Food storage facilitates professional religious specialization in hunter-gatherer societies.

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 phylogenet

SUBMITTER: Watts J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10426101 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature