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

Lowie begins by noting that Indians did not recognize the physical/metaphysical dichotomy that characterizes Western thought, but they “can and did react vehemently to perceptions that are wholly out of the normal range of experience.”  These were things that struck them as “mysterious, weird, or miraculous, thrilling or awe inspiring.” 

Nearly every tribe had an umbrella word to describe such perceptions; for the Lakota (Sioux) it is “wakan” and for the Crow (Apsaroke) it is “maxpe.”  There is also the famous Algonkian (Winnebago) “manitou.” 

My version of Lowie’s book (Univ. of Nebraska/Bison) has a preface written by Raymond DeMallie.  In his otherwise superb introduction DeMallie points out some problems with the book, one supposedly being that “Indian religion” is no longer discussed under the heading “supernaturalism.”  This assertion, unexplicated or explained, strikes me as wrong. 

The leading authority on this subject, Ake Hultkrantz, uses the term “supernaturalism” and I think it is quite fitting given the diverse and non-systematic nature of Amerindian beliefs.  Using the term “religion” to describe these ideas sends messages that are not in the ethnohistoric record.

These killings have a purpose, but one that did not emerge until after Ngogo chimps’ patrols had been tracked and cataloged for 10 years. The Ngogo group has about 150 chimps and is particularly large, about three times the usual size. And its size makes it unusually aggressive. Its males directed most of their patrols against a chimp group that lived in a region to the northeast of their territory. Last year, the Ngogo chimps stopped patrolling the region and annexed it outright, increasing their home territory by 22 percent.

The Times reporter, Nicholas Wade, continues with an interesting observation and comparison:

Warfare among human groups that still live by hunting and gathering resembles chimp warfare in several ways. Foragers emphasize raids and ambushes in which few people are killed, yet casualties can mount up with incessant skirmishes.

Why do chimps incur the risk and time costs of patrolling into enemy territory when the advantage accrues most evidently to the group? Dr. Mitani invokes the idea of group-level selection — the idea that natural selection can work on groups and favor behaviors, like altruism and cooperation, that benefit the group at the expense of the individual. Selection usually depends only on whether an individual, not a group, leaves more surviving children.

Many biologists are skeptical of group-level selection, saying it could be effective only in cases where there is intense warfare between groups, a reduced rate of selection on individuals, and little interchange of genes between groups.

Although Wade is not a biologist, he is not skeptical of group level selection — indeed, he is an ardent advocate.  In his recent book, The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved & Why It Endures, Wade contends that religion was an adaptation specifically targeted by selection because it made groups more cohesive and cooperative.  This, in turn, enabled religious groups to better compete against other groups.  A major aspect of this enhanced ability to compete, so the argument goes, is that religious groups are better able to war against non-religious groups.  Wade is not alone in believing this; the anthropologist David Sloan Wilson and evolutionary psychologist Matt Rossano make similar arguments.

The recent chimp study — “Lethal intergroup aggression leads to territorial expansion in wild chimpanzees” — bears on this hypothesis.  The aggressive Kibale group is exceptionally large because it occupies particularly fertile territory.  This fertile territory sustains larger numbers of chimps, who in turn cooperate and use this numerical advantage to further enlarge their territory.  No one has ever suggested that chimps are spiritual or religious, so these activities — cooperation and warfare — are not being driven by these abstractions.  Kinship is the primary factor holding the males of these groups together, and which causes them to cooperate.

This is quite similar to the ethnohistoric situation on the Great Plains.  From 1680 to 1880, Plains Indian tribes such as the Lakota, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche, Crow, Kiowa-Apache, Shoshoni, Blackfoot, Cree, Gros Ventre, Flathead, and Sarsi constantly warred against one another for territory, horses, and booty.  These hunting and gathering groups were held together first and foremost by extended kinship ties; shamans neither organized nor lead war parties.  These tribes neither invoked nor relied on religious differences as a justification for war or raiding.  In fact, it would have been impossible to do so given that these tribes had substantially similar types of beliefs and rituals.  The most successful of these tribes — the Lakota — enlarged their numbers and expanded their territory not because they were more spiritual or religious than the other tribes, or had more effective group rituals.  Instead, they had various material, geographic, and economic advantages which enabled them to succeed.

