Ancestors, Territoriality, and Gods: A Natural History of Religion

Description

This books sets out to explain how and why religion came into being. Today this question is as fascinating as ever, especially since religion has moved to the centre of socio-political relationships. In contrast to the current, but incomplete approaches from disciplines such as cognitive science and psychology, the present authors adopt a new approach, equally manifest and constructive, that explains the origins of religion based strictly on behavioural biology. They employ accepted research results that remove all need for speculation. Decisive factors for the earliest demonstrations of religion are thus territorial behaviour and ranking, coping with existential fears, and conflict solution with the help of rituals. These in turn, in a process of cultural evolution, are shown to be the roots of the historical and contemporary religions Front Matter....Pages i-vii Of Men and Apes....Pages 1-19 The Crux of a Darwinian Approach to Evolution....Pages 21-35 The Question of When? (Lower Palaeolithic, C. 2.6 mybp–300,000 ybp)....Pages 37-48 My Cave Is My Castle—Middle Palaeolithic, Territoriality, and Death....Pages 49-71 Existential Fears—And an Excursus in Art History....Pages 73-86 A Forest of Symbols—The Art of the European Upper Palaeolithic (40,000–12,000 ybp)....Pages 87-104 The Change of Imagery (The Central European Mesolithic, Approx. 9600–5800 ybp)....Pages 105-123 Aedificio Ergo Sum (I Build, Thus I Am). Early Settlers in the Fertile Crescent....Pages 125-152 The Village, the Ritual, and Death....Pages 153-172 Ex Oriente Lux: Neolithic Ideology Becomes Popular....Pages 173-195 Heroes, Gods, Sanctuaries—The Male Principle and Collective Cult....Pages 197-218 The Exchange of Gifts and the Underworld: Malta....Pages 219-233 The Double Axe and the Bull—A Pantheon Develops....Pages 235-256 Back Matter....Pages 257-290