Camilla Power

Camilla Power is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Dept of Anthropology at UCL, and was Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of East London. She completed her Ph.D. in 2001 at UCL under supervision of Leslie Aiello. Camilla has published many articles on the evolutionary origins of ritual, gender and the use of cosmetics in African initiation, and did fieldwork with Hadzabe hunter-gatherer women. Current research interests include the origins of religion, the Neanderthal symbolic revolution, grandmothers and cooperative breeding, and Hadza women’s ritual. Teaching ranges across evolutionary anthropology, kinship and African cosmology.

Authored texts

Grandmothers, Politics, And Getting Back To Science
The Origins Of Anthropomorphic Thinking
The Human Symbolic Revolution A Darwinian Account (Text Version)
The Human Symbolic Revolution A Darwinian Account (Publication Version)
Beauty Magic Deceptive Sexual Signalling And The Evolution Of Ritual
Women In Prehistoric Art
Biological Substrates Of Human Kinship The View From Life History Theory And Evolutionary Ecology
The Woman With The Zebra’s Penis Gender, Mutability And Performance
First Gender, Wrong Sex
Secret Language Use At Female Initiation. Bounding Gossiping Communities
Social Conditions For The Evolutionary Emergence Of Language
Cosmetics, Identity And Consciousness
Lysistrata: The Ritual Logic Of The Sex-Strike
Sham Menstruation, Sex-Strike Theory And Contemporary Implications
A Reply To Helena Cronin
Sex, Symbolism And Neanderthals
Female Proto-Symbolic Strategies
The Seasonality Thermostat: Female Reproductive Synchrony And Male Behavior In Monkeys, Neanderthals, And Modern Humans
Human Origins: Contributions from Social Anthropology