• It was built by nomadic hunter-gatherers rather than sedentary or village agriculturalists.
• It was a religious or ritual pilgrimage center that attracted people from far and wide.
• The massive stone pillars or megaliths were “temples” or “shrines.”
• Göbekli was not a residential site and the structures were not occupied.

From these conclusions flow the claim that a new kind of symbolism led to the domestication of plant and animals. According to the excavator Klaus Schmidt, hunter-gatherers living in the region developed a new religion 11,000 years ago which resulted in the Neolithic Revolution, and this radically new way of life spread from Göbekli to the rest of the world. No explanation has been offered for what might have (divinely) sparked this “new religion” that is responsible for modern civilization.

These are extraordinary claims that require extraordinary evidence. In the previous posts in this series, we have examined some of the evidence and over the past week I have read most of the Göbekli papers. The evidence does not, at this time, support these claims.

Let’s start with what the evidence does show, keeping in mind the all-important point that perhaps 5% of the total site (and none of the surrounds) have been excavated:

• The people who built and used Göbekli were hunting and gathering.
• The structures and symbols at Göbekli had ritual significance.
• The T-shaped pillars are the oldest known megaliths.
• People were preparing and eating plants-animals while at Göbekli.
• People were making tools at Göbekli.

Göbekli is undoubtedly impressive and important. It was built and used during a momentous transition in human history: from food gathering to food production. This transition or “Neolithicization” was not a single event that occurred in one place and one time. It was sporadic and uneven, taking several hundreds or even thousands of years. It occurred fitfully at different times and in different places. Göbekli was not the sole source of this transition and is not the seat of the Neolithic Revolution.

It obviously required substantial resources to build Göbekli, so how was it done? If the builders were in fact hunter-gatherers without incipient agriculture or animal husbandry, one possible answer comes from Klaus Schmidt. The picture he paints of Göbekli 11,000 years ago is of a veritable paradise or “hunter’s dream.” If the area surrounding Göbekli was as rich and full of year-round resources as he suggests, the people there would not have been ordinary hunter-gatherers.

When hunter-gatherers are fortunate enough to find themselves in resource rich areas, they tend to settle and their societies become bigger and more complex. The paradigmatic example comes from the American Northwest Coast, where natives settled on stretches of river that provided abundant and reliable salmon. They built impressive structures and developed a rich symbolism; their rituals were elaborate.

Where resources are concentrated and dense, populations grow and people have time to do things other than gather and hunt. Perhaps Göbekli was such a place.

It seems more likely however that the people at Göbekli were hunting and gathering in a resource rich area, in addition to being in a region where the process of Neolithicization was well underway. We are fortunate to have excellent descriptions of this process, which began in the Levant, in the October 2011 pre-print issue of Current Anthropology (Banning’s Göbekli article is in the already printed October issue).

In “Becoming Farmers: The Inside Story” and “Neolithization Processes in the Levant: The Outer Envelope” (open access), Anna Belfer-Cohen and Nigel Goring-Morris survey the many developments in the region which culminated in the domestication of plants and animals. The authors provide the larger historical context into which Göbekli fits and effectively demystify Göbekli in the process.

This brings us back to Banning and the questions he raises in “So Fair a House.” Banning was not the first archaeologist to suggest that Schmidt’s interpretations and claims were questionable but he was the first to write a substantive article about them. Banning is not alone in thinking that Göbekli may be a Neolithic village and not a hunter-gatherer cult center.

It is premature to decide these issues one way or another. Too little of the site and surrounding area has been excavated. Those monumental portions that have been excavated have yielded suggestive evidence. More (and finer-grained) excavation, without preconceived ideas about what is being excavated, needs to occur. Specific hypotheses need to be formulated and tested. Until these things happen, Göbekli should be bracketed with a series of question marks.

Whatever questions remain, there is no question that Klaus Schmidt deserves enormous credit and thanks. His keen eye resulted in the discovery of Göbekli, and his hard work has yielded up an historical treasure. He understands that this treasure will keep giving for decades to come and is not to be ripped out of the ground in a frenzy, monetary and political pressures notwithstanding. He is by all accounts the most gracious of hosts who shares his time and finds freely.

Göbekli is and will remain one of the world’s premier archaeological sites no matter what it actually is or represents.

References:

Goring-Morris, A., & Belfer-Cohen, A. (2011). Neolithization Processes in the Levant Current Anthropology, 52 (S4) DOI: 10.1086/658860

Belfer-Cohen, A., & Goring-Morris, A. (2011). Becoming Farmers: Current Anthropology, 52 (S4) DOI: 10.1086/658861

Those who understand Patterns of Culture as a psychoanalytic riff on national character probably haven’t read it. Nietzsche’s analysis of ancient Greek culture as an Apollonian-Dionysian dialectic is a tour de force; Benedict’s similar treatment of the Zuni, Dobu, and Kwakiutl is on par. And despite all the fieldwork-obsessed criticism of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture, it is still read by the Japanese and nearly everyone interested in Japan.

About once a year, I am reminded of Benedict’s enduring relevance. It usually happens when I come across something she has written but which was not published or is hidden away. Because Benedict was prolific and her interests so broad, this happens surprisingly often. This year I came across her 1938 “Religion” essay in General Anthropology (open access), a massive tome edited by Benedict’s teacher and mentor Franz Boas.

Although Benedict pays homage to her particularist training and the description is thick, her assay of religion betrays a deeper interest in underlying patterns and themes. The tension is palpable. Her desire to explain is repressed.

Something similar can be found in “The Vision in Plains Culture” (open access), Benedict’s vivid account of the Native American vision quest and its varying deployment among tribes from coast to coast. Published in 1922, it remains the standard reference for those who study the distinctive vision complex of the Great Plains culture area.

Ruth Benedict with Blackfeet Informants

Benedict organizes her data around three patterns that others have considered characteristic of the Plains area vision quest: (1) the infliction of self-torture, (2) the lack of a laity-shaman distinction in seeking visions, and (3) the attaining of a guardian spirit. In typical Boasian fashion, Benedict then shows that while there may be some truth to these patterns, there are many variations and the generalizations don’t always hold. She does, however, identify one that does: in the Plains area, vision seeking is an “affair of maturity and not of adolescence.” Just east or west of the Plains and toward either coast, vision seeking is usually associated with liminal rites that mark passage from adolescence to adulthood.

In closing, Benedict mimics her mentor Boas and reminds us that all this variation argues against generalization:

The very great diversity of the vision pattern even in one culture area such as the Plains is therefore evident. Not only are the general traits unevenly and even entirely lacking in certain tribes, but local developments of one kind and another have overlaid the common pattern till it is at times hardly recognizable. A blanket classification under some such heading as the “acquiring of guardian spirits” leads us nowhere.

[T]he utmost diversity which makes of Plains “religion” a heterogeneity. Animism, magic, mana-ism, mysticism — all the known classifications of religion — jostle with each other in this one area; and after all these headings were tabulated, the real diversities would still remain outside.

These points are well taken. But as is so often the case with Benedict’s work, her appended admonition does little to obscure the larger patterns and explanations lurking throughout the article. Diversity is a pattern that tells us something important about nomadic supernaturalism: across time and space, it is fluid.

As is often the case with incisive thinkers and good writers, Benedict’s mere “description” is organized and presented in a way which smacks of analysis. By showing, she tells.

Reference:

Benedict, R. (1922). The Vision in Plains Culture American Anthropologist, 24 (1), 1-23 DOI: 10.1525/aa.1922.24.1.02a00020

Although there are several striking parallels between the Levantine and Chinese Neolithic transitions (Underhill 1997), one Chinese tradition was early developing and distinctive: ancestor worship. In The Archeology of Ancient China, K.C. Chang asserts that burials dating from 3,000 BCE indicate such worship: “The probable lineage arrangement in the village cemetery and the regularity of the individual burials within the cemetery in many cases make it highly likely that the cult of ancestors to symbolize lineage solidarity had already been initiated.” Over the next several thousand years, parental reverence or “filial piety” became a cornerstone of Chinese culture and metaphysics. It remains so to this day.

