Ted North interviewed Camilla Power of the Radical Anthropology Group

Could you briefly sum up your view on the origin of humanity?

From a materialist point of view, the great problem of human evolution is how mothers fuelled the increasingly large brains of their offspring. Our brains are extraordinarily expensive in terms of energy – three times the size of our closest living relatives, the bonobos and chimps. We could only break through this ‘grey ceiling’ with some form of cooperative breeding – help for mothers from their own kin and from mates.

Selfish-gene theory is important here because it highlights the contradictions and conflicts driving the evolution of mating systems – conflicts between males and females. For evolving Homo males there is a trade-off: whether to invest in a current child or move on to the next fertile female. Females, however, have no choice about it, while their babies are breastfeeding.

In my view the origin of human society as we know it lies in the revolutionary transcendence of these conflicts of interest. Males were the leisured sex; females had to take collective action against would-be philanderers who targeted fertile females at the expense of support to pregnant and breast-feeding mothers.

The signal for males telling them which female is likely to be fertile in the near future is menstruation. This marks out a female from those who are pregnant and breastfeeding as imminently fertile. In a Darwinian world, it attracts male attention and incites sexual competition: among males competing to bond with that female; and among females who stand to lose support.

The collective female strategy in response to this threat must be to prevent males from picking and choosing between females. The way to do this is for the whole coalition to grab the menstrual signal using cosmetic pigments to demonstrate their solidarity to any males who try to target specific fertile females. With the help of male kin, who are on the inside of this ‘blood’ coalition, this female cosmetic coalition strategy is the first step into ritual and symbolism.¹

How do you respond to leftwing critics of ‘sociobiology’, who argue that this is a form of genetic determinism?

The science of selfish genes is the science of solidarity. Communists should understand this dialectic above all. All behavioural ecologists studying animals are working at the problem of how genes that do nothing except replicate themselves nevertheless generate forms of cooperation at higher levels of complexity. Evolutionary change happens on the ground, when animals alter their behaviour – take direct action, if you like. Then the genes that facilitate these novel strategies come under positive selection. This is exactly the reverse of the old ideas about genetic deter minism, which preceded the selfish-gene revolution in the life sciences.

Where does Engels come into the picture? Why do you think his views are still relevant, considering that when he was writing our knowledge of the fossil and archaeological records was almost non-existent?

No other Marxist so clearly understood the centrality of sex and conflict between the sexes in driving the emergence of primitive communism. He pinpointed the discontinuity between systems of primate dominance and the characteristic counter-dominance of egalitarian hunter-gatherers. He realised the material basis for resistance to uncooperative males was in the kinship solidarity of women, the matrilineal clan. Today’s leading theory of early human kinship, the ‘grandmother’ hypothesis, fully vindicates Engels’ argument.

Mainstream opinion on the origins of ‘modern’ human behaviour are split between those who see a sudden and late development at 40,000-50,000 years ago, and those who argue there was a gradual development beginning some time earlier – as indicated by, for example, early pigment use at Twin Rivers in Zambia. How do you see your models relating to these dichotomous views?

There was a revolution among our African ancestors, evidenced by the spread of pigment use in the African middle Stone Age from central to southern Africa (from sites like Twin Rivers, to Pinnacle Point and Blombos). This explodes in the process of our speciation as modern Homo sapiens from around 200,000 years ago. We were already fully cultural, singing and dancing, modern humans when the first ‘out of Africa’ lineages moved out around the Indian Ocean some 60,000 years ago, carrying red cosmetics in the form of ochre wherever they went. This is the modern human trademark in the archaeology.

Notes

1. For more on this subject, see Chris Knight: Blood relations: menstruation and the origins of culture.

What Engels wrote

By Camilla Power

In the Origin of the family, private property and the state (1884), Marxism and anthropology meet. Engels built on notes Marx left on Ancient society (1877), the pioneering work on the evolutionary stages of kinship by American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan. In an evolutionary framework, he argued that changes in the form of the family, kinship and marriage were caused by changes in the material relations of production and economic forms of subsistence. This prefigured what Darwinian anthropologists do today.

Where Morgan was a gradualist Darwinian, Engels added his revolutionary insights. He pointed to the radical discontinuity between non-human primate society and earliest human society, identifying sexual competition – ‘the jealousy of the male’ – as the vital issue that needed to be overcome to allow the emergence of the oldest form of family involving ‘group marriage’.

Primitive communism was based in the matrilineal clan, where women lived with their classificatory sisters, applying the principle, ‘My sister’s child is my child’. This kinship solidarity empowered women to take action against uncooperative males. Engels saw the ‘world historic defeat of the female sex’ – the switch from what he called mother-right to father-right – as inseparable from the onset of farming and pastoralism. The idea that the cow is the enemy of matriliny is strongly supported by anthropology today.

Women themselves became the first property in class society, with men’s possession of women in ‘monogamous’ marriage – monogamous only for women, of course – ending their earlier sexual freedoms.