at close range, syllables differentiated by subtle vowel modulations and consonantal contrasts serve this function. Selection pressures in this context drive evolutionary differentiation of the upper vocal tract. Whereas the ‘lexical pressure’ model presupposes speech from the outset, this model makes no such assumptions. Citing known biological precedents and respecting Darwinian constraints, it may better explain the emergence of a high-speed, low-cost, digital encoding medium available for subsequent exaptation to serve speech functions.

Conclusion: The Emergence of Syntactical Speech

In all mammalian species, it is the young who invest most energy in play. As with human speech, there is a genetically determined ‘critical period’ for engaging in social play to maximum cognitive advantage. An animal deprived of play opportunities during infancy may later show a deficit in normal social skills (Biben 1998). In the human case, childhood play is not phased out but rather preserved in the elaboration of adult symbolic competence and performance (Huizinga 1970; Bruner et al. 1976: 534—704). By contrast, the playfulness of young animals is for the most part inhibited with the onset of sexual maturity. Sexual competition can provoke lethal conflict. As animals mature, their play correspondingly becomes closely involved in the determination of social rank. With increasing frequency, play fights become real fights — whereupon the play stops. Adulthood for most primates is challenging and risky, affording relatively few opportunities for that trust and abandon which is the hallmark of genuine play.

The distinctively human counterdominance strategies intrinsic to ‘sham menstruation/sex strike’ (Knight, Power and Watts 1995; Power and Aiello 1997; Power and Watts 1996, 1997) drive the emergence of symbolic culture by extending ‘play’ into the domain of adult relationships. Siblings and more distant relatives who might otherwise have been pitched into direct sexual rivalry are bonded in playful coalitionary opposition to the out-group. By retaining close bonds with kin-related females (cf. Power 1998, 1999, this volume), each coalition is enabled to extract increasing levels of mating effort from males. The outcome is ‘bride service’, an arrangement characteristic of hunter-gatherers, in which in-marrying males bring regular meat or other provisioning under supervision from their in-laws (Knight 1991, 1999). While this amounts to ‘economic exploitation’, Darwinian considerations clarify why minimal resistance is to be expected. In-marrying males are gaining access to the group’s fertile females; moreover, they are provisioning their own probable offspring. Combative coalitions formed to secure such outcomes, meeting little organised resistance, should be highly stable. They are familiar ethnographically as unilineal lineages and clans.

What is the significance of all this for language evolution? The key point is that ‘lexical syntax’ (Marler 1998) presupposes digital as opposed to analog distinctions between meanings. Like distinctions between the face values of banknotes, such contrasts depend entirely on collective agreement. Take the case of kinship terms — an obvious initial focus for any human language. In hunter-gatherer kinship terminologies, ‘sister’ is defined in opposition to the contrastive term ‘wife’. Primates could not sustain belief in such contrastive meanings, even if they had the cognitive competence. This is because their kin coalitions are neither categorically bounded nor stable. A close female relative from one standpoint will therefore be a less close relative — potentially a mate — from another. Instead of being categorically — in the eyes of a stable collectivity — ‘sister’ or ‘wife’, each female will be more or less either according to individual standpoint. Primate politics determine that other social meanings will be similarly graded and contested.

Within human systems of ‘fictive’ kinship, a woman is ‘our sister’ (or a man ‘our brother’) because the collectivity asserts it to be so. Children engaged in games of ‘let’s pretend’ may likewise assert, ‘this rag is mummy’ or ‘that stick is a horse’ (Leslie 1987). In stratified societies, specified persons on a similar basis may count as ‘the government’ while certain small pieces of paper count as ‘money’. Not necessarily dependent upon verbal language, such ‘institu-tional facts’ are expressions of collective intentionality (Searle 1998). To uphold them is a social, moral and — in a most fundamental sense — religious challenge (Durkheim 1965). To confuse ‘sister’ with ‘wife’, after all, would be more than mere semantic or cognitive error — it would be a violation (Levi-Strauss 1969). Likewise if you visited my home and confused our family tablecloth with the doormat. Transgression of such categorical boundaries amounts to sacrilege. Words would lose all meaning if such boundaries could not be enforced.

The main institutional fact — the condition of all others — is that the collectivity exists. To represent this fact is to assert group self-identity, defined in opposition to the out-group. Such boundary maintenance requires serious effort, presupposing costly signals, not mere tokenistic substitutes. I have argued elsewhere (Knight 1999) that as group-living ancestral humans came under corresponding pressure to perform their war dances or sing their mantras, they shared in representing ‘the sacred’ as an emblem of group-level solidarity and identity (cf. Durtheim 1965). In this chapter I have suggested that during intervening periods of relaxation, however, as the performers periodically dispersed, these same representational techniques became available for redeployment in a quite different — essentially playful — atmosphere. Intentions were now once again those of distinct individuals, partitioning their shared representational resources accordingly. Processes of trust-based abbreviation and conventionalisation in this context generated a growing repertoire of low-cost tokens which, while expressive of merely personal intentions, nonetheless retained the social authority and communicable status of the whole. ‘Words’ were in this way ‘authorised’ — endowed by the ritual collective with performative force (cf. Austin 1978; Bourdieu 1991).

Finally, we may return to the ‘insuperable’ problem posed by MacNeilage (1998). When, how and why did the modality switch to vocal speech occur?

MacNeilage’s basic argument, we may recall, is that if the vocal-auditory modality was adaptive during the later stages of human speech evolution, it must therefore have been equally adaptive from the outset. This argument would have force if it could be confirmed that the social contexts of language use remained invariant throughout the course of human evolution. But if changing social strategies are built into our models, there is no reason to suppose that a modality which is adaptive during one period must remain equally adaptive later. Where social contexts are ‘Machiavellian’, as is the case among primates (Byrne and Whiten 1988), constraints operate to obstruct the emergence of low-cost, conventional — in other words fakeable — signalling (Zahavi and Zahavi 1997). We have seen that in the primate case, the need to retain intrinsic signal credibility precludes playful cognitive expressivity in the vocal-auditory channel. Until this problem was solved, conceptual signalling had therefore to rely on a different modality. We may suppose that hominid use of the hands and body — whose manipulability had originally evolved in the service of noncommunicative functions — came increasingly to serve this novel purpose. Unfettered cognitive manipulability, however, was inconsistent with signal credibility (cf. Knight 1998). Mimesis (Donald 1991) may in this light have emerged in the human lineage as a compromise between these opposing pulls: hard-to-fake signals became manipulable, but only within limits. Costly, hard-to-fake and for that reason intrinsically convincing ‘song and dance’ remained central to communication wherever resistance to deception remained high.

