English
 
Help Privacy Policy Disclaimer
  Advanced SearchBrowse

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Released

Journal Article

Food storage facilitates professional religious specialization in hunter–gatherer societies

MPS-Authors
/persons/resource/persons202655

Watts,  Joseph
Linguistic and Cultural Evolution, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Max Planck Society;

External Resource
No external resources are shared
Fulltext (restricted access)
There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.
Fulltext (public)

Watts_Food_EvolHumSci_2022.pdf
(Publisher version), 390KB

Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
Citation

Watts, J., Hamerslag, E. M., Sprules, C., Shaver, J. H., & Dunbar, R. I. M. (2022). Food storage facilitates professional religious specialization in hunter–gatherer societies. Evolutionary Human Sciences, 4: e17. doi:10.1017/ehs.2022.17.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-000C-8156-1
Abstract
Professional religious specialists centralised religious authority in early human societies and represented some of the earliest instances of formalised social leadership. These individuals played a central role in the emergence of organised religion and transitions to more stratified human societies. Evolutionary theories highlight a range of environmental, economic and social factors that are potentially causally related to the emergence of professional religious specialists in human history. There remains little consensus over the relative importance of these factors and whether professional religious specialists were the outcome or driver of increased socio-cultural complexity. We built a global dataset of hunter–gatherer societies and developed a novel method of exploratory phylogenetic path analysis. This enabled us to systematically identify the factors associated with the emergence of professional religious specialists and infer the directionality of causal dependencies. We find that environmental predictability, environmental richness, pathogen load, social leadership and food storage systems are all correlated with professional religious specialists. However, only food storage is directly related to the emergence of professional religious specialists. Our findings are most consistent with the claim that the early stages of organised religion were the outcome rather than driver of increased socio-economic complexity.