How women drove the evolution of symbolic culture: the last half million years

Name: How women drove the evolution of symbolic culture: the last half million years
Start: 2026-02-24T18:30:00+00:00
End: 2026-02-24T20:00:00+00:00
Location: UCL Anthropology

Schedule

Tue Feb 24 2026 at 06:30 pm to 08:00 pm

UTC+00:00

Location

UCL Anthropology | London, EN

This talk uses Chris Knight’s ‘sex-strike’ model and Camilla Power’s Female Cosmetic Coalitions model for the origins of symbolic culture. Ian Watts addresses anthropology’s core question – what it is to be a modern human and how our symbolic species evolved. Ian focuses on what is widely considered to be the earliest archaeological residue of group ritual, the record of earth pigment use. The model’s premise is that the maternal energetics of birthing and rearing successively larger brained offspring drove the evolution of female coalitionary strategies. Predictions concern: i/ details of the earth pigment record, ii/ how this would relate to the brain-size story, iii/ contextualising behavioural developments (e.g. campsites and lunar phase-locked hunting), and iv/ specifying an ‘ideology of blood’ at the root of symbolic culture, testable against the ethnographic record of myth and ritual. Ian calls on social anthropology in particular to engage with the model’s predictions on the ethnography of hunter-gatherer myth and ritual
Ian will speak
LIVE in Daryll Forde Room, 230, 2nd Floor, UCL Anthropology Dept, 14 Taviton St, London WC1H 0BW
ZOOM ID 952 8554 1412 passcode Wawilak
Invite link
https://ucl.zoom.us/j/95285541412?pwd=LjI5yIagplvPmFXVwSnLbDbV1xUiep.1