As exogamous kin-coalitions became repeatedly successful and correspondingly stable, however (Knight 1991), the outcome was a radical intensification of in-group trust. Not only did this allow costs to be cut through adoption of conventional shorthands. A corollary was the establishment, through collective intentionality, of semantic meanings in the form of digitally contrastive collective representations. In arriving at shorthands for these, we would expect ‘conspiratorial whisperers’ (cf. Krebs and Dawkins 1978) to resort to the cheapest, most efficient available encoding medium. Considerations of speed and efficiency in this new context drove progressive exaptation of the phonological system, yielding syntax in the Chomskyan sense — an autonomous level of structure serving as a ‘switchboard’ (Newmeyer 1991) between the formerly disparate systems of vocal transmission and conceptual representation.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Catherine Arthur and Michael Studdert-Kennedy for their critical comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

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From Approaches to the Evolution of Language, ed James R Hurford, Michael Studdert-Kennedy & Chris Knight.
1998. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK, ISBN 0 521 63964 6. 1998

1 Introduction: the Darwinian paradigm

Darwinism is setting a new research agenda across the related fields of palaeoanthropology, evolutionary psychology and theoretical linguistics (Dunbar 1993; Hurford 1989, 1992; Pinker & Bloom 1990; Steele & Shennan 1996). It is now widely accepted that no other theoretical framework has equivalent potential to solve the major outstanding problems in human origins research. Rival paradigms from the human and social sciences — Freudian, Piagetian, Chomskyan, Lévi-Straussian — cannot explain evolved human mentality because they already assume this as a basic premise. Tried and tested as a methodology applicable to the social behaviour of all living organisms (Dawkins 1976; Hamilton 1964; Trivers 1985), Darwinism makes no such assumptions, thereby avoiding circularity.

Modern Darwinism seeks to harmonize research into human life with the rest of scientific knowledge. This project depends, however, on accounting for the emergence of symbolic culture, including speech, a system of communication unparalleled elsewhere in biology. While Darwinians confidently expect an explanation (Pinker & Bloom 1990), it has to be admitted that, to date, no compelling account has been advanced.

In this chapter, I treat speech as a revolutionary development made possible by the establishment of novel levels of social co-operation. In this, I follow Maynard Smith and Szathmáry (1995), who provide a Darwinian game-theoretic perspective on the origins of human social co-operation, including speech. They view the momentous process as one of a limited number of ‘major transitions’ during life’s evolution on Earth. Each such transition is revolutionary in that it involves a relatively sudden and dramatic restructuring, like the breaking of a log-jam. The preceding barrier to the new level of complexity, discernible with hindsight, arises because, despite any emergent potential for self organization on the higher level (that of the multicellular organism, for example, or the speech-based co-operative community), the necessary co-operative strategies repeatedly lose out to more stable strategies of ‘selfish’ gene-replication on the lower level.

Previous, gradualist, models of language origins ignored such problems, taking speech to be in some absolute sense ‘better’ than a primate gesture-call system. Speech, it is frequently said, allows access to a communal pool of knowledge, saving duplication of effort in trial-and-error direct discovery (Pinker & Bloom 1990: 712). But a primate-style ‘Machiavellian’ social dynamic (Byrne & Whiten 1988) would weigh heavily against reliance on uncorroborated second-hand information. Vulnerability to deceit is costly. Every adaptation has costs as well as benefits; a novel adaptation spreads only if the benefits outweigh the costs. Previous thinking on speech evolution has simply ignored the costs.

2 Darwinism and symbolic culture

Speech differs from a primate gesture-call system in presupposing a wholly new representational level. Through exposure to art, music, dance and other ‘external memory stores’ (Donald 1991), humans from infancy learn to internalize a set of representations essential to the self organization of a cultural community. The representations central on this level are morally authoritative intangibles or ‘collective representations’ (Durkheim 1965). ‘God’, ‘Unicorn’ and ‘Totem’ are among the possibilities. ‘Symbolic culture’, to quote archaeologist Philip Chase (1994), ‘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.’ It would be surprising if this new representational level did not bring with it a new level of complexity in communication.

Linguistic reference is not a direct mapping from linguistic terms either to perceptible things or to intentional states; the mapping is from linguistic terms to communal constructs — representations established in the universe of discourse. This universe is structured by people’s ritual and other symbolic experience. While hunting eland in the Kalahari — to take just one example — Zu/’hoäsi will refer to their prey using the ‘respect’ term tcheni — literally ‘dance’. ‘People’, ‘fatness’, ‘menstruation’, ‘gender-ambiguity’ and ‘fertility’ are associated meanings (Lewis Williams 1981; Power & Watts 1997). A complex representation of this kind is not perceptually constrained. The god-like ‘Eland’ of these hunter-gatherers is a communal fiction, connected only in the loosest way to anything existing in the real world.

Not being perceptually verifiable, representations of this kind — the kind to which words are attached — are bound up with anomalous levels of trust and social co-operation; these require ‘special’ explanation (cf. Maynard Smith & Szäthmáry 1995). Theoretical linguists have traditionally avoided the problems by simply assuming the existence of a homogenous speech-community, committed to the co-operative, honest sharing of information. The anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu (1991) terms this the ‘assumption of communism’, noting its centrality to formal linguistics since the discipline’s inception. While speech indeed presupposes social co-operation (Grice 1969, 1975), such models distract attention from precisely the problems which, to a Darwinian, most cry out to be addressed. Why, in the human case, can such anomalous levels of co-operation be assumed?

