If the model outlined in the previous chapter seems somewhat speculative, this chapter presents an array of illustrative evidence, and demonstrates the genuine multi-disciplinarity of the evolutionary ideas discussed. Chris Knight and Camilla Power separately present a great deal more evidence than I offer here, but what is perhaps demonstrated in this chapter is an invitation into an expanded image of the human being, in that we begin to see more clearly that our apparently separate categories of human behaviour – visionary experience, religion, language, menstruation, sexual behaviours, symbolic culture – participate in a much more interconnected reality than we are perhaps accustomed to considering. This holistic experience of our humanity will be developed further in later chapters…
This evolutionary picture, pioneered by Chris Knight and expanded with Camilla Power and several others, of cognitively-transforming humans gaining collective and symbolic identity is a subtle and reasoned narrative that emerges from strictly Darwinian sexual selective pressures, but which nonetheless maintains a lively sense of the sacred throughout. In case the semi-mythical nature of the model should cause one to think it fantasy, however, it should be noted that this 'Female Cosmetic Coalitions' hypothesis, bears significant predictive power upon the fields of archaeology as pertaining to the Middle Stone Age in Africa and possibly Europe, as well as upon the ethnography of modern hunter-gatherer populations the world over.
This evolutionary picture, pioneered by Chris Knight and expanded with Camilla Power and several others, of cognitively-transforming humans gaining collective and symbolic identity is a subtle and reasoned narrative that emerges from strictly Darwinian sexual selective pressures, but which nonetheless maintains a lively sense of the sacred throughout. In case the semi-mythical nature of the model should cause one to think it fantasy, however, it should be noted that this 'Female Cosmetic Coalitions' hypothesis, bears significant predictive power upon the fields of archaeology as pertaining to the Middle Stone Age in Africa and possibly Europe, as well as upon the ethnography of modern hunter-gatherer populations the world over.
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