Female cosmetic coalitions

The theory of female cosmetic coalitions (FCC) represents a controversial attempt to explain the evolutionary emergence of art, ritual and symbolic culture in Homo sapiens.

[1] Supporters of this theory contest the prevailing assumption that the earliest art was painted or engraved on external surfaces such as cave walls or rock faces.

The earliest art, according to FCC, consisted of predominantly blood-red designs produced on the body for purposes of cosmetic display and resistance to unwanted sex.

[5] Female cosmetic coalitions as a conceptual approach links:[6][7][8][9] These seemingly divergent topics come together in a co-authored publication attempting to explain why the world today is populated by modern Homo sapiens instead of by the equally large-brained, previously successful Neanderthals.

[10] An article published in the journal Current Anthropology in 2016 gives an account of exhaustive archaeological testing of the FCC theory, including robust debate between specialists.

On the other hand, theoretical models predict that group-living species will tend to synchronise wherever females can benefit by maximising the number of males offered chances of paternity, minimising reproductive skew.

[18] The same models predict that female primates, including evolving humans, will tend to synchronise wherever fitness benefits can be gained by securing access to multiple males.

[22] By evolving concealed ovulation and continuous receptivity, females force males into longer periods of consortship if they are to have a good chance of achieving impregnation (figures c,d).

As females of Homo heidelbergensis, the ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans, came under increasing selection pressure for larger brain size within the past half million years,[26] they needed more energy in support.

However, in the Darwinian world of primate sexual competition, males may be more interested in finding new fertile females than in supplying the needs of breast-feeding mothers and their infants.

Red ochre pigments allowed women to take conscious control over their signals, resisting any dominant male strategy of picking and choosing between them on biological grounds.

On this basis, FCC theory leads us to expect 'divine' or 'totemic' spiritual entities depicted in early rock art to be therianthropic ('wrong species'), sex-ambivalent ('wrong sex') and blood-red ('wrong time') (figure h).

One can imagine that the Aurignacians regularly painted their bodies red, dyed their animal skins, coated their weapons, and sprinkled the ground of their dwellings, and that a paste of ocher was used for decorative purposes in every phase of their domestic life.

This builds cogently on the position taken by the FCC team three decades ago – that the ochre marked ritual activity critical to the emergence of symbolic cognition.

Among 'Machiavellian', competitive nonhuman primates, sex is a major source of conflict, mutual suspicion and mistrust, as a result of which group members attempt to minimise the cost of deception by responding only to bodily signals which are intrinsically 'hard to fake'.

FCC theorists argue that for signals as cheap and intrinsically unreliable as words to become socially accepted, unprecedentedly intense levels of in-group trust were required.

An effect of the Female Cosmetic Coalitions strategy, claim its supporters, was to minimise internal sexual conflict within each gender group, giving rise to a trusting social atmosphere such as is found among extant human egalitarian hunter-gatherers.

It is claimed that, more than any other theoretical model of modern human origins, FCC offers detailed and specific predictions testable in the light of data from a wide variety of disciplines.

Despite this divergence in terminology, both teams agree on the critical point that humans began using ocher regularly and habitually for ritual purposes from around 160,000 years ago.

As Dapschauskas and colleagues acknowledge[failed verification][need quotation to verify], Knight, Power and Watts predicted this date on theoretical grounds thirty years earlier, when much less was known about the ocher record.

A Himba woman of northern Namibia, cosmetically adorned with red ochre.
Figure a . Females competing for good genes should avoid ovulatory synchrony. Moving from one female to the next, a single dominant male under these conditions can exercise a monopoly. Key : Circle = female. Pointer = ovulation. Triangle = male.
Figure b . Females in need of male time and energy should synchronise their cycles, preventing any single male from monopolising access.
Figure c . Males abandon females once ovulation has passed.
Figure d . Females counter this problem by concealing ovulation and extending receptivity.
Figure e . Menstruation now attracts disproportionate male attention.
Figure f . Coalition members respond to this threat by controlling male access to the (imminently) fertile female.
Figure g . To prevent males from picking and choosing between them, members of the coalition join forces and 'paint up'.
Figure h . "Wrong sex, wrong species, wrong time."
'Wrong species, wrong sex, wrong time.' In San rock art, a 'new maiden' is identified during her first menstruation ceremony as a sacred animal, the sex-ambivalent 'Eland Bull'. [ 31 ] [ 32 ] Rock painting of an eland, Drakensberg, South Africa.