The value of Darwinian theory is that it forces us to consider the barriers to the establishment of co-operation on the necessary scale. In a Darwinian world, individuals who deceive others to make selfish gains, or who ‘free-load’ — enjoying the benefits of society while evading the costs — are likely to have higher fitness than co-operators (Axelrod & Hamilton 1981; Trivers 1971). Attempts to solve this problem by modelling ever-higher benefits from co-operation are self-defeating: the greater the benefits, the greater the gains made by any free-loader who can still reap these while avoiding the costs. Neither can it be objected that lying and cheating, in undermining co-operation, would threaten the extinction of whole groups. Evolution is blind and individualistic. If individual genetic fitness is best pursued through such strategies, selfishness is to be expected regardless of negative consequences at the population level.

3 How animal signals evolve

Politics and power relations are inevitably involved in communication. Krebs & Dawkins (1984) broke new ground by abandoning assumptions about truthfulness and defining animal communication as the means by which one individual, the actor, exploits the muscle power of another, the reactor. Where animals have conflicting interests, they will seek to exploit and deceive rather than share good information, prompting receivers to develop corresponding ‘sales resistance’. As conflict intensifies, signals become restricted to displays of fighting or other competitive ability. Such signals are uninformative except in one narrow respect: they reveal the signaller’s ability to meet the costs of the display. The more discernibly costly the signal, the more impressive it is (Zahavi 1987). As receivers incur fitness penalties for being too impressionable, all but the most costly, elaborate, repetitive and ‘ritual’-like signals are simply ignored. The dynamic culminates in extravagant advertisements such as peacock displays or the roars of rutting caribou bulls.

Where interests converge, however, this dynamic is set into reverse. Instead of resisting and checking out all incoming signals, receivers can now afford to minimize response times, acting on trust. Signals then evolve to become less repetitive and ‘ritualized’, more cryptic, quiet and efficient. Signals may now take more effort to detect and decode, but if the information is valuable, receivers should be motivated to invest that effort. This allows signallers to offload costs of communication onto receivers — minimizing redundancy, lowering amplitude and narrowing the range of utilized channels. The outcome is what Krebs & Dawkins call ‘conspiratorial whispering’. Social insects communicating within well-defended colonies offer examples of such highly informative ‘whispering’.

In the animal world, however, the process of cost-cutting comes up against constraints. Where whole local populations are concerned, interests rarely converge except in relation to a narrow range of challenges such as external threats. Even in this context, any build-up of mutual trust will simultaneously offer scope for cheating. The discrete, species-specific anti-predator alarms of vervet monkeys, for example, are occasionally used deceptively against conspecifics. On hearing an alarm, correspondingly, vervets do not behave as if wholly trusting; they scan the horizon ‘as if they were searching for additional cues, both from the source of the alarm call and elsewhere’ (Cheney & Seyfarth 1990: 107). Admittedly, vervet alarms are honest by default: they would not work otherwise. But it is precisely where listeners expect reliable signals that they are most vulnerable to being deceived.

In the human case, speech as a low-cost, low-amplitude system meets the specifications of ‘conspiratorial whispering’, but by the same token it exposes listeners to the most extreme risks. Linguistic signs are related in an ‘arbitrary’ way to their referents; it is learned convention alone which links a word with its semantic meaning. Such decoupling of signals from emotions and associated real-world stimuli renders listeners highly vulnerable to deception. We would expect ‘Machiavellian’ strategists to resist signals of this kind, setting up negative selection pressures against their evolution.

A thought-experiment may illustrate the problem. Suppose certain unusually intelligent chimps in a wild population develop a repertoire of volitional vocal signals, each with a conventional meaning. Enterprising animals will soon be using these in tactically deceiving each other (Byrne & Whiten 1985). Emission costs will be low, making even small gains worthwhile, putting pressure on all to deceive where possible. On that basis, ingroup trust will rapidly be exhausted, to the point where no-one is listening any more; the system will now be useless for any purpose, honest or dishonest. Zahavi (1993) concludes that, since potential conflicts of interest exist throughout the animal world, even between close kin, resistance to deception has always selected against conventional signals — with the one puzzling exception of humans.

4 Apes: too clever for words?

The problem, then, is that conventional signals depend on trust, whereas those animals intelligent enough to use such signals will also be clever enough to exploit that trust competitively. This may help explain why, despite their cognitive capacities (cf. Ulbaek, this volume), chimpanzees have no natural use for conventional signals. In particular, it clarifies why, in common with other primates, chimps do not vocalize dispassionately, lacking those capacities for cortical control which appear natural in other contexts such as manual gesticulation (Hayes 1950). Such lack of control should not be seen as maladaptive: at stake is the maintenance of credibility. Chimps, like other primates, need reliable signals on which to base their behaviour. Only to the extent that their vocalizations remain governed by the limbic (emotional) system can listeners trust them as reliable cues to internal states.

Admittedly, apes may volitionally suppress their calls. For example, on discovering food, a chimp may with difficulty conceal its excitement, suppressing the associated food-call and succeeding thereby in keeping all for itself. Still more impressively, a group of chimps may maintain silence for hours while patrolling near a neighbouring band’s range. This reflects a group-wide temporary convergence of interests, the suppression of sounds being backed with reprimands (Goodall 1986: 490—491). Once the danger is over and calls can be resumed, however, these are as usual highly emotional. Where calculating manipulation is concerned, the most impressive chimp signals are not their calls but their silences.

For use in deceiving one another, however, primates have resources beyond the purely vocal. In one often-cited incident, an adolescent male baboon was threatened by an approaching group of adults. Instead of running, it stood on its hindlegs and stared into the distance, as if it had noticed a predator. Its pursuers turned to look — and although no danger was present, the distraction enabled the adolescent to escape (Byrne & Whiten 1985). In another incident, a female gorilla, moving with her group, noticed a partly concealed clump of edible vine. Pretending to have seen nothing, she stopped as if to groom herself. As the others moved on, she was able to consume the food undisturbed (Whiten & Byrne (1988:218), citing Fossey). Now, it is true that tricks of this kind would not work unless most such signals were reliable. But it would be a mistake to conclude that ‘primates are usually honest’. The truthful versions of the deceptive signals noted here — genuinely seeing a predator, genuinely stopping to groom oneself — would be examples of incidentally informative functional behaviour, not truthful deliberate signalling. The trust exploited by deceivers has nothing to do with expectations of intentional honesty. On the contrary, the cues habitually trusted as sources of information are valued precisely in proportion as their informational content appears unintentional.

