Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods

by E Fuller Torrey

  A relationship between the size of a population and the type of gods that exist in that population has been clearly established. In 1960 Guy Swanson, a psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley, published a study of gods in 50 “primitive” societies, a sample of George Murdoch’s ethnographic database of 556 societies. Swanson reported a significant correlation between societies that were more socially and politically complex (had more “sovereign organizations”) and the existence of “high gods” (“a god who rules the world and heavens”). A more recent study reported a highly significant correlation between the size of societies (number of levels of political authority beyond the local community) and the existence of “moralizing gods” (“gods who tell people what they should and should not do”). This relationship was summarized by Azim Shariff, a psychologist at the University of Oregon, in a paper aptly titled “Big Gods Were Made for Big Groups.” Sheriff noted that “big gods … tend to be relatively recent Holocene innovations and ones that developed only in large, complex societies.” The association of “big gods” with big populations is also emphasized in recent books on the god-is-watching-you theory of religion, summarized in chapter 8.55

  Are there any more precise indicators of when and where the first higher gods emerged in the later stages of the agricultural revolution? Much of the discussion has focused on the enigmatic figurines and statues, some up to three feet tall, that became increasingly common beginning about 10,000 years ago. Some of the statues were originally painted in bright colors and, according to archeologist Jacques Cauvin, “would have been striking.”56

  It has been widely debated whether these figurines and statues represent ancestors or deities. Those who argue that they represent ancestors point to the fact that the appearance of each is different and thus they do not appear to be attempts to convey the image of a single deity. In addition, many of the figurines resemble in facial features the contemporary painted and plastered skulls, which are widely assumed to have been ancestors. Also, the figurines and plastered skulls are often found in association with one another; some researchers have therefore concluded that the figurines were probably “recently deceased female household members” or “abstracted representations of ancestors … indicators of an ancestor-based social and religious organization.”57

  Arguments on the other side include the fact that some of the statues have six, rather than five, toes; Jacques Cauvin claimed that this “would seem to confirm [their] supernatural status.” The female figurines found at Çatalhöyük have been especially suggested as being deities. James Mellaart, the British archeologist who first excavated the site, claimed that the female figurines represented a mother goddess. “To Mellaart the notion that Neolithic farmers would call upon gods and goddesses of agriculture and fertility to give them spiritual guidance and bless their harvests seemed obvious.” Jacques Cauvin similarly asserted that the female figurines represented “a supreme being and universal mother, in other words a goddess who crowned a religious system which one could describe as ‘female monotheism.’ ” Such assertions have made Çatalhöyük “the equivalent of Mecca for the Mother Goddess movement” among some women, and each year “goddess worshippers make the pilgrimage to Çatalhöyük.”58

  In recent years, the interpretations of Mellaart and Cauvin have become a minority view. Most contemporary archeologists view the female figurines of 7,000 to 10,000 years ago as indicating an important role for women and possible association with fertility but nothing more. As Ian Hodder pointed out, at Çatalhöyük the female figurines “do not occur in special places”:

  They do not occur in burials or in locations which would suggest special importance. Most of the figurines, in fact, have been found in prehistoric refuse dumps. By contrast, the depictions of bulls at Çatalhöyük do appear to be in important places, often at the center of what may have been a shrine. Thus, if the residents of Çatalhöyük had elevated anything to the status of a deity, it seems more likely to have been a bull than a woman.59

  Until new archeological evidence comes to light, it is probably futile to try to further identify the emergence of the first gods in time or space. The possible time period covers several thousand years and the area under consideration stretches for 2,000 miles, from Iran to Bulgaria. What may have been true in one area would not necessarily have been true in another. In ancient Greece, for example, Asclepius was venerated as the founder of physicians in some parts of the country but worshiped as a god in other parts.60

  It was only after the invention of writing, and thus the availability of historic records, that we can be absolutely certain that the gods had emerged. This occurred in Mesopotamia about 6,500 years ago, as will be described in the next chapter. Since the gods appear to have been fully developed at that time, it seems likely that the first gods emerged sometime earlier, but it is not yet possible to specify when or where that took place.

  THE BRAIN OF THE FIRST FARMERS

  Between 40,000 years ago, when modern Homo sapiens apparently first developed an autobiographical memory and an ability to project themselves backward and forward in time, and 11,000 years ago, when the first farmers began domesticating plants, is a period of almost 30,000 years. Why didn’t modern Homo sapiens begin cultivating plants at the same time that they began using memory devices, burying fellow hominins with grave goods, and painting magnificent animals they hoped to successfully hunt in the future? As Dale Guthrie put it, “Why is it that for 30,000 years we see no agriculture, urban life, written language, pottery, refined metals, cloth, or any other of the dynamic panoply of innovation that shaped the lives of most of our Holocene ancestors?”61

  One explanation, of course, was the climate, which was cold during most of that period and thus unsuited to the development of agriculture. However, this does not explain the warmer intervals that occurred intermittently at about 38,000, 35,000, 29,000, and 15,000 years ago. Why don’t we find any evidence of the domestication of plants during these warmer intervals, either in the Fertile Crescent or at the other sites where agriculture developed independently after 11,000 years ago?

