Part 2

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

(Page 2 of 3)

Like most anthropologists, however, I have been motivated ultimately by the wish to understand better the behavior of my own species. Coupling my own research with analysis of the behavior of our humanlike extinct ancestors in Africa, Asia, and Europe - as studied by other scholars - has allowed me to grasp something about just how we humans evolved. I am especially fascinated with the evolutionary history of empathy; of meaning-making; of rule-following; of imagination; and of consciousness. In what ways do monkeys and apes today express behaviors related to these aspects of emotional and cognitive life? How can we best seek evidence of these in our extinct ancestors? Can we uncover traces of our emotional prehistory in the remains, both physical and cultural, of the Neandertals and related groups? If so, how do these traces speak to us across the millennia about the development of religion?

These questions emerge from my own experience as an observer of primates, a writer, and a student of others' anthropological research - and indeed from my long-standing tendency to be attracted to the "big questions" of biological anthropology. Yet no book that purports to explain something meaningful about religion can spring entirely from a single discipline. Though biological anthropology is the most appropriate field in which to ground our inquiry, it's necessary to adopt a broad perspective.

A second set of issues beckons us further into the labyrinth that must be negotiated in any study of religion. What is religion? What is the relationship - both in the present and in the past - between religious belief and religious practice? That is, must religion be defined as a set of beliefs, or can it be something different? How do theologians and other religious thinkers portray the relationship between faith and practice? Can understanding this relationship lead us to a different take on the findings from the first set of questions, those about the prehistory of religion?

The challenge is to weave together two discrete strands: the development of the religious imagination throughout prehistory, and the phenomenon of religion itself. These two threads, each with a panoply of attendant questions, seem to lead in a dizzying variety of directions. In the following chapters, I shall draw the threads together into a coherent story. Along the way, I will compare and contrast my views with those of other writers who speculate about the origins of religion. In what ways are these theorists on the right track, and in what ways do they miss critical pieces of the puzzle?

For now, the essence of my argument can be summarized in three key points:

A fundamental characteristic of all primates, the need for belongingness is most elaborated in the African apes, our closest living relatives. Though we did not descend from chimpanzees or gorillas, we share with them a common ancestor. The everyday social behavior of this apelike ancestor laid a foundation for the evolution of religion that was to come much later, a foundation that can be reconstructed from knowledge of what today's apes do.

Drawing on my own years of up-close-and-personal encounters with chimpanzees and gorillas, I discuss in Chapter 2 the early precursors to religion - empathy, meaning-making, rule-following, and imagination - and how these relate to the issue of ape consciousness. I am convinced that apes are highly sensitive and tuned in to one another starting in infancy, when a baby begins to negotiate with its mother about its needs. More than most other mammals, ape infants are born into a highly social world, a web of emotional interactions among relatives and other social partners. Research on animals like dolphins and elephants may someday challenge this conclusion, but it seems clear at least that the way two apes respond to each other sensitively and contingently is of different quality than what happens when two wolves, say, or two domestic cats, circle each other and adjust to each other's snarls, or lunges, in a well-honed, highly instinctual dance. It even seems different from the learned behaviors of other primates, like monkeys. The apes' finely tuned responses to each other are rooted in belongingness, in the emotionality toward others that stems from their being so keenly dependent on their mothers and other relatives from birth onward.

Second, profound changes in emotional relating occurred as our human ancestors' lives diverged from those of the apelike ancestors. In Chapters 3 through 6, I focus on the origins of the human religious imagination in the span of time bounded, on the one end, by the divergence of hominids (human ancestors) from the ape lineage about 6 million or 7 million years ago, and on the other by the beginning of farming and settled communities around 10,000 years ago. Admittedly, we can glean almost nothing concrete about emotional connectedness as far back as 7 million years (though we can continue to use modern-day apes as models, and speculate in useful ways). After 3 million years ago, the record of material culture - fossilized artifacts and other concrete products of hominid behavior - begins. At that point, tangible clues help us assess the changes that take place in empathy, meaning-making, rule-following, imagination, and consciousness, and, indeed, in the pattern of nurturing and caring that lays the foundation for all of these.

After all, it is not the stones and bones, the technology and art, that deserve top billing in our prehistory; it is material culture's emotional backstory that does. Throughout the millennia, hominid mothers nurtured their children; siblings played with each other and with their friends; adults shifted alliances, supporting first this friend, then another, against a rival. The emotional dependency of ape infants on their mothers and other relatives only deepened and lengthened as the human lineage began to evolve, a fact with cascading consequences for the hominids' whole lives.

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.