[This

article

was

submitted

to

the

International

Socialism

Journal in 1992. Without acknowledgement it was not published.]

Simply bloody

reply

to

Chris

Harmans and

review the

of

Chris of

Knight, Culture

Blood (Yale

Relations:

Menstruation

Origins

University Press, 1991)

Lionel D. Sims

Chris Harmans review of Knights book, Blood Relations1, raises five main criticisms.

First,

where

Knight undermined

depicts by sexual

primate

co-operation and

as

fundamentally Harman sees

jealousies as

conflict,

primate

social

systems

largely

harmonious.

Secondly, Harman disputes any necessary connection between the pursuit by males of genetic fitness and philandering. Thirdly, human females _ according to Harman _ are not unique but

resemble other primates in the form taken by their reproductive

physiology and menstrual cycle. Fourthly, Harman sees human culture and language as ancient developments which evolved

gradually and extend back perhaps a million years. He disputes the theory that symbolic culture emerged in a relatively recent Human Revolution. Finally, Harman denies that there is any evidence for Knights sex-strike theory.

Lets look at each criticism in turn.

Ape society. Of course, there are many examples of co-operation among group-living chimpanzees and other apes. But by ignoring conflict _ which also exists _ Harman seeks only to draw

parallels between ape and early human social life, without being able to define the contrasts. Engels did not take this line, instead focusing on the theoretical significance of

inter-male sexual jealousy as a disruptive factor undermining primate co-operation. The jealousy of the male, he wrote, representing both tie and limits of the family, brings the animal family into conflict with the horde...This alone

suffices to prove that the animal family and primitive human society are incompatible things...2. Engels, then, saw the

competitive sexual relationships of apes as incompatible with the co-operative patterns accomplished by early human huntergatherers. Knights work, like that of many other specialists,

has confirmed Engels on this point.

Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, primatology was dominated by the gradualist views of Jane Goodall and others who saw chimps and other apes as really very nice and not all that different from us. Jane Goodall repudiated such early views in the face of incontrovertible evidence for chimp cannibalism and inter-troop violence. Harman fails to acknowledge that he is drawing from an early and now superseded tradition in

primatology. He even accuses Knight of getting his data on primate sexual conflict from an outdated source: Solly

Zuckermans London Zoo baboon-enclosure research conducted in the 1930s. Knights actual words are: Zuckerman wrote many years ago, and there is nowadays no need to give any particular weight to his formulations3. In fact Knights bibliography quotes 59 other primatological sources and in particular relies on one of the world leaders in primatology, Robin Dunbar, and his definitive text Primate Social Systems, published in 19814 It would appear that Harman wants readers of the Journal to remain unaware that Knight is drawing on this wealth of

scholarship.

The scientific consensus is that the strongest coalitions and co-operation within most primate societies are amongst groups

of

related

females,

who

mainly

concern

themselves

with

provisioning themselves and their offspring. Males by contrast congregate around the females foraging locales, and are mainly concerned with the search for fertilisable females. The more the females are dispersed, as female gibbons are dispersed in the forest canopy, the less the inter-male rivalry. The more the females are grouped together _ as happens when they seek safety in numbers during exposure to predators on the savannah _ the easier it is for dominant males to attempt to police them and monopolise them, with the result that male rivalries and sexual inequalities become severe. This tendency, as Engels pointed out, is in direct contradiction to the egalitarianism and cooperation of human hunter-gatherer societies.

Harman argues that no special theory is needed to explain human sharing, language or co-operation. Even chimps, he says, share food and hunt co-operatively, with not a little

communication. Harmans idea, then, is that chimps are already on a social level incipiently human. This represents a quite breathtaking challenge to the entire Marxist tradition. In a dramatic point in Engels superb book, The Origin of the

Family, Private Property and the State, he suggests that in some unknown way our ancestors took a different route from the apes. They thereby achieved one of the greatest revolutions in

history:

the

overthrow the

of

rule

by

jealous of being

dominant stray is are and

males.

...[A]pes gradually reason

...give

impression

sidelines sufficient based those on of

approaching rejecting

extinction...This all conclusions family

alone that forms

for

parallels

drawn

between

their

primitive man. Mutual toleration among the adult males, freedom from jealousy, was, however, the first condition for the

building of those large and enduring groups in the midst of which alone the transition from animal to man could be

achieved.5 Harman, on this issue, seems to have forgotten that Marxists are not gradualists. The Marxist method looks for movement in contradiction and discontinuity. Harman is also unaware that primatologists are now providing us with the

evidence to see that the curbing and harnessing of primate sexuality to economic purposes was the unknown way in which the human revolution was achieved.