In “The Place of Filial Piety in Ancient China,” Donald Holzman examines the early history of ancestor worship in China and traces its development over succeeding millennia. It is a fascinating history that seems completely foreign. As might be expected, Chinese rulers and elites found it expedient to have the microcosm (household) mirror the macrocosm (empire). Just as one must obey and revere one’s parents or elders, one must also obey and revere the emperor or state. As Holzman explains, this relationship was elevated to sacred status:

[A]t the very earliest stages in their history, the Chinese gave filial piety an extremely exalted position — treated it as something one might almost call an absolute, a metaphysical entity, something so exalted in their minds that it becomes difficult for us of another culture to appreciate it today. A brief discussion of the origin of filial piety in China will show that this phenomenon seems always to have been central in Chinese life and very seldom, if ever, called into question.

While Westerners may find this exceedingly odd, Holzman does not and compares it to Western belief:

It is a truism that the Chinese are, philosophically, down-to-earth, immanentists, uninterested in transcendence, whereas in the West God is felt to be transcendent, above and beyond us. It is also well known that the Chinese have not been interested, in their philosophies, in the origin of the world, in a Creator.

The only creators the Chinese know are the parents who gave them life and thus it is not surprising that those who have saintly natures have reacted towards their parents as men and women in the West have reacted towards the God they consider to be their Creator.

[F]ilial piety in China came to be seen as having absolute value and the worship of one’s parents (that is, one’s creators) can be compared to the worship of God in the West.

One question remains unanswered: Why did ancestor worship or filial piety arise in the first place? My guess would be that early millet and rice agriculture led to increasing social stratification — with unequal and potentially conflicting claims on land/water — and that certain families established priority for such claims. Under these circumstances, it becomes expedient to establish lineages and worship ancestors.

References:

Holzman, D. (1998). The Place of Filial Piety in Ancient China Journal of the American Oriental Society, 118 (2) DOI: 10.2307/605890

Underhill, A. (1997). Current issues in Chinese Neolithic archaeology Journal of World Prehistory, 11 (2), 103-160 DOI: 10.1007/BF02221203

The Buran-Kaya rockshelter is located in the Crimean Mountains (Ukraine) near the Black Sea. Discovered in 1990, it is one of the earliest and richest Middle to Upper Paleolithic sites in the region. The assemblage of greatest interest has been directly dated and is 32,000 years old.

In a recently published study (open access), Sandrine Prat and colleagues report on the human remains and activities at Buran-Kaya. The site contains 162 human bones — mostly fragmented crania — representing 5 individuals (an adult, subadult, and juvenile). The skulls show unequivocal evidence of processing; cut marks have created multiple and parallel striations. Non-human crania at the site do not show similar signs of processing. The human heads were being treated differently. The question is why.

The authors suggest the cutting “could be interpreted as a mortuary ritual, either ritual cannibalism or a specific mortuary practice: post-mortem disarticulation processes of corpses for secondary disposal,” and is evidence of symbolic behavior related to the dead. This is a plausible suggestion. The authors then suggest a distinction between “ritual cannibalism” and “dietary cannibalism.” If ethnographic analogues are any guide, these suggestions are not mutually exclusive: the processing of human heads could have been all these things.

Among hunter-gatherers, the killing and eating of big-game is never simply a dietary act. Food is symbolic; rituals surround its preparation and consumption. If this is true of ordinary big-game, it would have been doubly true of extraordinary big-game. Hunting large mammals is a dangerous business and would have been most dangerous when humans were the prey. So when human head soup was on the menu, the ritualism surely was intense. Knowing this, it seems unlikely we can ever distinguish “ritual” and “dietary” cannibalism: the two are intertwined.

Following the feast (if it was that), the crania could been specially treated in some kind of mortuary ritual. We don’t know whether the crania belonged to strangers/enemies or relatives/friends. If the former, the crania may have been curated out of respect. If the latter, the crania may have been curated for different reasons. Perhaps they were symbols and sources of power or prowess.

The processed crania from Buran-Kaya are hardly unique; we find evidence of similar treatments, widely spread in space and time, throughout the Middle and Upper Paleolithic. Whether it was cannibalistic or mortuary or both, it seems likely that head hunting and handling was symbolically and ritualistically charged.