Humans, unlike chimps, can vocalize dispassionately. This is clearly a key capacity essential to the evolution of a convention-based system of vocal communication. Under what selection pressures did it emerge? We know that it is in deceptive use of signals that cortical control most decisively takes over from the limbic system. The literature on primate tactical deception shows how, in being co-opted for deceptive use, functional routines are in a sense ‘displaced’ under cortical, volitional control (e.g. Savage-Rumbaugh & McDonald 1988). It is known that, among humans today, lying typically requires more cognitive effort than truth telling (Knapp & Comadena 1979). Machiavellian manipulations were by inference central to the selection pressures driving neocortex evolution and enhanced cortical control over signals among group-living primates, including evolving humans (Byrne & Whiten 1988). But our problem is to explain how, in the human case, vocalizations became cortically controlled without becoming self-evidently manipulative and so resisted.

Although speech is not intrinsically reliable, conversationalists in fact routinely give one another the benefit of any doubt. The philosopher Paul Grice (1969) has identified mutual intentionality as the heart of human linguistic communication. We humans rely not merely on unintended truthfulness in one another’s signals: where we are on speaking terms, we expect intentional honesty. It follows that without the establishment among humans of a new kind of honesty as a default — habitual honesty in volitional signalling — speech could not have got off the ground. In the human case, then, precisely the most unreliable kinds of signals — namely, the volitional, intentional ones — must have become adapted for honest use. Somehow, in the course of human evolution, what were once frequency-dependent tactical deceptions must have become increasingly routine while becoming simultaneously harnessed to a reversed social function — the group-wide sharing of good information.

Imagine a population in which volitional signals are becoming commonplace, thanks initially to skills in deception. How can a new honest strategy invade the deceptive one and become evolutionarily stable? An immediate problem is that any increase in the proportion of trusting listeners increases the rewards to a liar, increasing the frequency of lying. Yet until hearers can safely assume honesty, their stance will be indifference to volitional signals. Then, even lying will be a waste of time. In other words, there is a threshold of honest use of conventional signals, below which any strategy based on such signalling remains unstable. To achieve stability, the honest strategy has to predominate decisively over deception; yet the evolutionary route to such honesty seems to pass inescapably across a point at which deception is so rampant that trust in volitional signals collapses. How can this conundrum be solved?

There are those (e.g. Konner 1982: 169) who argue that the main function of speech was and remains lying. Such claims may appear persuasive; humans routinely tailor their utterances and the information divulged according to their audience and the effect desired. Yet this view poses as many problems as it solves. Speech is not only a convention-based, radically arbitrary means of communication; it is also (by comparison with primate calls) minimally redundant, low in amplitude and heavily demanding of listeners. Darwinians view these as the tell-tale design-hallmarks of ‘conspiratorial whispering’ — indicating a system designed for communicating good information to trusting listeners at speed (cf. Krebs & Dawkins 1984).

This implies that speech has been co-operative from its inception. In accounting for the necessary honesty, it is tempting to draw on Darwinian reciprocal altruism theory (Trivers 1971): if you lie to me, I’ll never again listen to you — so be honest. But even accepting this, we need to explain why the dynamic did not lead to volitional, conventional signalling among those apes which appear cognitively capable of reciprocal altruism. It would seem that in their case, the logic of tit-for-tat — if you lie to me, then I’ll retaliate — perpetuated the equivalent of a financial crash, in which all paper currency is worthless. What stopped this from happening in the human case?

Reciprocal altruism presupposes a local network of communicators known to each other and likely to meet repeatedly over time. In larger, open populations, deceivers could theoretically escape retaliation by exploiting one gullible victim after another, each in a different locality. Our problem is that a human speech-community is not a personal mutual aid network but is typically an extended group transcending the limits of affiliation on the basis of residence, economic co-operation or kinship. Given an initial situation of primate-style Machiavellian com petition and manipulation, it is difficult to see how an honest strategy could successfully invade and take over so open a population.

5 Individual versus collective deception

In seeking a solution, we may begin by noting that fictions need not be exploitative — in principle, they may be deployed co-operatively, by a coalition. As we have seen, primates on occasion signal deceptively — such imaginative usage arguably prefiguring ‘symbolic’ behaviour. But they do so only for selfish, competitive gain. A primate deceptive representation, therefore, is never valued by others; resistance to it prevents the fiction from being collectively perpetuated or elaborated. Symbolic culture, consequently, cannot even begin to emerge.

The key point, then, is that primates do not engage in collective deception. Humans by contrast deceive collectively, recurrently establishing group identity in the process. Told by his Dorze (southern Ethiopian) informants a patently unbelievable ‘fact’ — that the local leopards were devout Christians, for example — the social anthropologist Dan Sperber (1975: 3) suspected ‘symbolism’. Sperber found this to be borne out regularly enough to suggest a rule-of-thumb: ‘“That’s symbolic.” Why? Because it’s false.’ Nigel Barley (1983: 10) glossed Sperber’s rule as ‘This looks crazy. It must be symbolism.’ Note the implication: far from embodying self-evident truth, symbolic culture may be better understood as a world of patent fictions held collectively to be true on some deeper level.

Myths, dramatic performances, art and indeed all expressions of human symbolic culture may in this light be understood as ‘collusion in deception’ (Knight, Power & Watts 1995; Rue 1994) — collaboration in the maintenance of fictions which have social support. Trust in the founding fictions is not given lightly. Durkheim (1965) indeed showed long ago that a community will place ultimate confidence only in those fictions which are emblematic of itself. If all collude, then on another level the deceptive signal may constitute a performative, constructing its own truth. Ritual specialists may assume the burden of sustaining such circular ‘truths’ on which group identity depends (Rappaport 1979). Note, however, that ingroup/outgroup polarity is central here: one group’s most sacred truths may be another’s transparent deceits. ‘Lies’, to quote Lattas (1989: 461), ‘must be hidden from some and available to others, and as such lies are ordering phenomena, constitutive of groups in their opposition to others.’ A symbolic community is always on some level a secret society, its knowledge inseparable from others’ ignorance and hence its own power in relation to them.

