Radical Anthropology

Chris Knight is the founder of the Radical Anthropology Group and author of Blood Relations: Menstruation and the origins of culture (1991).

Jerome Lewis lectures in Social Anthropology at University College London.

Language emerged not just for practical communication but through dramatic, shared cultural performances fostering deep trust and symbolic understanding, a shift from primate dominance to shared humanity.

Drawing on primatology, linguistics, evolutionary theory, biological and social anthropology of existing African hunter-gatherer societies, they show how early human societies' unique cooperative childcare, ritualized practices and egalitarian politics was fundamental to language emergence.

Tuesday's session with Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis on their forthcoming book 'The Revolutionary Origins of Language' (Yale UP 2026)

RE: https://c.im/@RadicalAnthro/116170289277256727

This BBC piece has very little idea on language origins!
If you'd like some good ideas, come hear Chris and Jerome on Tuesday.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20260303-listen-to-stone-age-chat-the-lost-languages-of-ancient-humans

7/9 Surprisingly, ghost ancestry persists in “archaic deserts”—regions thought to be modern human-specific, including the desert containing FOXP2 on chromosome 7, challenging interpretations of positive selection for modern human variants in these regions.

4/9 We recover patterns of Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestry in non-Africans. Surprisingly, we find ghost ancestry (0.5-1.1%) in *all* modern humans -- East Africans, West Africans, Europeans, East Asians, and South Asians.

“Recovering signatures of archaic introgression using ancestral recombination graphs” nice new preprint from PriyaMoorjani’s lab, with good summary thread by first author @yulinzhang.bsky.social 👇🧪🧬

Tiny possum and glider thought extinct for 6,000 years found in remote West Papua The discovery of two lost species is 'exceptional' and rare, scientists say

The BBC report had:
Identification of the species would not have been possible without local elders of Tambrauw and Maybrat clans.
"They're very traditional people," [who] regard the glider as so sacred that "not only won't they hunt it, they won't mention its name".'
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Meet ‘Tous’ — an entirely new genus of mammal we identified. Here’s why it’s so exciting A plantation worker photographed this new genus of mammal in New Guinea, thought to have been dead for 6,000 years.

Meet ‘Tous’ — an entirely new genus of mammal we identified. Here’s why it’s so exciting. 🐾🇮🇩 theconversation.com/meet-tous-an...

It should be out in summer, we'll keep you posted. We will try to record, but those recordings have gone astray lately disappeared into someone's cloud!

Next Tuesday's session with Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis on their forthcoming book 'The Revolutionary Origins of Language' (Yale UP 2026)

Joan Miró “The Morning Star” (1940) • During WWII, Miró produced 23 paintings collectively known as the Constellations. To create each piece, the artist first applied a soft ground of dry-brushed color that evokes the randomness of nature. Next, he painted fanciful black lines and vibrant flat shapes that change color whenever they cross over a line. Red switches to black…black switches to blue…blue switches to red. Miró’s Constellations pulse, like a universe with music in its soul. • During World War II, the Constellations were the first works of art created by a prominent European artist to reach America. Rumor has it they were secretly transported in a diplomatic pouch.

#ArtHistory 🗃️ 🐡

To escape from the reality of WWII into the comfort of a fantasy world, Miró turned to the sky as a coping mechanism. “I felt a deep desire to flee,” said the artist. “The moon and the stars began to play a major role in my paintings.”

Joan Miró, “The Morning Star” (1940)

Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi | The dry and the wet burn together The war launched against Iran by the United States and Israel is a war of choice and of hubris. There is scarcely even...

"‘The dry and the wet burn together’ is a Persian expression invoked when a fire spreads without discrimination. Once the blaze begins, distinctions collapse: between the combustible and the damp, the guilty and the innocent, perpetrators and victims."

Not great that so much of the commentariat is absolutely dug in on the idea that advocating for a green transition was a sort of "luxury belief" and not the most hard-headed of realism and now that we're once again seeing how wrong this is, none of them want to draw attention to how wrong they were.

Amazing how the archaeology of Arabia is developing. Nice new paper from my colleagues. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Dentition of the Mugharet El'Aliya Fossil Human Maxilla, Morocco Objective This study follows up on our recent morphological analysis of the juvenile maxilla from Mugharet el'Aliya, Morocco. Although this specimen shows a reportedly archaic morphology, likely…

Dentición de un Homo sapiens juvenil del Ateriense, datado en 35-60 ka:
Dentition of the Mugharet El'Aliya Fossil Human Maxilla, Morocco

Birds are changing — and Indigenous memory is the longest record we have Conservation has long depended on measurement. Populations are counted, habitats mapped, trends plotted against baselines that often extend back only a few decades. Yet many ecosystems began changing…

[FOUNDER'S BRIEF - @rhettayersbutler.bsky.social]

A global study using Indigenous and local knowledge across three continents finds bird communities shifting toward smaller species over the past 80 years — suggesting widespread loss of larger birds.

Chris Knight is the founder of the Radical Anthropology Group and author of Blood Relations: Menstruation and the origins of culture (1991).

Jerome Lewis lectures in Social Anthropology at University College London.

Language emerged not just for practical communication but through dramatic, shared cultural performances fostering deep trust and symbolic understanding, a shift from primate dominance to shared humanity.

Drawing on primatology, linguistics, evolutionary theory, biological and social anthropology of existing African hunter-gatherer societies, they show how early human societies' unique cooperative childcare, ritualized practices and egalitarian politics was fundamental to language emergence.

Next Tuesday's session with Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis on their forthcoming book 'The Revolutionary Origins of Language' (Yale UP 2026)

An early form of terrestrial hominine bipedalism in the Late Miocene of Bulgaria - Palaeobiodiversity and Palaeoenvironments Fossils of Orrorin record the first convincing evidence of hominid terrestrial bipedalism in the Late Miocene, at about six million years ago. Bipedalism in the slightly older (7 Ma old) Sahelanthropu...

This new paper describes a Hominine femur from Bulgaria, tentatively assigned to Graecopithecus, and finds it indicative of both terrestrial quadrupedalism and some form of bipedalism. A lot of interesting implications! doi.org/10.1007/s125... #homininae #paleoanthropology #paleontology #miocene

Meet Tatu and Loulis—the last of the 'talking' chimpanzees In the 1960s and '70s, a group of chimpanzees astonished the world by learning sign language. Only two remain, and one question still lingers: Was it worth it?

A piece on the last two of the #ASL signing #chimpanzees Tatu and Loulis

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/chimpanzee-sign-language-experiments

Front cover of Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis' forthcoming book shows three gesticulating figures in red, dancing, arguing or discussing?

✨Tues Mar 10, 18:30 (UTC London)🌗
Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis
The Revolutionary Origins of Language

All welcome
LIVE in Daryll Forde Room, 2nd Floor, UCL Anthropology Dept, 14 Taviton St, WC1H 0BW
ZOOM ID 952 8554 1412 passcode Wawilak

No to war

Can we all just agree that if your evolutionary theory of humans posits we all evolved to have the social values of 1950s American it’s probably wrong? Thanks.

The Blood Moon 2026 and the Full Moon.

It was so cloudy here, and the totality started not long after moonrise. The totality almost couldn't be seen by naked eye, I only noticed it after I took long exposure pic with my phone.

My blood moon shots from 2018 until 2026.

My Blood Moon collection

#BloodMoon #LunarEclipse

So lovely to have you back, Cedric, beautiful talk and really thought-provoking on child development and the ecology for learning language. Thank you!