Modern

primatology

is

in

agreement

with

Engels

that

some

qualitative leap had to be made from primate sociality to the first forms of human symbolic culture. In agreeing with the gradualist primatologists of the 1960s, Harman is dumping the revolutionary kernel of Engels and revealing his unfamiliarity with modern palaeoanthropological science and the exciting

debates now revolutionising it.

Selfish

gene

theory

and

male

philandering.

According

to

Harman, Knights claim is that animal males will always try to maximise the number of females they inseminate to raise the odds of passing on their genes to the next generation. But Harman observes that this need not imply selfishness. Under certain conditions, or as when offspring the are threatened odds with of

predation

resource

stress,

mathematical

population genetics will select for those males which can act altruistically towards females and offspring to protect their own genetic investment. It all depends on the odds, writes Harman.

This is an extremely interesting observation. The idea that it all depends on the odds is precisely the principle of

inclusive fitness, the core concept of sociobiology. For the last two Marxism conferences I and others have been furiously berated for engaging with sociobiology on the grounds that it is fascist. Yet here we have Chris Harman telling us how the selfish gene, under certain ecological conditions, will

metamorphose into the altruistic gene. We were also told that in discussing primate societies at all we were being racist, or that ape social systems have nothing to do with the

investigation of human cultural origins. It is encouraging that

Harman now seeks to acquaint himself with recent primatology.

Of

course,

it

is

precisely

such

issues

which

Chris

Knight

investigates in enormous detail in his book. The task is to explain how initially jealous primate males could have evolved into trusting, cooperative males who provision their mates. If a male is to be confident of his paternity, how can he leave his mate to go on a foraging expedition for her? In any

plausible picture of the precultural initial situation - and particularly scenario if we by accept Harman the resource-stressed whenever one male savannah left his

favoured

partner undefended while seeking food, his rivals would seize their chance with her, taking advantage of his absence. It is because Harman cannot solve this problem that he has to insist there is no problem: chimps and baboons can cooperate already in essentially human-like ways. As Marxists, by contrast, we have to identify what distinguishes primate behaviour from

human behaviour; otherwise, we will never be able to work out how our ancestors achieved the transition from one to the

other.

No primate male provisions its mate. Food items may be shared opportunistically, but females are only likely to succeed in begging from males if they are in oestrus; females who are

pregnant or nursing will not do so well. This was the problem for evolving human females: how to get males to provision them anyway, regardless of precise reproductive status? Knight shows that in the resource-rich woodland and riverine mosaic areas along the African rift valley, kin-related human females could congregate in quite large groups, synchronising their ovulatory cycles so as to make it impossible for one dominant male to succeed in impregnating one female and then abandon her for another. If the females all signal yes together, then no single male can cope, so that more males are brought into the breeding system. Under these conditions, the high genetic

stakes which in so many mammal species promote fierce intermale competition begin to disappear. Moreover, as the females become in addition sexually receptive throughout the whole

cycle, the result is to undermine sexual inequalities between the males. This then raises the females chances of getting paternity support for their offspring, since more males are assured of a successful consortship.

Far from arguing that male sexual fights and rivalries were endemic amongst our precultural human ancestors - as Harman astonishingly alleges - Knight in this way explains precisely how and why such rivalries began to be transcended, even before the human cultural revolution occurred. Knight models a

biologically-driven

process

preceding

the

transition

to

culture; this earlier process explains the gradual emergence of large brained, bipedal, cooperative, co-cycling hominids. We now have a materialist explanation for the emergence of male provisioning which does not assume what has to be explained.