An ability to handle fictional representations, then, is the essence of human symbolic competence Distinguishing between surface and deeper meanings poses a major cognitive challenge; involvement in ‘pretend-play’ during childhood is crucial to the development of the necessary cognitive skills. Pretend-play is the imaginative use of one thing as if it were another. One child may take, say, a pencil, and move it through the air like an aeroplane. Despite knowing that the ‘plane’ is a fiction, the same or another child may still enjoy the pretence. This ability to hold in mind both ‘true’ and ‘false’ implications, handling them on different levels, is central to human mindreading and symbolic competence. A young child who fails to play in this way may be showing early signs of autism or ‘mindblindness’ (Baron-Cohen 1995). Such a child will prioritize literal truth — insisting, for example, that a pencil is just a pencil. Faced with a playmate’s patent fiction, the child shows little inclination to collude.

Effective, creative speech depends on imaginative mindreading skills and hence on collusion in a much wider domain of symbolic behaviour. The concept of co-operative pretend-play is central to our current under standing of how children acquire speech (Bates, Bretherton & Snyder 1988; Bruner 1977; Trevarthen 1979); it is equally central to ‘speech act’ theory (Austin 1978; Searle 1969). Take a seemingly propositional utterance — for example, There are three bison over the hill. As a factual statement, this may appear unconnected with performative invocation or communal pretend-play. Yet in reality, a constellation of ritual assumptions and expectations underpins its force. Faced with scepticism, the speaker might preface the statement with an oath: I swear by the Great Spirit that… . This could involve taking a knife and drawing blood. If listeners need no such costly demonstration, such swearing may be abbreviated or left implicit. But in that case, the speaker must already have paid the ritual costs of getting to a position where his or her utterances have such weight.

According to anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu (1991: 107): ‘The power of words is nothing other than the delegated power of the spokesperson, and his speech… is no more than a testimony, and one among others, of the guarantee of delegation which is vested in him.’ The words of some derided ‘nobody’ have no weight; we may accuse such a person of ‘talking through his hat’ or ‘talking off the top of his head’. Words emanating from such a source lack what Austin (1978) calls ‘illocutionary force’ — that efficacy which attaches to words when they are accepted as trusted, authorized. If a known liar says ‘I promise’, it is not just that no-one believes; rather, no promise is in fact made. To promise is to enter into a communally sanctioned contract; one individual cannot do this alone. To ‘do things with words’ is to play by the rules of the whole congregation, as if mandated by ‘the gods’; only thus authorized does any utterance work (Bourdieu 1991).

Speech-act theorists (Austin 1978; Grice 1969; Searle 1969, 1983) have established that all effective speech works on this basis. Utterances have force only through collusion with a wider system of ritual or ceremonial. It is this wider system which sustains the communal fictions (gods, spirits, etc.) upon whose authority oaths, promises and comparable declarations depend. The relevant ‘morally’ authoritative intangibles are products of communal ritual (Durkheim 1965): they are ingroup self-representations, frequently ‘misrecognised’ (Bourdieu 1991) as other-worldly beings. Deployed to certify statements as reliable, they reflect communal resistance to deception. In the final analysis, people are on speaking terms only with those who ‘share the same gods’. The magic of words is the collusion of a ritual ingroup. Withdraw the collusion and nothing happens — the speaker’s words are empty sound.

Unlike Machiavellian primates, whose creative fictions prompt countermeasures from those around them, human conversationalists routinely encourage that very resort to imaginative story-telling which in primates is socially resisted. Humans reward one another in the currency of status, conferred by listeners in proportion as utterances appear relevant in addressing some shared concern (Dessalles, this volume). Such status-seeking may appear individualistic and competitive (Burling 1986), but we should remember that there are limits to this. Speakers, whatever their differences, must remain in effect co-religionists — those ‘in the know’ must be trusted to use the discourse for shared purposes, concealing it where necessary from outsiders. Where these conditions are not met, then the relationship of status to relevance may be reversed. When conspiring to rob a bank, for example, the important thing is not to divulge the plan to the authorities. Preparations for war, or for a ritual contest against the enemy team, equally demand discretion. Such cases remind us that ‘relevance’ is defined by a problem shared, and that social boundaries are likely to be decisive. Far from raising one’s ingroup status, being relevant to the wrong people will lower it.

A status-conferring ingroup admits members only at a price. Traditionally — as in the case of Aboriginal Australian male secret societies — the initiatory ordeals tend to be bloody and painful (Knight 1991). Willingness to pay the costs displays commitment; in principle, the heavier the costs, the better. Ritual is the one signal which, in being visibly costly, carries its own authentication — requiring no external corroboration because in principle it cannot deceive (Aunger 1995; Rappaport 1979). Ingroup confidence in other signals, such as cheap vocal ones, can now be based on this ultimate ‘gold standard’. Effective speakers are those who, having paid the costs, are authorized to act ‘in God’s name’ (Bourdieu 1991). Such authority can at any time be with drawn. Under such circumstances, only an incompetent Machiavellian would be tempted to lie.

All this is far removed from primate-style ‘Machiavellian’ politics. Chimpanzees may play, but their playful fictions are not collectively shared. Given such isolation on the imaginative level, intangibles such as ‘promises’ stand no chance of emerging as publicly available fictional representations — no chimp ever swore on oath. Note, moreover, that for a chimp to freely broadcast relevant information would be maladaptive:

opponents would simply take advantage and status would be lost. Chimps, not surprisingly, are as concerned to conceal relevant information as to reveal it. Experts at being poker-faced, they have no interest in having their minds read too easily (De Waal 1982).

6 The origins of ritual

How and why, then, did social life change so dramatically in the human case? Current models (e.g. Dunbar 1993) associate the rapid evolutionary expansion of the hominid brain with increasingly Machiavellian cognitive demands. Darwinian strategies of ‘Machiavellian status escalation’

— coalitionary resistance against physical or sexual dominance by individuals — may account for the emergence of egalitarian social norms of the kind characteristic of modern human hunter-gatherers. Recall the obsequious sexual and other submission-displays central to the signalling repertoire of the social great apes; these contrast sharply with the ‘don’t mess with me’ norms of human hunter-gatherers. If everyone is king, then no-one is. Hunter-gatherer females as well as males show strong aversion to submission (Knauft 1994: 182). Hunter-gatherer egalitarianism, in this Darwinian perspective, becomes established as the capacities of dominant individuals to exploit subordinates become increasingly matched by group members’ ‘counterdominance’ capacities. Under such conditions, a strategy of ‘playing fair’ — resisting dominance by others while not attempting dominance oneself — becomes evolutionarily stable (Erdal & Whiten 1994).

