Early Migrations
From Mbscientific_wiki
The story of our social evolution begins with migration, tens of thousands of years of migration. In the next three slides, based on Genetic Analysis showing ancestral commonalities among various populations world wide, you will see the migration routes 600000, 35000 and 10000 years ago (Source: https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/atlas.html - A Must See)
Symbolic Thinking, Co-Evolution of Governance and Religion
We are wired to make sense of our surroundings as a matter of survival. Ever since Homo-Habilis's days, and probably before, we were forced to compete with our fellow animals by figuring out the environment and making tools in order to cope. The act of trying to figure out the environment had two pivotal side effects in our evolution. The first was the development of symbolic thinking. We see evidence for that in rock drawings as early as the (upper) paleolithic age, some 40000 years ago (and probably before). Symbolic thinking creates abstract sets of related objects in our mental picture of our environment. For our upper paleolithic ancestors, that would have meant themselves, their friends and enemies, their animal and plant food sources, environmental landmarks, terrestrial and cosmic symbols, etc. One could argue that by then our ancestors must have developed a language to verbalize what they were drawing (they certainly had the vocalization capacity).
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An interesting note about some of these rock drawings is that they were placed in very inaccessible caves, indicating that they were ritualistic practices, maybe the first inklings of shamanism. So one can imagine that these ritual acts were indeed acts of symbolic deification. Contrary to common portrayals, shamans were then (as are today) bearers of important practical knowledge, such as the knowledge of surroundings, animal behavior, edible plants, medicinal plants and inevitably psychedelic plants.
This brings us to the second pivotal point in our evolution, that is the need to create mental closure. You see, once the mental picture of the one's surroundings gets large enough then one can see the boundaries of the known and the unknown. By the upper paleolithic period the known set was all that was required for survival, the clan elders and shamans where the guardians of that knowledge, which must have made them very important in the clan social structure. But that process necessarily evokes the concept of the unknown. And that is more than just an abstraction, that is the domain of all the new stuff that could come in handy, and all of the bad stuff that could kill. Moreover, the domain of the unknown dwarfs the known domain (it certainly did then, as it does now). So the mind is wired to probe the unknown as a matter of survival, to harness resources, to avoid dangers, to make sense of birth, death and everything in between. By default, the clan elders and shamans must have been the interpreters of the domain of the unknown, rendering the metaphysical in the language of the group.
In the process the shamans developed the first religions that tried to depict these concepts of existence, the known and the unknown. And perhaps that is what we see in the rock arts, the known: horses, oxen and hunters, and the unknown: the deified, God like creatures depicted in cosmic settings.
So the exhibited social morphological marker that is religion, is directly tied in to the behavioral psychology of the individual, his need to have mental closure, to integrate the known and the unknown. That is why religion is such a constant presence in human history.
Then there is the social aspect of religiosity. Religions give psychological comfort and cohesion to the members of the order. The basic unwritten contract is that if you, the practitioner, follow the rules of the religion, then you will be given redemption in this life and salvation in the thereafter. Not only this is psychologically comforting to a person but it also offers the glue for social cohesion. It becomes a point of personal comfort in moments of distress, pain and death. It becomes the guide in social rituals of marriage and birth. In between birth and death, it governs the rules reaching manhood and womanhood, conduct and punishment, coexistence and conflict.
So from these early clan societies we can gather a sense of co-evolution of governance and religion, both aiming at a measure of social cohesion.
One can argue that a cohesive social order is a far better medium for memetic evolution. If an idea is set to practice and nets results, by the virtue of orderly proximity, it can spread rapidly. And, if there are other clans within the social makeup, a measure of cohesion between clans further spreads practices in the society at large. Then trade networks can (and did) emerge, bartering resources throughout the social order. That gave impetus for the accumulation of technological capacity through the trade networks. It gave impetus to a measure of wealth in the capacity to harness resources in a wider geographical domain, the instinctive drive for expansion. And that gave impetus for pooling of human resources in defense and expansion.
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