The symbolic revolution

Abstract

This chapter presents a Darwinian account of how humans became the symbolic species. It challenges the widely held idea that symbolic culture did not emerge until long after our African speciation. Red ochre use appears as a cumulative cultural tradition emerging prior to modern humans, becoming ubiquitous with modern Homo sapiens. One argument for the evolution of within-group cooperation has been inter-group conflict, but this is unlikely to result in sexual morality. An alternative model of “reverse dominance” or “gender” warfare is explored, generating playful, ritual contest between the sexes. As a reproductive strategy, women in coalitions resisted dominant male attempts to monopolize fertile females without providing adequate investment. Ritual bodypaint performances established symbolic culture, morality, kinship, and the sexual division of labor. Investor males drove the success of this symbolic strategy through sexual selection of ritually decorated females, linked to the plateau of encephalization in modern humans.