This is not to say that in certain places and at certain times some groups used religion to bind them together and justify war.  It occurred many times and in many places, but this is fairly recent behavior that corresponds to the rise of the first city-states in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Near East.  Because this is modern behavior that is the product of rulers and elites marrying religion to power, I cannot see how it has anything to do with the evolutionary origins of religion.

For those unfamiliar Lakota history from 1850-1890 and the larger Ghost Dance movement that began in 1879, this is a nice introduction.  At a mere 200 pages, Moon of the Popping Trees qualifies as a summer read, suitable for the beach.  Its most outstanding feature is Smith’s effort to tell the story from two perspectives — that of the government, army, and settlers on the one side and of the splintered Lakota on the other.  Smith largely succeeds in this until the final chapters, when it comes to the events of Wounded Knee.

Non-polarized assessments are not very popular these days, and Smith’s contentions are sure to offend all sides.  No one comes out looking particularly good, and each side has its share of good and bad.  Smith’s determination to tell a balanced story is both a strength and a weakness.  One gets the sense that for each event, there are two perspectives (true) and each perspective was simultaneously reasonable and unreasonable (not so true).  There comes a point when balance for balance’s sake ends up distorting actual history.

While I recommend this book, there is a problem: Smith is neither an historian nor an academic.  Under different circumstances, I would say this is a plus — scholarly writing can be dessicated, narrow, and digressive.  In this case however, Smith is covering disputed ground and without citations (there are no footnotes or endnotes, though there is a sparse bibliography that would not be acceptable to a graduate school committee or peer review panel) one cannot verify Smith’s assertions or arguments.

Finally, I find it hard to accept his conclusion that Wounded Knee was a “battle” rather than a “massacre.”  Even if one was not aware of the many different accounts of this event (which I am), you could use Smith’s information to come to a completely different conclusion.

Smith notes that Chief Big Foot’s abject band of 300 was comprised mostly of women and children, that the adult men among them were few and not well armed, and that all of them were starving and suffering from prolonged exposure to cold.  Before embarking on their trek which tragically ended at Wounded Knee, they had spent more than a decade on the reservation, being systematically beaten down and broken apart.

Contrast this to the 500 well-fed, equipped, and armed soldiers sent to prevent Chief Big Foot’s band from reaching Pine Ridge.  This army unit infamously included the reconstituted 7th Cavalry, which had been humiliated at the Custer battle in 1876 and was itching for retribution.  Smith provides us with the chilling orders issued to the army, but says nothing more about the implications:

Disarm the Indians.  Take every precaution to prevent their escape.  If they choose to fight, destroy them.

Short, concise, and clear.  The results were deadly, and it was not a battle.  One can come to this conclusion only by relying primarily or exclusively on government and army sources, which apparently is what Smith did.

In the end, 200 Lakota lay dead and 25 soldiers were killed.  Beginning with the famous photo of Chief Big Foot (who was suffering from pneumonia and coughing blood when the shooting started), here is the gruesome aftermath:

It is hard to look at these photos and not be reminded of events in Europe fifty years later.

While Smith claims that most of the soldiers were killed by a few warriors defending the women, children, and elderly being slaughtered by 500 troopers using rifles and 4 Hotchkiss cannons with exploding shells (with a firing rate of 1 shell per second), this strains credulity.  Unwisely, the army commander had formed his troops in a circle around the Lakota, so when the firing began the troopers were shooting not only at the unprotected Lakota, but also at their fellows — killing each other with “friendly” fire.  This resulted in a court martial for the commander.

These defects aside, Moon of the Popping Trees offers considerable insight into the dysfunctional social and economic conditions that often lead to millenarian, apocalyptic, and eschatological religious movements.

When I lecture or write on this critical — albeit little known — topic, I like to use a string of “s” words to describe the consequences of domestication:

• Sedentism
• Surplus
• Specialization
• Stratification
• Sickness

These seemingly innocuous words are but basic descriptions for much larger changes in population, politics, warfare, economy, and religion.  The default assumption for most people seems to be that these changes were an unmitigated improvement and herald the dawn of “civilization.”

