Rituals of the Full Moon

Letters

Vol. 14 No. 6 · 26 March 1992

From Chris Knight

In her generous review of my Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture (LRB, 27 February), Caroline Humphrey commends me for the ‘daring’ of my argument that women created culture. Her worries focus less on my data than my logic. In a lion pride, she objects, the numerous females synchronise their oestrus periods yet – in apparent contradiction of my theory – get themselves impregnated by a single dominant male. I restrict my response to two points. Unlike evolving human females, lionesses require sperm from males but little else, being physiologically well-equipped to do their own hunting for themselves. Correspondingly, in permitting impregnation a lioness insists on little sexual time from her consort, releasing him to move from one female to the next in quick succession. Reflecting this, lionesses lack the continuous sexual receptivity, oestrus-concealment and other time-consuming features so intriguingly characteristic of human female reproductive physiology and sexuality. My book argues that human female ovulatory synchrony just wouldn’t have worked without these additional features, which emerged all together as a package.

An incoming lion in the situation Humphrey describes stimulates the synchronised receptivity of his newly-monopolised females by killing their existing cubs (carriers of the genes of his defeated rival). Once these ‘unwanted’ cubs are dead, the mothers stop lactating and in consequence come jointly back into heat. Had your reviewer mentioned this detail, I doubt whether her logic would have seemed more compelling than mine. Lion sexual politics are fascinating, but no school of palaeoanthropology, to my knowledge, holds that evolving human females could have tolerated such a wastage of pregnancies and maternal energies in the interests of ‘paternal certainty’.

Chris Knight
London SE13