Reference:

Prat S, Péan SC, Crépin L, Drucker DG, Puaud SJ, Valladas H, Lázničková-Galetová M, van der Plicht J, & Yanevich A (2011). The oldest anatomically modern humans from far southeast europe: direct dating, culture and behavior. PloS one, 6 (6) PMID: 21698105

The assumption has always been that these were grandpa’s and grandma’s bones. Many archaeologists, including Ian Hodder, have suggested this signals a change in community structure: ancestral lineages were linked to resource ownership and social stratification.

This is in stark contrast to nomadic hunter-gatherers who place little emphasis on ancestors, presumably because resources are communally shared. There is no need to link ancestral lineages to property or power.

A recent study, however, challenges these assumptions. Marin Pilloud and Clark Spencer Larsen studied tooth morphology to test the hypothesis that the multiple burials within each home were biological kin indicative of ancestral lineages. Their findings, however, indicated otherwise:

Results indicate that inclusion for interment within a house was only minimally related to biological affinity. Moreover, the site does not appear to be organized into larger, biologically related neighborhoods of houses.

These findings suggest that Çatalhöyük may not have been a kin-based society, largely because membership within a house cemetery was not solely defined on the basis of biological affinity, such as in a family group.

Rather, it appears that social structure was centered on the house as the unifying social principle. The choice for interment location may have transcended biological lines thereby creating an alternate and more fluid definition of “kin.”

While this is surprising it is not altogether unexpected. Hunter-gatherers had long been using fictive kinship to enlarge their relations and increase group size. There is significant ethnohistoric evidence of this among the Plains Indians. Most foraging bands were composed not of close kin, but of independent households that were attracted to particular leaders or chiefs.

To take but one well known example, suppose that Crazy Horse’s large band (about 900 people) of Lakota had been buried together by virtue of some catastrophic geological event. Although a study of tooth morphology would reveal a good deal of biological kinship, many would not be so related. This does not mean Crazy Horse band members did not consider themselves kin (because they mostly did) but it would show that kinship was not a simple matter of biology. Viewed from this perspective, we should not be overly surprised by these findings from Catalhoyuk.

It is always good to be reminded that our assumptions may be wrong and that we cannot simply project modern ideas about ancestry into the deep past.

Reference:

Pilloud, Marin A., & Larsen, Clark Spencer (2011). “Official” and “practical” kin: Inferring social and community structure from dental phenotype at Neolithic Çatalhöyük, Turkey. American Journal of Physical Anthropology (May 17) : 10.1002/ajpa.21520

It surely was no coincidence that later in the year, Nebraska experienced a sharp drop in tourism and state troopers issued record numbers of tickets to drivers in a hurry to pass through the state. Who can blame people for wanting to avoid scythe-wielding Corn Children with a pagan penchant for ritual murder:

You know things are bad when post-apocalyptic berserker Linda Hamilton (aka Sarah Connor) cannot avoid a corn crucifixion:

Now that is a high intensity ritual! But if Quentin Atkinson and Harvey Whitehouse are correct, it is not true to form.

In “The Cultural Morphospace of Ritual Form: Examining Modes of Religiosity Cross-Culturally,” Atkinson and Whitehouse use the latter’s mode of religiosity theory to predict ritual forms. This theory proposes that two different kinds of cognitive memory systems — episodic and semantic — are linked to (and subserve) two broad categories of religion: “imagistic” and “doctrinal.”

The imagistic mode of religion is based on rare, climactic rituals that are extremely intense. The doctrinal mode revolves around frequently repeated rituals (or teachings) that are relatively sedate. The theory predicts that rituals associated with imagistic religions will be low frequency and high arousal, whereas rituals associated with doctrinal religions will be high frequency and low arousal.

To test these predictions the authors used a sample of 74 randomly selected societies drawn from the Human Relations Area Files, a well known and highly respected ethnographic database. They coded the rituals for frequency and arousal. As predicted, they found that ritual frequency is negatively correlated with ritual intensity. Ritual intensity levels were highest for once in a lifetime rituals and lowest for daily ones. There is a big arousal difference, in other words, between the Native American vision quest and attending Mass or performing Salah.

