Paper short abstract:

The Female Cosmetic Coalition model is a Darwinian account of the emergence of symbolic culture, language, art and religion. Driven by female strategies for securing male support for energetically expensive offspring, it predicts a lunar, menstrual cosmology central to the world’s first religion.

Paper long abstract:

The Female Cosmetic Coalition (FCC) model uses Darwinian theory to account for the emergence of symbolic culture in modern humans. It makes testable predictions ranging across archaeology and the ethnographic record of hunter-gatherer cosmology.

The key problem for female ancestors was to secure male support for increasingly large-brained offspring. Reproductive synchrony among females could prevent philandering male strategies, leading to selection for lunar periodicity in women's cycles. But these natural factors were not enough. Because it cues imminent fertility, menstruation became a critical signal, liable to cause conflict both between females and among males. Coalitions of related females needed to collectivise and synchronise menstrual signals by cultural, cosmetic means.

In this first ritual performance, a group of individuals shared in representing a fiction. They constructed the symbolic cultural domain by demonstrating solidarity as a kin group to male hunters. Red cosmetics did not so much symbolize 'menstruation' as its antidote -'taboo' or 'magical potency' - setting females apart into sacred space and time, inaccessible to outsider males until hunting was successful. At once, morality (joining the ritual and not offering sex to males before the hunters return), kinship (female and male kin marked out by red cosmetics), economics (obligations of brideservice exchange imposed on outsider hunters) and cosmology (the 'other world') come into force. The FCC model predicts the presence of red ochre in the archaeological record; imagery connecting women and animals in rock art; and an archaic lunar/menstrual cosmology at the heart of hunter-gatherer religion.