But this purely Darwinian, biological approach cannot explain the emergence of human language, consciousness or symbolic

culture. It made sense for females to signal yes to males continuously, maximising the number of males in the vicinity, only when the required food was gatherable by these males in abundance ovulatory in the immediate strategy vicinity. could In only other have words, worked the in

synchrony

vegetationally resource-rich regions. Those hominids who left for the resource-stressed savannah would have had to disperse more widely in order to practice area-extensive foraging; under such conditions, female solidarity and ovulatory synchrony

would have broken down. Dispersed early humans, such as Homo erectus, migrating away from areas like the African rift

valley, would then have reverted to more robust forms, females becoming particularly robust so as to able to provision

themselves with little or no male support. This would explain why South-east Asian Homo erectus living only half-a-million years ago actually look less like modern humans than their

counterparts living in the East African Rift Valley a million years ago. Harman, following a gradualist model of human

evolution, cannot explain such details.

At the beginning of the last Ice-Age, localised food sources began to diminish, and the hunting of large game animals became more and more necessary. When the females required males to go away on extended hunting expeditions, it no longer made sense to keep signalling yes in sexual terms. Whenever meat was scarce, the females had to collectively signal No. They had to make the males go away hunting at a distance, not stay around as they had done before. Since the females had the modern human physiological condition known as continuous

sexual receptivity, signalling no could not be done in the biological way other primates do this simply hormonally,

through displaying the fact that they were in their anoestrous state. Quite unlike chimps, these anatomically human females had no anoestrous state. Their no-signal therefore had to be deliberate and conscious.

Preserving

the

synchrony

and

solidarity

of

their

previous

evolution, the evidence is that modern human females recovered their lost ability to emit a potent no-signal by drawing on the biological factor of menstrual bleeding, constructing this

consciously as a signal that they were periodically taboo, whilst also elaborating the signal using red ochre and other pigments. In that way, they could make their males travel over wide distances, scouring the landscape for game instead of simply foraging in the local vicinity. This had the enormous advantage of liberating humans from their former dependence on local ecological conditions, and provided modern humans with the minimum cultural rules to survive almost anywhere on the planet. This is all dealt with at great length and with

scholarly caution by Chris Knight in his book. Harman fails as a reviewer in not acquainting readers of the Journal with these issues.

Evolution of the human female menstrual cycle. Harmans third point focuses on ape and human sexual characteristics. He

points out that humans are not the only primate females to have lost their oestrus signals and developed a menstrual cycle. Harman caricatures Knights position here, denying that

menstruation, sexual receptivity and synchrony could all have begun suddenly, as the result of a sex-strike organised 60 or so thousand years ago. Having shown that this is impossible, Harman claims to have refuted Knights theory. But in fact Knight makes no such absurd claim. It is a straw man for Harman to knock down without having to engage with the actual theory.

Harman is missing the main point. The fact is that when she is fertile and showing oestrus swellings, a female chimpanzee

cannot signal NO to sex _ she is hormonally driven to attract sexual partners and to copulate. Human females can always

signal NO _ sexual behaviour and the signals associated with it are subject to cortical control. If orangutans have a menstrual and sexual cycle just like women, with no oestrus, as Harman claims, then isnt it obvious that the really interesting

question is: How are women different from female orangutans? Harman apparently wants Journal readers to believe that there is little significant sexual/physiological difference between a woman and a chimp! Has he never visited the Zoo? The huge sexual swellings of chimps at oestrus publically advertise the time of ovulation, a physiological feature which has clearly evolved as female chimps competed sexually with one another. Why have human females completely concealed the moment of

ovulation?

Harman goes further, and points out that many animals also synchronise their sexual cycles. Of course, it is true that synchronisation of periods occurs amongst many animals. In

fact, almost any animal living closely with conspecifics will synchronise its cycle, whether menstrual or oestrus; this is

generally locked to seasonal cycles. But no ape can synchronise its periods with an external clock, the moon, enabling

synchrony to be maintained not just within local groups but across the landscape.

The human menstrual cycle is different from all ape menstrual cycles in that menstruation is much accentuated, ovulation is concealed, receptivity is continuous and the average cycle

length is 29.5 days. No ape shares this particular combination of characteristics; Knight sees the human pattern as one which evolved gradually, by standard Darwinian processes of natural selection, and not as the result of womens conscious

organisation of a sex strike. These features were adaptive among group-living precultural humans engaged in area-intensive foraging along lake, river or sea-shores, females synchronising their cycles with tidal rhythms. These biological features

could later be culturally manipulated, and Knights argument is that they were. It is a crass distortion to claim that Knights argument is that the human cultural revolution biological features to evolve. caused such

The

Marxist

method

locates

change

in

the

struggle

between

opposites. Knights methodology falls within this tradition. Faithful to Engels, he argues that an alliance of females and

their male kin against the competitive strategies of dominant, philandering males harnessed human sexual energies to

collective economic requirements for the very first time. Of course, the biology that made all this possible was a long time in coming, its evolution spread over a million years and more. But Harman makes the mistake of conflating the biological

evolution of modern humans with the Human Revolution which established symbolic language and culture. The dominant view in biology and archaeology now is that these were separate

processes.

It was the view some decades ago that standardised stone handaxes over a million years old were an early indicator of

culture, but since this minimal toolkit remained unchanged for millennia, archaeologists now see this million years of

boredom (as they call it) as a species phenomenon, having nothing to do with culture in its modern, symbolic sense. It used to be the view that Neanderthals conducted ritual burials, but it is now agreed that the only firm evidence for

Neanderthal use of ritual and symbols came very late, after contact with modern humans.6 It is true that the capacity for speech began evolving millions of years ago, but that cannot be equated with the use of language. If brain size and shape could be read off as an indicator of culture, then this would make

Neanderthals of a higher cultural level than modern humans, since they had bigger brains than us! True symbolic language (as opposed to primate-style call-systems) must indicate the capacity for a moral system of abstract rules> The proper

measure for this in the archaeological record is not the shape of the brain but the remains of symbolic culture. Neither Homo erectus nor the Neanderthals produced any art. The earliest indications of symbolism date from at most 110,000 years ago in Africa, and somewhat later elsewhere; there is no evidence for symbolic culture of any kind millions of years ago as Harman seems to think.

Sex strike theory and ethnography. Harman claims that there is no contemporary evidence for the sex-strike theory among surviving hunter-gatherers. He quotes the two groups he appears familiar with _ the !Kung and the Mbuti. I can only assume that Harman is hoping nobody will read his sources, since they say entirely the opposite to what he claims. In arguing against Knights stress on the ritual and symbolic significance of menstrual synchrony, Harman claims that the !Kung hardly bother with menstruation. Yet from the same paragraph of the original text from which he draws this observation, we read: Many !Kung women do believe, however, that if a woman sees traces of menstrual blood on another womans leg or even is told that

another

woman

has

started

her

period,

she

will

begin that a

menstruating as well.7 From the same book, we are told

menstruating woman is in special communion with the moon8 and is indigenously believed to be synchronised with it9; a young womans first menstruation is marked by a special ceremony which includes fasting, isolation from men and support from all women10; finally, a menstruating woman can adversely affect the outcome of a hunt if she touches mens arrows or if she has sex with a hunter or goes anyway near a hunt11. Thus Harmans source also tells us that !Kung women synchronise their menstrual periods with each other and the moon, and that at this time all !Kung women isolate themselves while men get on with the hunt. This is the sex-strike theory! Amongst the Mbuti, Harman

suggests that their mocking of the strict menstrual taboos that prevail among their agricultural Bantu neighbours is

tantamount to a rejection of menstrual taboos per se. What Harman fails to communicate to readers of the Journal, is that the Bantu misogynist version of menstrual taboos are ridiculed against the Mbuti woman-affirming Elima menarche ritual12.

Harman seems to fear all discussion of menstruation, I assume because in contemporary politics such observations are usually the province of radical feminists. But in pre-state societies such taboos assert non-heterosexual clan solidarity over the marital rights of the husband. Because Harman has so much lost

sight of the central leadership role of women in primitive communism, any vestige of brother-sister solidarity, and

therefore womens power, cannot be seen.

Harmans charge is that Knight is claiming that everything that is specifically human about us emerged in a cultural revolution between 60 and 40 thousand years ago. Since it is easy to point out that menstruation, synchrony and some forms of cooperation long predate modern humans amongst many animals, then it is a simple matter to refute such a claim. But since Knight never makes this argument, the kindest interpretation is that Harman has misread the book he is supposed to be reviewing, and that driven by a sense of loyalty and responsibility to his

understanding of what is the Marxist position on human origins, anything can be done to deflect attention away from such a debate. But the debate will not go away, since it is not the property of any one person or a small group of people. We are now in the middle of a paradigm shift in primatology,

archaeology, and anthropology, of which our Party is almost completely unaware. This review by Harman disarms our Party by deepening our ignorance of these scientific revolutions.