When the authors analyzed the variables associated with ritual intensity and arousal, they found that “reliance on agriculture is a key predictor of variation” and that agricultural intensity best predicts ritual intensity. Hardcore farmers prefer lowkey rituals. Hunter-gatherers, by contrast, tend towards the hardcore:

These findings are not surprising. If we suppose that “religions” can in fact be roughly divided into two types and follow Whitehouse’s division, it seems that “imagistic” religions describe the beliefs of most pre-state or small-scale societies, and that “doctrinal” religions entail the beliefs of most agricultural and industrial societies.

If this is the case, then religion-ritual variation (“imagistic” or “doctrinal”) might be better explained as a difference in political economy. The basic difference, in other words, is that pre-state and small-scale societies generally lack the kinds of elites, institutions, and technologies that promote “doctrinal” modes of religion. They also tend to lack writing and books, which may be prerequisites for “doctrinal” forms of religion.

We can also observe that until 10,000 years ago (i.e., before the Neolithic Revolution) all “religions” were shamanic and therefore imagistic. The domestication of plants and animals led to the development of city-states and resulted in a shift to more organized, systematic, and “doctrinal” forms of religion.

Thus while it may be true that “imagistic” religions draw primarily on episodic memory and “doctrinal” religions draw primarily on semantic memory, this cognitive association seems to be an historical effect rather than a biological cause. As Marx and Engels suggested long ago, a society’s mode of production generally determines its form of religion.

What does this have to do with deranged Corn Children? Assuming they planted the endless and eerie corn fields in the movie, we would predict their rituals to be mellow or even bookish. Ritual crucifixions and bloody murders don’t fit the predicted pattern. Either Stephen King missed the memo or he used the maize-loving Aztecs as his model.

Reference:

Atkinson, Quentin D., & Whitehouse, Harvey (2011). The Cultural Morphospace of Ritual Form: Examining Modes of Religiosity Cross-Culturally. Evolution and Human Behavior, 32 (1), 50-62 DOI: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2010.09.002

Modern Japanese understand what happened in scientific terms — crustal plates, subduction zones, and water columns — explain what occurred. But not more than a few hundred years ago, the explanation would have been much different: sea spirits had been angered and were punishing the people.

The Japanese are not alone in this respect. Most humans throughout history have used stories in similar fashion. The resulting oral traditions “are cultural forms that organize perceptions about the world” (Cruikshank 1992:40). Although stories are used to acquire, organize, store, and share information relevant to survival, they are more than this. They also enable people to “make sense of unpredictable destructive natural forces in their landscape” (McMillan & Hutchinson 2002:44).

Like the Japanese, indigenous peoples living along America’s Northwest Coast (near the Cascadia subduction zone) experienced devastating earthquakes and tsunamis. And like pre-modern Japanese, many Northwest Coast peoples told stories about these events and their supposed causes. For many tribes in this area, the explanation was simple: when the mountain dwarfs danced, the earth shook. Those who paid no heed to this shaking — i.e., those who failed to run to high ground or did not lash sturdy canoes to tall trees — were inevitably doomed by the oncoming wall of water.

In “When the Mountain Dwarfs Danced: Aboriginal Traditions of Paleoseismic Events along the Cascadia Subduction Zone of Western North America,” ethnohistorians Alan McMillan and Ian Hutchinson have collected many of these stories and concluded that several recount historically known and archaeologically detectable events. Most involved supernatural beings or dwarfs:

The mountain dwarfs, in Nuu-chah-nulth belief, were responsible for the earth shaking. In discussing supernatural beings recognized by the Nuuchah-nulth, Philip Drucker (1951:154) states: ‘‘There were also dwarfs, who had houses inside of mountains, where they enticed the unwary to dance with them around and around a great wooden drum. Sooner or later he [the unwary visitor] stumbled against the drum, and became afflicted with a peculiar disease called ‘‘earthquake foot’’— every time he took a step the ground shook.

In the Bella Coola Valley, the Nuxalk had a different explanation: “According to their beliefs, the earth is held in place with strong ropes held by a giant supernatural being. Earthquakes occur when the ropes slip from this being’s grasp or when he moves his hands to get a better grip.”

What I find most interesting about these stories is that they demonstrate the fundamental human need for explanation. Any explanation is better than none; the terror of the unknown and unpredictable is too much for most. In addition to providing teleological solace, most of the stories also provide instruction: what to expect when the dwarfs dance and what action needs to be taken. These stories are not just stories; they look much like adaptations.

