Christopher Knight is an academic and Marxist who gained his PhD in 1987 at the University of London for a thesis on Claude Lévi-Strauss's four-volume Mythologiques. He became a lecturer in anthropology at the University of East London in 1989 and a professor at the same institution in 2000. Knight is a founding member of the ''Radical Anthropology Group (RAG) and currently Senior Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology, University College London.
He spoke with Real People's Media about his understandings of the evolution of Matrilineal clan systems and their importance in the gaining of human freedom on April 27th, 2016.
Chris Knight speaking in 2007.
Knight is best known for his theory that human language, religion and culture emerged in the human species not simply by gradual Darwinian evolution but in a process culminating in revolutionary social change. In this, he claims to be following in the footsteps of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, who in their later years were fascinated by what was then the new science of anthropology.[5] Knight published his first book, Blood Relations: Menstruation and the origins of culture in 1991.[6] In 1996, he co-founded the EVOLANG series of international conferences on the origins of language, since when he has become a prominent figure in debates on the origins of human symbolic culture and especially the origin of language.