A more detailed speculative model (Knight et al. 1995; Power & Aiello 1997) locates the emergence of symbolic behaviour in counter-dominance strategies driven by the needs of females undergoing reproductive stress as brain-size underwent rapid expansion between 400,000 and 100,000 years ago. Unable to afford monopolization by dominant male philanderers, child-burdened mothers were increasingly driven to meet the costs of encephalization by making use of all available males, mobilizing coalitionary support from male kin in extracting from out-group males increasing levels of mating-effort in the form of provisioning.

Kin-coalitions of females, backed by male kin, brought to a head such strategies by periodically refusing sex to all outgroup males except those prepared to hunt at a distance and bring ‘home’ the meat. Periodic collective withdrawal of sexual access, prompted whenever provisions run low, is conceptualized by Knight (1991) in terms of ‘strike’-action.

One way of testing this model is to ask what kinds of signalling behaviour it would predict. Courtship ‘ritual’ in the animal world is central to a species’ mate recognition system; the basic pattern is one in which females signal to prospective male partners: I am of the same species as you; of the opposite sex; and it is my fertile time. On this basis, we would predict sexually defiant females to reverse the signals to Wrong species/sex/time. This, then, is the predicted signature of ‘sex strike’.

On Darwinian grounds, we would not expect such a message to be transmissible in whispers or in code. For human females to indicate We are males!, We are animals! and Anyway, we are all menstruating! is on one level absurd and implausible. The target audience of outgroup males will have no interest in collusion with such a collective fantasy. To overcome listener-resistance, signallers will therefore have to resort to the most explicit, loud and spectacular body-language possible. A costly, multimedia, deceptive display is now being staged by an ingroup to impress and exploit outsiders.

We now have a Darwinian model of the origins of collective deception through symbolic ritual. Although speculative, it is detailed and specific enough to be testable in the light of archaeological and ethnographic symbolic data. An extremely conservative level of cultural tradition is that of magico-religious symbolism. Southern African archaeologists widely agree that significant continuities in San hunter-gatherer material culture extend back about 25,000 years — the duration of the Later Stone Age (Knight et al. 1995). Checking the model’s predictions against the data on ritual, we find that during the ‘Eland Bull Dance’ of the Kalahari San, held to celebrate a girl’s first menstruation, women motivate males to hunt by defiantly signalling ‘maleness’ and ‘animality’. Specifically, women signal We are Eland! This explains why linguistic reference to this antelope embraces meanings which include ‘people’, ‘dance’, ‘fertility’, ‘gender-ambivalence’ and ‘menstruating maiden’ (Lewis-Williams 1981; Power & Watts 1997). The ‘Eland Bull’ of Kalahari discourse is not a perceptible entity but a morally authoritative construct — a ‘Totem’ or ‘God’. The gender-ambivalent, woman-loving ‘Rainbow Snake’ of Australian Aboriginal tradition equally matches the model’s ‘wrong sex/wrong species’ predictions, as do representations of ritual potency/divinity cross-culturally (Knight 1991, 1996, 1997).

Ritual maintenance of such paradoxical constructs requires elaborate communal pretend-play. Imagine a group of outgroup males faced with a performance such as the ‘Eland Bull’ dance. The women’s ritual identification with this animal of male gender will appear to them implausible — yet unanswerable in being forcibly asserted. Dancers are here asserting counterreality through counterdominance — a strategy of sexual resistance. Challenges would amount to harassment. But while the audience must neither probe nor question, literal belief is equally impossible. Consequently, ‘mindreading’ takes over; belief is displaced to another level. Behind the vivid, dramatic lies, listeners are invited to discern a simple idea: ‘No’ means ‘No’. On this ‘metaphorical’ level, the message indicated by the dancers is certain truth.

Communal self-defence is now inseparable from maintenance of the founding ingroup fiction (cf. Hartung 1995). Such defiance/defence might logically be expected to generate intense and diffuse internal solidarity, including the extension of each coalition to embrace ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ across the landscape (for hunter-gatherer patterns of ‘fictional kinship’ interpreted in this light, see Knight (1991)).

7 The origins of speech

If we are to understand the origins of speech, it is essential to understand first the factors obstructing its evolution in other species. ‘Machiavellian’ primate politics, we have seen, prompts mistrustful listeners to resist all signals except those whose veracity can be instantly and directly corroborated. This immediately excludes (a) volitional conventional signals; (b) displaced reference; (c) signals literally false but metaphorically true; (d) signals meaningful not in themselves, but only in combinatorial contexts. Primate-style resistance to deception, in other words, obstructs the emergence of the characteristics of speech not just on certain fronts but on all fronts simultaneously.

Suppose that whenever I opened my mouth to begin speaking, I found myself instantly challenged, my audience demanding on-the-spot corroboration of the very first sounds, refusing to listen further until satisfied. Denied the chance to express one transparent fiction, modify it by another, modify that in turn and so on, I could hardly display any skills I might have for handling such sequences. Faced with refusal to suspend disbelief even momentarily, I could hardly venture to refer to phenomena beyond the current context of here-and-now perceptible reality. How could I express a fantasy, elaborate a narrative or specify with precision a complex thought, if listeners demanded literal corroboration of each signal as I emitted it, refusing to wait until the end before deciding on a response? Finally, it is difficult to see how my utterance could display duality of patterning if listeners demanded literal veracity on the syllable-by-syllable level, obscuring and resisting the possibilities of meaning or patterning on any higher level.

My freedom to speak presupposes that you, the listener, are trusting enough to offer me, at least initially, the benefit of any doubt, demanding and expecting more information before checking out what I have signalled so far. I need you to be willing to internalize literal fictions, evaluating meanings not instantaneously, item by item, but only as I construct larger patterns on a higher, ‘combinatorial’ level (cf. Studdert Kennedy, this volume). By primate standards, such collusion with my deceits would appear disastrously maladaptive. Why place reliance on transparent fictions? Under the conditions of ordinary primate ‘Machiavellian’ politics, the fitness costs of such cognitive surrender would far outweigh any benefits.