References:

McMillan, A. (2002). When the Mountain Dwarfs Danced: Aboriginal Traditions of Paleoseismic Events along the Cascadia Subduction Zone of Western North America. Ethnohistory, 49 (1), 41-68 DOI: 10.1215/00141801-49-1-41

Cruikshank, Julie (1992). Invention of Anthropology in British Columbia’s Supreme Court: Oral Tradition as Evidence in Delgamuukw v. B.C. BC Studies (95), 25-42

In 2008, Bernard Chapais published Primeval Kinship: How Pair-Bonding Gave Birth to Human Society. Chapais observes that primate sexual practices limit the recognition of kinship. When kinship is recognized, it does not extend far. This in turn constrains group size, composition, and alliances. Humans are obviously different, but how did it happen? Commenting on a recent study of hunter-gatherer group composition and kinship that appeared in Science, Chapais explains:

A key event might have been the advent of pair bonding in the human lineage. Our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, live in large mixed-sex groups [and] mate promiscuously, with both sexes having multiple short-term partners. [This results in a genealogical structure that] is to a large extent “socially silent.” Now suppose that pair bonding evolved in this type of social structure. This brought the multifamily composition of human groups, with enduring associations between mothers and fathers enabling children to recognize their fathers. This, in turn, made it possible for children to recognize their father’s relatives; that is, pair bonding would reveal the underlying genealogical structure and create bilateral kinship.

In the nascent “tribe,” males were now able to circulate freely between groups in which they had kin and in-laws, cross-sex kin maintained lifetime bonds, and between group alliances were ensured by kinship bonds, “marital” ties, and the ensuing extensive networks of bonds between in-laws. [T]he dramatic and fortuitous extension of kin recognition brought about by pair bonding would have launched the evolution of supragroup social structures in which a large proportion of individuals were now distantly related.

Pair bonding, in other words, triggered a cascade of kinship effects that irrevocably altered human social structure. Groups would have become larger, more cooperative, and more cohesive. Networks resulting from pair bonding and bilateral kinship would have enabled between group cooperation and “multilevel alliance structures.” These effects are mathematically unassailable and ethnographically observed.

Chapais was not, however, the first to suggest that pair bonding is a key hominid adaptation. In his 1981 article “The Origin of Man,” C. Owen Lovejoy proposed that pair bonding was the “breakthrough” adaptation for hominids. While intriguing, Lovejoy’s hypothesis was largely referential (depending heavily on primate models) and theoretical (grounded extensively in life history analytics). It was short on evidence, whether from fossils or people. Three decades later, there is now some evidence from both.

In 2009, Lovejoy was part of the team that unveiled the 4.4 million year old Ardipithecus ramidus or “Ardi” in a special issue of Science. The team argued that Ardipithecus is an ancestral hominid and the genus that spawned Australopithecus (which in turn led to Homo). Lovejoy’s contribution, “Reexamining Human Origins in Light of Ardipithecus ramidus,” re-states his case for pair bonding as a breakthrough adaptation and places it within a suite of adaptations that uniquely altered the course of hominid evolution. It is a densely packed and impressive argument that hangs primarily on the slender thread of canine reduction in Ardipithecus.

Although Lovejoy’s paean to proto-marriage has the distinct feel of an umbrella hypothesis, this does not make it untrue. In fact, the recent study of hunter-gatherer group composition by Kim Hill and colleagues provides additional support for the idea that pair bonding is the key to extended kinship. While we currently have no way of knowing when hominids began pair bonding, there seems to be little doubt that it played a critical role in human evolution.

Given this fact, it is not surprising that nearly all organized religions target and sanctify this key evolutionary adaptation. It is important to realize, however, that the pair bond has not always been subject to supernatural sanction or ritual blessing. In many pre-state societies where shamanic practices prevail, pair bonding or “marriage” is a rather low key affair detached from the spirit world. Hunter-gatherers “marry” and “divorce” with relative ease and without the kinds of rituals or covenants that arose in conjunction with the earliest organized religions. The metaphysics of modern marriage are a post-Neolithic invention.