I have never been convinced that these effects were for the better; in that sense, I am a proud member of the “Paleoterrific” crowd.  This first dawned on me after reading Marshall Sahlins’ classic article, “The Original Affluent Society” and his book on paleolithic lifeways, Stone Age Economics.  Both should be required reading for those who believe that post-Neolithic civilization has been good either for humanity or earth.  Since first reading Sahlins’ article and book, I have read hundreds of ethnohistories and ethnographies on hunter-gatherers, including archaeological assessments of foraging, and nothing has changed my mind.

Although these issues do not receive much attention in the popular press, the BBC’s science reporter Paul Rincon recently interviewed Dr. Spencer Wells, who is the geneticist, anthropologist, and explorer in residence at the National Geographic Society (sounds like a very nice job).  During the interview, “Sting in the Tail of the Farming Revolution,” Wells expounded on the problems resulting from intensive agriculture, which makes everything else about “civilization” possible:

In [my new book Pandora's Seed], I talk about global warming and overpopulation. I trace a lot of these issues back in time to the dawn of the Neolithic. This was a period when humanity made a sea change in its culture. We settled down and started growing our own food.

Given that it has been so successful – 99.99% of the people in the world today are agriculturalists, and hunter-gatherers are a tiny minority – you would guess that it is successful for a reason. That it is a wonderful way of life, improved our health and so on.

It turns out, that’s not actually the case. Even if you look at very early communities, as they made the transition from a hunting and gathering lifestyle to farming in the same region, they became less healthy. They ended up shorter, they tended to die younger, the skeletal structure changed in a way that’s consistent with a decreased level of nutrition. So the question is why did (farming) win out?

Wells provides a climatological explanation, which may be partially correct and even necessary, but it is not sufficient.  Any explanation that fails to include the inexorable and uncontrollable drive to have sex and reproduce cannot be complete.  Regardless, Wells ascertains that farming has led to many unexpected and unpleasant consequences from which there may be no turning back:

Wells: But unfortunately, [the agricultural revolution] had lots of ancillary baggage. And the book is really about tracing that ancillary baggage. Diabetes, obesity, mental illness, climate change.

Rincon: How would people in western societies fare now if we had to be more like hunter-gatherers again?

Wells: I think we’d be in trouble (laughs). I think I’m probably romanticising hunter-gatherers somewhat in the book. But I have spent time with these groups and there is this remarkable sense of calm and almost coming home after a few days.

And it’s because they utilise so much of what it is to be human. So many different parts of the brain – their natural history knowledge is extraordinary.

Then there are the tracking skills, the hunting skills, the gathering skills, knowing where to find things at particular times of year. Even though it looks like a desert, you know where to dig down and find a tuber that’s going to keep you alive for a few more days.

We’ve lost all of that, and I think we’ve lost a lot in the process. We live in a very technological world, where everything’s available to us on Google. But if we lost that ability to Google things and we had to go out and subsist for ourselves in a marginal environment, I don’t know that we’d be able to do it. Once you lose it, it’s very difficult to get it back.

Wells’ ancillary baggage list is actually pretty tame; the slaughterbench of post-Neolithic history is perverse and the destruction of the earth’s plants, animals, and environment proceeds without pause.  The disaster in the Gulf is but the latest example, and is symptomatic of post-Neolithic societies. To this dismal list, I would add the all-important breakup of extended kinship groups, communal sharing of resources, and egalitarian ways of hunter-gatherers.

The Lakota and other Native Americans had good reason for resisting the advance of European civilization and detesting nearly everything about it, beginning with its intense focus on individualism, acquisition, consumption, and materialism.  Most of them thought the same of its pessimistic, prescriptive, doctrinal, and intolerant religious practices.

I mention this because Sam Harris (the neuroscientist) is engaged in a debate with Sean Carroll (the physicist) and PZ Myers (the biologist) over whether there can be a science of morality.  This debate has been joined by Phillip Goldberg (the ecumenical minister), who asserts:

Sam Harris describes his plan to formulate a science-based morality. It is an intriguing enterprise, and I wish him well. A rigorous enquiry could shed light on questions such as what constitutes the common good and which behaviors ought to be encouraged or discouraged. It might give secularists something to hang their ethical hats on, providing an evidence-based critique of precepts that have come down to us from old religious codes.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if Harris’ enterprise derives moral maxims that sound like the dos and don’ts of religions? Obviously, many religion-based tenets — those related to sex, the draconian punishments, etc. — will not make the cut, but they’re pretty much dead already except among a fanatical minority. But other principles, not just from the West, but from Buddhist precepts and the Hindu yamas and niyamas — don’t steal, don’t lie, be kind, help others, etc. — are likely to stand up to scientific scrutiny.

