Apes to Angels

Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion
by Barbara J. King, Ph.D.

The study of evolution has uncovered invaluable information about many aspects of human behavior and culture, from the physiology of our bodies and brains to the development of hunting, technology, and social groups. But an understanding of the intangibles of human experience, especially religion, lags far behind. Attempts to discover the source of religiosity through genetic analysis and neuroscience have so far yielded intriguing but incomplete insights. Evolving God represents an exciting breakthrough. Drawing on her own extensive investigations into the behavior of our closest primate relatives and the most up-to-date research in archaeology, anthropology, and biology, Barbara King offers a comprehensive, holistic view of how and why religion came to be.

King focuses on how the Great Apes, our human ancestors, and modern humans relate to one another socially and emotionally, and she traces the growing complexities of communication throughout the course of evolution. She shows that, with increased brain capacity, the scope and nature of socio-emotional ties began with one-to-one relationships and expanded to group relationships (families and communities) and then to connections with long-dead ancestors, animal spirits, and "higher beings." Her incisive, highly readable narrative takes readers from the earliest common relative of humans and apes (more than 6 million years ago), through the Neandertal period and the Stone Age, to the dawn of religion in early human societies.

Evolving God explores one of the greatest mysteries in human history - the question of whether humankind is innately religious - and provides evidence that will have a tremendous impact on current debates about evolution, creationism, and intelligent design.

Chapter 1

WE HUMANS CRAVE emotional connection with others. This deep desire to connect can be explained by the long evolutionary history we shared with other primates, the monkeys and apes. At the same time, it explains why humans evolved to become the spiritual ape - the ape that grew a large brain, the ape that stood up, the ape that first created art, but, above all, the ape that evolved God.

A focus on emotional connection is an exciting way to view human prehistory, but it is not the traditional way. Millions of years of human evolution are most often recounted as a series of changes in the skeletons, artifacts, and big, flashy, attention-grabbing behaviors of our ancestors. Medium-size skulls with forward-jutting jaws morph into skulls with high foreheads, large enough to house a neuron-packed human brain. Bones of the leg lengthen and shape-shift over time, so that a foot with apelike curved toes becomes a foot that imprints the sand just the way yours and mine do as we stroll along the surf. Crudely modified tools made of rough stone develop gradually into objects of antler and bone, delicately fashioned and as much symbolic as utilitarian. Caves, at first refuges for Neandertal hunters seeking shelter from hungry bears and other carnivores, become colorful art galleries when Homo sapiens begins to paint the walls with magnificent images of the animals they hunt.

Stones, bones, and "big" behaviors like tool-making and cave-painting do change over time as our ancestors evolve, and much of what we can learn about these transformations is enlightening. But the most profound, indeed the most stirring transformations in the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens involve what does not fossilize and what is only sometimes made tangible: belongingness.

Belongingness is mattering to someone who matters to you. It's about getting positive feelings from our relationships. It's what you and I work to maintain (or what we wish for) with family and friends, and perhaps also with colleagues or people in our community; for some of us, it extends to animals as well (other animals, for we humans are first and foremost animals). Relating emotionally to others shapes the very quality of our lives.

Belongingness, then, is a useful shorthand term for the undeniable reality that humans of all ages, in all societies, thrive in relation to others. That humans crave emotional connection is obvious in some respects. Most of us marry and live in families, configured either as parents (or a single parent) living with children or, more commonly worldwide, as multiple generations living together in extended family groups. We do things, both spiritual and secular, and by choice as well as necessity, in groups of relatives, friends, and associates. We write great literature and make great art based on the deepest emotions for those we love, or pine for, or grieve for.

Who can linger over a superbly crafted love poem and doubt the depth of human yearning for belongingness? We feel, rather than merely read or hear, Emily Dickinson's poem "Compensation":

For each ectatic instant
We must an anguish pay
In keen and quivering ratio
To the ecstasy.
For each beloved hour
Sharp pittances of years,
Bitter contested farthings
And coffers heaped with tears.

For one reader, these words might conjure up two lovers separated, by death or by mere circumstance, after a too-fleeting time together, an image accompanied by a feeling of searing loss. For another reader, they might bring to mind what happens when a cherished child not only grows up but grows apart, a thought coupled with a bittersweet mingling of pride and regret at being the center of her universe no more.

Emerging from the emotional depths of this poem, a reader might wonder what new can be said about human belongingness that might shed light on the evolution of the human religious imagination. Compelling questions can guide us here.

Weaving a Story

How did humans go from craving belongingness to relating in profound and deep ways to God, gods, or spirits? How did an engagement with the sacred that is wholly unique to humans emerge from a desire for belongingness that is common to monkeys, apes, extinct human ancestors, and humans of today? These seem to me the most vital questions, and they will act as my touchstone as I weave two thick strands of information together into an evolutionary account of the prehistory of belongingness.

For two and a half decades, at work in zoos and research centers and in the African bush, I have observed, filmed, and interpreted the behavior of monkeys and apes. The social and emotional behavior of these close relatives of ours never fails to fascinate in its own right. In long-term study of particular social groups, any keen observer comes to recognize bitter rivalries, deep friendships, and enduring family ties - and becomes convinced that the animals, too, recognize them and act accordingly.

Copyright © 2007 by Barbara J. King

About the Author

Barbara J. King is Professor of Anthropology at the College of William and Mary. A biological anthropologist, she has studied ape and monkey behavior in Gabon, in Kenya, and at the Smithsonian Institution's National Zoological Park. She lives in Gloucester County, Virginia.