References:

Chapais, B. (2011). The Deep Social Structure of Humankind. Science, 331 (6022), 1276-1277 DOI: 10.1126/science.1203281

Hill, K., Walker, R., Bozicevic, M., Eder, J., Headland, T., Hewlett, B., Hurtado, A., Marlowe, F., Wiessner, P., & Wood, B. (2011). Co-Residence Patterns in Hunter-Gatherer Societies Show Unique Human Social Structure. Science, 331 (6022), 1286-1289 DOI: 10.1126/science.1199071

Lovejoy, C. (1981). The Origin of Man. Science, 211 (4480), 341-350 DOI: 10.1126/science.211.4480.341

Lovejoy, C. (2009). Reexamining Human Origins in Light of Ardipithecus ramidus. Science, 326 (5949), 74-74 DOI: 10.1126/science.1175834

Langdon, J. (1997). Umbrella hypotheses and parsimony in human evolution: a critique of the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis. Journal of Human Evolution, 33 (4), 479-494 DOI: 10.1006/jhev.1997.0146

The blood rituals were considered part of a reciprocal relationship between humankind and god; the ultimate gift is blood and is amongst the highest honour one can pay to the gods. Aztec blood rituals were an act of reciprocity for the blood the gods sacrificed of themselves in order to create the sun and the cosmos. Blood sacrifices ensured the gods would remain helpful and they ensured the sun would continue to shine, the fields would grow abundant crops and the wheels of life would continue to turn.

In part two, Pendragon continues along these lines and suggests that Aztec bloodlust is linked primarily to ideas:

Fear of pain and suffering inflicted by the gods in retribution for any lack of blood sacrifice would have been an overwhelming incentive to constantly sacrifice and appease the vengeful gods.

While there can be little doubt that ideas had something to do with the almost unimaginable amounts of blood spilled by the Aztecs, the “purpose” of such rituals extends far beyond the realm of emic beliefs or priestly rationalizations.

The Aztecs were a militaristic and imperial society situated in an impoverished and precarious ecological environment.  By the time they achieved dominance (circa 1460 CE), the Valley of Mexico had been intensively exploited for thousands of years.  The deer were gone and soils impoverished.  The empire was sustained in large part by warfare and conquest — taking resources from others.  Such taking is of course a bloody business.

It is therefore no accident that the Aztecs focused their ritualistic activities on blood (coming mostly from prisoners taken in warfare).  While the Aztecs may have believed their gods were insatiable, this appears to have been little more than a projection of their own thirsts and needs.

One explanation for Dyson’s contrarian stance is that he sees environmentalists as religionists and their beliefs as faith:

In the June 12, 2008, New York Review of Books, in an essay called “The Question of Global Warming,” Dyson reviews books on that subject by William Nordhaus and Ernesto Zedillo. He writes: “All the books that I have seen about the science and economics of global warming, including the two books under review, miss the main point. The main point is religious rather than scientific. There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth.”

After halfheartedly endorsing this idea of stewardship, Dyson goes on to lament that “the worldwide community of environmentalists—most of whom are not scientists”—have “adopted as an article of faith the belief that global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet.”

After noting that Dyson does not profess this faith as his own, Brower confirms that he was raised in it:

Environmentalism does indeed make a very satisfactory kind of religion. It is the faith in which I myself was brought up. In my family, we had no other. My father, David Brower, the first executive director of the Sierra Club and the founder of Friends of the Earth, could confer no higher praise than “He has the religion.” By this, my father meant that the person in question understood, felt the cause and the imperative of environmentalism in his or her bones.

The tenets go something like this: this living planet is the greatest of miracles. We Homo sapiens, for all the exceptionalism of our species, are part of a terrestrial web of life and are utterly dependent upon it. Nature runs the biosphere much better than we do, as we demonstrate with our ham-handedness each time we try.

This is all quite interesting and speaks to the issue of what constitutes “religion.”  If one added to Brower’s description the idea that the biosphere is somehow sentient, aware, active, and responsive (something along the lines of the Gaia Hypothesis with a supernatural twist), then I would tend more to the religion classification.  This, of course, is why the Vatican declared Avatar to be a dangerous and heretical movie.  I loved it.