Goldberg obviously is not an anthropologist or an historian, or he would know that moral-ethical precepts did not “come down to us from old religious codes.”  The basic tenets that Goldberg mentions (and which are common to most morally-based religions) — “don’t steal, don’t lie, be kind, help others, etc.” — have been around for a long, long time.  These precepts pre-date the rise of the first city-states (~4,500 BC), and are commonly found in hunter-gatherer societies.  In all likelihood, these precepts have been present in such societies for at least 50,000 years.

In historic times, one can find this idea among the Lakota or Sioux Indians.  In Land of the Spotted Eagle and My People the Sioux, Luther Standing Bear describes in detail what is known as “the Lakota way,” which encapsulates Lakota understandings of what constitutes moral or ethical behavior.  These understandings are little different from (and in several ways superior to) the basic moral injunctions contained in ethical world religions.  There is however one major difference, as Standing Bear states: “But this arrangement was not assigned to divine instruction nor given a religious hue; it was wholly and solely an adjustment with the social plans of the tribe.”

As for Goldberg’s contention that “which behaviors ought to be encouraged or discouraged” spring from the “do’s and don’ts of religion,” this completely ignores the fact that the earliest legal codes — which specifically described behaviors to be encouraged-discouraged in the form of do’s and don’ts, pre-date the rise of the oldest world religions.  While the Ten Commandments (Jewish) and the maxims of the Rig Veda (Hindu) are respectably old, both dating from around 1,500 BC, the Sumerians had a legal code (which addressed moral and ethical issues) more than a thousand years earlier.  The Sumerian code makes no reference to religion and is not based on religion.  By the same token, the Babylonian King Hammurabi formulated his famous law code (based on moral and ethical behavior) hundreds of years before the Ten Commandments or Rig Veda were conceived or written.  Hammurabi’s code was neither based on nor grounded in religion.

There is, therefore, no historical evidence to support the idea that moral and ethical precepts originate with — or are dependent on — religion.  The conflation of morality with religion is a relatively recent development in human history, and it is limited to certain peoples in certain places who practice certain religions.

All this aside, there already is a substantial body of scientific research which demonstrates that moral and prosocial behavior has a long evolutionary history and that such behavior is biologically rooted.  Some primates, untutored children, and adults in all cultures appear to possess basic concepts of altruism, cooperation, fairness, sharing, and tend to treat others in a manner that could easily be described as “the golden rule.” Primates and humans are intensely social, so these findings should come as no surprise.

There are of course exceptions to moral and proscial behavior, given that cultural patterning will significantly impact moral valuations, judgments, and actions.  Moreover,  individual pathologies — which may result from either brain defects or experiential trauma — can derail the basic moral-ethical tool-kit which all of us possess at birth.

There is one aspect of the article which deserves further mention.  The findings which Sethi reports are relevant to James McClenon’s argument in Wondrous Healing: Shamanism, Human Evolution, and the Origin of Religion.  McClenon’s thesis is that shamans throughout history have been healers, and that shamanism could be an evolved adaptation.  Essential to McClenon’s argument is that the people being treated by shamans (a) must believe in the shaman’s power to heal, and (b) have better outcomes if they are prone to hypnotic states similar to those described in Sethi’s article.  What is being described here is the power of placebo, which is undeniable and empirically supported by numerous controlled medical studies.

A fascinating account of shamanic success in healing comes from James R. Walker’s Lakota Belief and Ritual.  Walker was an American medical doctor who in 1896 became the head of medical services on the Sioux Pine Ridge Reservation; he remained in that position until 1914.  Almost immediately and contrary to his expectations, Dr. Walker noticed that his interventions were significantly more successful when patients received both Western medical treatment from Walker and healing treatment from Lakota shamans or medicine-men (“wicasa wakan“).  This, in turn, prompted Walker to learn the ways of Lakota shamans and Walker himself eventually became a wicasa wakan, incorporating traditional healing methods into his medical practice.

