Before The Dawn of Everything

Abstract

The Dawn of Everything ( DoE ) holds that social organisation among our earliest ancestors is likely to have been extraordinarily diverse. Therefore, there can have been no ‘original’ form of human society. ‘Searching for one can only be a matter of myth-making.’ This does not bode well for integrating evolutionary and social anthropology, but contributions from social anthropology, with its unique perspective on what it is to be a symbolic species, are rare in modern human ‘origins’ research, and so deserve close attention. Following a critique of DoE’ s framing this contribution inverts the premise of extraordinary diversity. The latest archaeological findings and their interpretation suggest pan-African habitual performance of collective ritual, with a uniform signature of red cosmetic usage, from ~160 ka, around the end of speciation, grounding symbolic culture’s first shared fiction(s). DoE marginalised evolutionary theory, the archaeology of our speciation and African hunter-gatherer ethnography. Thereby, it resembles the decried ‘sapient paradox’ and leaves readers clueless as to how the tea-time ‘carnival parade’ of political forms of the last 30,000 years arose. By contrast, African hunter-gatherer ritual use of red substances and associated beliefs suggest an ideology of blood at origin, metaphorically linking women’s reproduction to men’s hunting labour.