Mistrust, then, sets up — simultaneously and on all fronts — selection pressures obstructing the emergence of speech. An intriguing corollary worth exploring is that by the same token, if sufficiently intense ingroup trust could be generated, it would set up reversed selection pressures simultaneously on all fronts, ‘unpacking’ speech-performance on the basis of capacities already evolved.

Such a model would allow us to break with the tradition in which language appears as a bundle of separate components or features, each requiring its own evolutionary explanation. We could instead treat metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson 1980), displaced reference, duality of patterning (both in Hockett (1960)) and syntax (Chomsky 1965) as logically interrelated. Moreover, we could discern a connection with symbolic behaviour more generally, reconceptualizing reliance on speech as a modality of ‘faith’ — reliance on second-hand information, based on faith in the signalling intentions of others.

We may now begin putting all this together. As modelled in the previous section, imagine a broad, stable coalition of females allied to male kin, targeting deceptive sexual signals at outsiders for the purpose of exploiting their muscle-power. The loud, repetitive signals are patent fictions. Not only do they fail to match reality — they systematically reverse it, point by point. But if all are deploying the same fictions, and if this signalling is internally co-operative, then between group members there is no reason to expect resistance. Those colluding in emitting the fictions now have an opportunity to understand one another ‘through’ them. When deployed internally, moreover, pretend-play routines may be abbreviated and conventionalized. Shorthand portions of pretend-play will now act as referents, not directly to anything in the external world, but to recurrent representations within the domain of pretend-play held in common. ‘Displaced’ reference — reference to points in a domain of communal imagination — has now come into being. Note that the condition of this was the emergence, thanks to sexual counter-dominance, of a shared domain of reality-defying deception/fantasy in the first place. In what follows, I address some problems in evolutionary linguistics which this approach may help to explain.

7.1 Conventionalization

Speech — if this model is accepted — is a special case of ‘conspiratorial whispering’. In communicating within an already-established ritual ingroup, there is no need to waste time or energy. There will be minimal resistance to signals, hence no need to repeat, amplify or display. Signallers can abbreviate their pretend-play routines — which, before long, will be so cryptic and conventionalized as to have become, to an outsider, unrecognizable. Convention alone will now link the shorthand gesture to its referent. We need not postulate conscious decision-making to arrive at such ‘arbitrary’ agreements. Instead, given sufficient ingroup trust, a tendency for all signals to begin as ‘song-and-dance’ and gradually to become conventionalized will be an inevitable, automatic and continuous process (cf. Heine, Claudi & Hünnemeyer 1991; Klima & Bellugi 1979).

7.2 Metaphor

Metaphor — a kind of pretend-play — is central to linguistic creativity and renewal. A metaphor ‘is, literally, a false statement’ (Davidson 1979). React on a literal level, and the signaller will be rebuffed, denied the freedom to ‘lie’. By contrast, where listeners are willing to mindread through such fictions, metaphorical usage will flower. Metaphor counters a process of decay intrinsic to conventionalization. As pretend-play sequences get abbreviated and routinized, so listeners become habituated to them, processing them quickly and almost unthinkingly, the whole mind hardly engaged. This does not matter where purely digital, on/off indications of case, tense or other grammatical properties are concerned: all will have standardized, stereotypical ‘concepts’ on this purely grammatical level, making it immaterial whether communication fully engages the imagination. Conventionalization on this level becomes in fact the secret of speech’s astonishing efficiency. Yet genuine, novel human thoughts arise from the whole mind, and, to communicate these, we correspondingly need to engage the imagination of listeners. To this end, speakers counteract conventionalization, exploring the domain of ritual fantasy in search of fresh and dramatic fictions which can be applied in novel contexts. Metaphors are such fictions. Being literally false, they demand full cognitive involvement on the part of listeners if they are not to be mistaken for deceits.

7.3 Tense/case markers

Pressures to develop markers indicating tense, case and other such properties will now be felt. Note that primates are under no such pres sure. Embedded in the currently perceptible world, their gestures and calls allow listeners to gain all the supplementary information they need simply by checking out the perceptible context of each signal. Metaphorical fictions such as Gods, Unicorns or Eland Bulls have no existence in space or time; listeners wishing to check out the propositional value of any such symbolic usage will therefore need further information. Pressure to connect back to some verifiable position in space/time will drive signallers to find new metaphors capable of specifying such relationships.

7.4 Grammaticalization

As the more costly (‘ritualized’) dimensions of the pretend-play domain become set aside for use against outsiders, the remaining signals — reserved for ingroup use — therefore come under novel selection pressures. Grammatical markers have been shown to be metaphorical expressions which, through a process of long-term linguistic change, have become habitual, abbreviated and formalized. If self-expression through metaphor were blocked — if listeners resisted such fictions instead of exploring the co-operative intentions ‘behind’ them — grammar could not even begin to evolve. The initial raw material for construction of a linguistic form is recurrently an imaginative and dramatic metaphor, potent in proportion as it is ‘displaced’ — uprooted from its original setting and reinserted into a novel, unexpected context. All the morphemes comprising a natural language, including even grammatical items such as prefixes or suffixes marking tense or case, were originally just such imaginative fictions. But in being conventionally accepted and circulated, each has become gradually transformed into an increasingly cryptic signal conveying a more and more well-worn, conventional message (Heine et al. 1991; Kurylowicz 1975).

7.5 Productivity/generativity

While ritual signals are one-way — targeted repetitively, stereotypically and insistently at the outgroup — ingroup communication is intrinsically two-way, with contradiction, questioning and qualification inevitable. With signallers pressed to reveal the contents of their minds, any single pretend-play routine is likely to be deemed insufficient; listeners will demand one such abbreviated signal followed by another and then another, each narrowing the range of possible interpretations. As conventionalization proceeds, each lower-level fictional representation will now be noted and rapidly processed not for its intrinsic value but only as a cue to a higher, combinatorial level of meaning. Signallers are now under pressure to develop skills in assembling uniquely relevant sequences from discrete, recyclable lower-level components (cf. Studdert-Kennedy, this volume). From phonology to syntax, all levels in the emergent hierarchy coevolve.