Between McClenon’s empirical findings and Walker’s medical practice, there is powerful evidence to suggest that shamanic techniques of healing improve outcomes.  Neither McClenon nor Walker, however, stated whether these improved medical/healing outcomes were the result of suggestion (placebo) or the work of spirits, and both seemed open to either idea or some combination thereof.  The suspension of disbelief can, under certain circumstances, be a wonderful thing.

The concept of “religion” is Western and recent.  Simply having a category called “religion” implies there is something — a set of practices, rituals, and beliefs — that is separate and apart from other domains that are non-religious.  I was reminded of this the other day while reading Raymond DeMallie’s “Lakota Belief and Ritual in the Nineteenth Century”:

It is essential at the outset to emphasize that traditional Lakota lifeways were not compartmentalized into the distinct institutions that characterize modern America.  Religion was not separated out from the rest of social life but was an organic part of the whole….In a very real sense, humankind and nature were one, just as the natural and supernatural, so basic to European thought, was meaningless in Lakota culture.

The Lakota were not alone in their monism.  Most small-scale societies had (or have) similar views.  It is primarily in the West that we find a dualistic (natural/supernatural) cosmology.

This obviously poses something of a problem for scholars of “religion.”  It also raises the issue of whether etic (outsider) studies of the emic (insider) can proceed in a meaningful way.  I think they can.

Over at his blog, the Oxford anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse asserted (after drinking several glasses of wine) that religion was akin to ratatouille, and classified religions as being of four “types” (similar to four recipes for ratatouille).  Maurice Bloch responded with this zinger:

If we go on with considering explaining religion as a legitimate scientific enterprise we imply that all humans have an essential characteristic which can be indicated by the R word. This would mean that religion is a feature of human beings, rather like the shape of their femur. This is wrong, highly misleading and it plays into an insidious argument that our language lets us slide into….

Humans may not have a religion bone, but there does seem to be something about our universal cognitive architecture that lends itself to metaphysical thinking.  Having said this, Bloch raises some important and subtle questions about treating “religion” as a category.  There is a slippery slope here, which can be traversed so long as one anchors the concept of religion in history and carefully defines the term.

In the so-called postmodern culture of late consumer capitalism, a significant number of white affluent suburban and urban middle-aged baby boomers complain of feeling uprooted from cultural traditions, community belonging, and spiritual meaning.  The New Age movement is one such response to these feelings.  New Agers romanticize an “authentic” and “traditional” Native American culture whose spirituality can save them from their own sense of malaise.  However, as products of the very consumer culture they seek to escape, these New Agers pursue spiritual meaning and cultural identification through acts of purchase.

Which cultural traditions could give rise to this peculiar form of nostalgia?  Surely not many such traditions have ever existed in mainstream US culture.  My guess is that this nostalgia is actually a yearning for a different way of life.

I am not aware of many cultural traditions rooted in capitalism that promote a sense of community belonging (or the idea that extended families and kinship networks are important).  It is no accident that our primary sense of community belonging now revolves around the nation-state: “Proud to be an American”!

Indeed, the necessities of capitalist production require the destruction of community and the formation of new identities revolving around the nuclear family and individual.  Nuclear families and individuals are mobile and can be plugged into the system wherever they are most needed, all in the pursuit of perceived self interest (i.e., making more money and accumulating more things).

Traditional Native Americans did, in fact, experience something radically different.  After the Lakota were finally subdued and confined to reservations, astute government agents recognized that the primary obstacles to “civilizing” and assimilating the Lakota into American society arose from their culture of sharing all resources and gift giving that prevented accumulation.  In 1881, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs bluntly stated that extended families and kinship networks needed to be broken, and an appreciation for ownership instilled in the Lakota:

Private property tends to break up tribal relations.  It has the effect of creating individuality, responsibility, and a desire to accumulate property.  It teaches the Indians habits of industry and frugality, and stimulates them to look forward to a better and more useful life.

All this leaves me wondering whether Americans afflicted by individuality and accumulation can find much comfort in a spiritual tradition that is deeply tied to a form of economy so different from our own.