Knights theory of a Palaeolithic sex-strike is an attempt to explain how all three of these paradigm shifts can be combined. It is not a serious position to deny these developments in

these

disciplines.

Either

we

discuss

them

so

as

to

enrich

Marxism, or we condemn ourselves to the sidelines of scientific debate.

What is Harmans alternative? He claims that writers such as Leakey, Tanner and Alexeev have already sketched out what

genuine Marxists have long argued. Who are these genuine Marxists? I thought the main one was Engels, yet nowhere in his review does Harman defend Engels view that womens

collectivity in the matrilineal clan was the high point of all history until the next revolution into communism. The

communistic household, in which most of the women or even all of the women belong to one and the same gens (clan LDS), while the men come of from that various other gentes, of women is the material generally

foundation

predominance

which

obtained in primitive times.13 Whatever Harman thinks of the sex-strike theory, one thing is clear from his review - he does not agree with Engels that the earliest human society was a revolutionary break with primate sexual politics, and that the role of women was crucial in that revolution. Why wont Harman defend Engels? And what is the ready-made sketch of human

origins which we are supposed to endorse? A vague series of generalisations that under certain conditions those primitive creatures which can learn to stand upright, talk, make tools,

cooperate etc. etc. will have a selective advantage over those creatures that cannot. Of course this must be true, but stated like this, the conclusion to the argument is included in the premise of the argument. What specific conditions led our

ancestors to walk upright, when every other savannah primate, such as baboons, can and remained do quadrapedal? to their Why human is it that in

chimpanzees

talk

teachers

American Sign Language, while in their relations with other chimpanzees they rely on a rudimentary call system or just plain force? Why did the Homo erectus hand-axe tradition last without modification for one-million years and then disappear shortly before the first archaeological evidence for symbolism occurs with anatomically modern humans at the start of the last ice age? Why, in short, did the ancestors of modern humans do something no other ape did, even though apes have the potential to be bipedal, talk and use tools? Scientists are now asking how such changes were achieved, and the answers they are coming up with have massive political implications. Knights book is a Marxists intervention in that recent debate. He proposes that we, anatomically modern humans, are a revolutionary species that established culture during the last ice age through the sibling solidarity sufficient to generate matrilineal clans of the kind recognised by Engels as central to primitive

communism.

As Marxists we have always had to battle not only against quackery, but also against the politics of the bunker - the tendency to close ourselves off from the latest advances in science. Harmans review of Blood Relations does not review the main arguments of Knights theory, sets up straw men that Knight never proposes, and trundles out tired functionalist tautologies that do not begin to measure up to the intellectual challenges. We can enrich Marxism through a cautious engagement with science. All Marxist organisations have to face the

problem of continually relating to bourgeois society yet at the same time combatting it. To now be unaware of the in massive biology,

intellectual

revolutions

taking

place

primatology and archaeology disarms our Party, preventing us from inspiring is supporters from with the the confidence of that Marxism It is

itself

inseparable

advances

science.

especially important since these specific issues allow us to refute separatist feminist ideas which still hold a

disproportionate influence in some quarters. Our Party should be taking a lead in this debate.

1.. C. Harman, Blood Simple, International Socialism Journal 54 Spring 1992. 2.. F Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, (Moscow, 1968), p.35. 3... Chris Knight, Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture (Yale University Press, 1991), p. 185. In the actual passage cited by Harman, Knight (p. 24) distances himself as follows: One of the very earliest books I had read had been Solly Zuckermans harrowing description of what he termed the social life of monkeys and apes (in reality the story of a pathologically distorted Hamadryas baboon community artificially created in the London Zoo). Harman incorrectly refers to this

as a study of chimpanzees. 4... R.I.M. Dunbar (1988), Primate Social Systems (London: Croom Helm).

5.. Engels, ibid., pp33-36. 6.. P. Mellars & C. Stringer (eds.)(1989), The Human Revolution. Behavioral and biological perspectives in the origins of modern humans (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). 7.. M. Shostack (1983), Nisa. The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman (Harmondsworth: Penguin), p68. 8.. ibid., p.72 & 163. 9.. ibid., p73 & 78. 10.. ibid., p163. 11.. ibid., p239 & 243. 12.. C.M. Turnbull (1966), Wayward Servants. The Two Worlds of the African Pygmies (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode), p70. 13.. Ibid, p. 49.