Female cosmetic coalitions: History and Key Facts

The hypothesis of female cosmetic coalitions (FCC) represents a controversial attempt to explain the evolutionary emergence of art, ritual and symbolic culture in Homo sapiens. The hypothesis was first proposed by evolutionary anthropologists Chris Knight and Camilla Power together with archaeologist Ian Watts. It has since been tested, critiqued, confirmed and/or extended by scientists studying the emergence of human symbolic culture, especially symbolic ritual and art. Prominent figures among them are Cedric Boeckx, specialist in the cross-cultural study of indigenous myths, Deon Liebenberg, Cape Town rock art specialists Emily-Jane Vowles and John Parkington,

and middle Stone Age archaeologist Rimtautas Dapschauskas and his team.

Supporters of this hypothesis contest the prevailing assumption that the earliest art was painted or engraved on external surfaces such as cave walls or rock faces. They argue instead that art is much older than previously thought and that the canvas was initially the human body. The earliest art, according to FCC, consisted of predominantly blood-red designs produced on the body for purposes of cosmetic display, the aim being to signal the inviolability or 'sacredness' of the human body.

Female cosmetic coalitions as a conceptual approach links Darwin's theory of evolution by natural and sexual selection, research into sexual signalling by wild-living monkeys and apes, the fossil record of encephalization in human evolution, recent archaeological discoveries of red-ochre pigments dating back to the speciation in Africa of Homo sapiens around 250,000 years ago, and modern hunter-gatherer ethnography.

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