7.6 Status-for-relevance

To the extent that dual loyalties, conflicts and suspicions no longer characterize ingroup relations, listeners are now in a position to trust all insiders who might potentially offer relevant information, conferring status accordingly (cf. Dessalles, this volume). Note that a ritually organized group may far exceed the size of a kin group or personal mutual aid network.

7.7 Performative force

Words are cheap, making it difficult to understand why they were ever taken seriously. The solution here suggested is that words evolved not in isolation but as part of a system. Ingroup solidarity at outgroup expense was demonstrated through costly ritual display, targeted against outsiders. Ritual performance, in conferring authority on participants, then gave weight to those cheap vocal shorthands which members of each ingroup

— having paid their admission-costs — could now safely use among themselves.

7.8 Vocal—auditory reliance

Within each ritual coalition, ‘conspiracy’ presupposes not only the trusting, group-wide divulging of relevant information but equally its concealment from outsiders. A ‘mimetic’ language of dance or gesture, besides being slow and costly, is vulnerable to eavesdropping: it broadcasts information, but is poorly designed for selectively concealing it. Being in conspiratorial contexts a handicap, self-explanatory gesture is therefore rapidly phased out in favour of reliance on cheap, conventionalized vocal signals permitting exclusion of outsiders through frequent switching of codes (cf. Englefield 1977: 123). The primary ingroup communication system is now fully conventional and one-sidedly vocal-auditory.

7.9 Syntactical competence

Within each ritual ingroup, vocal mini-routines, in being abbreviated and deprived of their former gestural/mimetic medium, assume novel form. With all former pretend-play linkages removed, linear sequences of conventional vocal signals must now bear the full syntactic load. Note that there is nothing specifically vocal about the neural linkages or skills involved: deaf children of hearing parents, deprived of a vocal medium within which to embed and link their gestures, are in a comparable way forced to invent de novo a discrete-combinatorial language out of manual signs (Goldin-Meadow 1993). No sudden genetic reorganization of the brain is required to introduce such novel complexity. For the human mind as already evolved to switch over to the new system, just one new operational principle may suffice (cf. Berwick, this volume). And now, as signal is placed after signal and fiction set recursively within fiction, ‘syntactical complexity’ — previously a property of mindreading (Worden, this volume) and communication through mimetic gesture (Armstrong, Stokoe & Wilcox 1994; Donald 1991, this volume) — floods into the vocal-auditory channel. Signallers must now use a linear stream of coded vocal shorthands to recursively embed fictions whose mutual relationships remain represented in the mind as bodily gestures (cf. Johnson 1987). Exapting neurophysiological capacities for handling a system of calls still heavily embedded in gesture, syntactical speech explosively evolves.

8 Conclusion: the ‘human revolution’

Bickerton (1990, this volume) posits that speech emerged in an evolutionary quantum-jump. Archaic humans possessed ‘protolanguage’ — a vocal system with a substantial lexicon but lacking syntax. Vocal signs were strung together like beads on a string, in the absence of any systematic ordering principles. Then, with the emergence of anatomically modern humans, syntax appeared, caused by a genetic mutation which abruptly re-wired the brain.

In this chapter’s contrasting scenario, something prefiguring ‘syntax’ has long been present, but not initially as a way of ordering combinatorial sequences of conventionalized, abbreviated vocal mini-routines. Pre-modern humans in this model are heavily involved in communal pretend-play or ‘mimesis’ — fantasy-sharing representational activity such as mime, song and dance (cf. Donald 1991); this drives selection pressures for subtle volitional control over emotionally expressive vocalizations and linked gestural representations. At this stage, generativity based on discrete/particulate structure is held back, because signallers must still combine conventional call with emotionally expressive, costly display in each signalling episode, in this respect maintaining continuity with primate ‘gesture-call’ systems (cf. Burling 1993).

Coalition-members during this evolutionary period have shared interests, allowing them to arrive at cost-cutting shorthands in representing food-items, predators and other things. But there is as yet no polarized binary/digital ingroup/outgroup dynamic structuring relationships across the landscape (cf. Knight 1991: 301—304). Instead, kinship-based coalitions and mutual aid networks cross-cut and overlap, with much dual membership, conflicting loyalties and hence internal flux and instability. In this context, it remains as important to withhold relevant information as to divulge it. Almost any listener is potentially a rival, even when currently an ally, blocking the emergence of a group-wide, trust-based, purely conventional system. Signallers continue to rely on their primate-derived ‘hard-to-fake’ signals for cajoling, seducing, threatening and so on, such emotionally convincing body-language still retaining primacy over any shared code. An element of ‘song-and-dance’ therefore remains central to all communication, anchoring and connecting low-cost shorthands or abbreviations in a matrix of more costly gesture — and thereby blocking the emergence of syntax/grammar as an ‘autonomous’ domain. There is ‘syntax’, but only in the sense that there is hierarchical, recursive embedding of one pretend-play fiction within another. The hierarchical ordering central to syntax has yet to become mapped onto a purely conventional linear sequence of signals. Instead, as with modern children in the pregrammatical stage (Zinober & Martlew 1986), pretend-play based largely on gesture still carries the syntactic load, with any conventionalized vocalizations acting as accompaniments.

The human symbolic revolution (Knight et al. 1995) begins to get under way from about 130,000 years ago. At this point, coalitions at last become universalistic, stable and bounded through balanced opposition, each constructing, through communal pretend-play, a shared self- representation — ‘the Eland Bull ‘the Rainbow Snake ‘the Totem’. This morally authoritative enactment — in essence ‘wrong sex/species/ time’ — now functions as the overarching sacred ‘Word’ (cf. Rappaport 1979), authenticating all lower-order semantic meanings and associated vocal markers. It is in this novel social and ritual context that syntactical speech emerges.

A simple ingroup/outgroup model of this kind has one major advantage. We need no longer suppose that humans evolved to become anomalously honest. Humans are dishonest, exploitative and manipulative — in many respects especially so. But this model allows us to see how a profound coalitionary restructuring could have redistributed honesty and dishonesty, co-operation and competition, such that symbolic culture was the result.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Catherine Arthur, Dan Nettle, Camilla Power , Robbins Burling, Adam Kendon, Jim Hurford, Jean-Louis Dessalles and Michael Studdert-Kennedy for critical comments and discussion.

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