  One possible explanation is that although the brain of modern Homo sapiens had developed autobiographical memory, it had not yet fully developed another critical faculty needed for the cultivation of crops and the domestication of animals. This faculty is planning, which is not the same as the ability to remember the past and project oneself into the future. An autobiographical memory is a necessary prerequisite for the ability to plan but is not planning itself.

  The part of the human brain regarded as the most important planning center is the lateral prefrontal cortex, as seen in figure 6.1 Whereas the medial prefrontal cortex develops earlier in hominin evolution and plays a critical role in the development of self-awareness, an awareness of others, and introspection, the lateral prefrontal cortex plays a relatively minor role in the acquisition of those cognitive skills. By contrast, the main tasks of the lateral prefrontal cortex are planning, reasoning, problem solving, and maintaining mental flexibility; these tasks are often referred to as the executive functions of the brain. As summarized by one researcher: “Having an unusually large lateral prefrontal cortex has made humans exceptionally capable of doing things that are ‘unconventional’ in the sense of representing novel solutions to behavior problems.”62

  It is known that damage to the lateral prefrontal cortex may seriously impair a person’s ability to plan and reason. The planning and reasoning functions of the lateral prefrontal cortex can be tested using neuropsychological tests. One such test, the Tower of Hanoi, tests the person’s ability to plan for the future. Another, the Wisconsin Card Sort, tests the person’s ability to change plans as circumstances change. These are the kinds of cognitive abilities that would have been essential for early farmers as they planned their crops and the management of their animals. It thus seems likely that modern Homo sapiens 11,000 years ago would have done better on such tests than their predecessors would have 40,0
00 years ago. Those individuals who had the best-developed lateral prefrontal cortex, and thus the best executive brain function, would have been more successful and more likely to pass on their genes.

  FIGURE 6.1  Modern Homo Sapiens: a spiritual self.

  The fact that the lateral prefrontal cortex is one of the last brain areas to have fully developed in Homo sapiens supports this hypothesis. Paul Emil Flechsig, who ranked 45 brain areas by their degree of myelination at birth, ranked the lateral prefrontal cortex among the very last “terminal zones,” as he called them. Similarly, neuroimaging studies of gray matter in children’s brains have reported that “in the frontal cortex, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex matures last” and does not reach its full maturation until the person is in their early twenties; this suggests that it developed very recently. When examined under a microscope, the lateral prefrontal cortex also has a different cellular appearance than the remainder of the prefrontal cortex, suggesting that it developed differently. And when the lateral prefrontal cortices from humans and chimpanzees are compared, that of the human is almost twice as large as would be expected. Such observations have led researchers to conclude that this brain area is probably unique in primates and especially well developed in humans. In the opinion of Todd Preuss, one of the leading researchers on brain development: “On present evidence, then, there are good grounds for concluding that dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is in fact one of the distinctive features of the primate brain. In addition, there is evidence that this region underwent extensive modification during primate history.”63

  Accompanying the continuing development of the lateral prefrontal cortex would have been the continuing development of the superior longitudinal fasciculus, the large white matter tract that connects the prefrontal cortex to the parietal and temporal lobes. As previously noted, the superior longitudinal fasciculus is one of the white matter tracts that develop very slowly in humans, indicating that it is a comparatively recent addition in human evolution. A study that compared the gray matter and white matter in the prefrontal cortex in humans and other primates reported that the differences in white matter, the connecting tracts, were much greater than the differences in gray matter, the neurons. Thus, when we ask why Homo sapiens did not begin cultivating plants during the climactically warmer intervals 20,000 or 30,000 years ago, the answer may be that there was not yet a sufficient number of connections between the prefrontal cortex and other brain areas. By 11,000 years ago, these connections had developed, allowing for not only the cultivation of plants but the cultivation of the spiritual self as well.64

  By about 7,000 years ago, it seems likely that the lateral prefrontal cortex and white matter connecting tracts had more fully developed in Homo sapiens, enabling the cognitive processes and behavior that we associate with our modern selves. We are able to cultivate both plants and our spiritual selves. The arrival of the gods initiated a period during which formal religions would develop and preoccupy mankind, a period that continues to the present.

  7

  GOVERNMENTS AND GODS

  A Theistic Self

  The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random among the profusion of the earth and the galaxies, but that in this prison we can fashion images of ourselves sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness.

  —André Malraux, Man’s Fate, 1932

  The ultimate arrival of the higher gods should not have been a surprise. As spirits, they had been standing in the wings for thousands of years, practicing their lines, waiting for their call to the world’s stage. The people who buried their kin with grave goods at Sungir and Dolní Vĕstonice 27,000 years ago had definite ideas regarding an afterlife, but there is no evidence that the afterlife had divine overseers. The people who painted animals at Lascaux 17,000 years ago exhibited a reverential appreciation of animals’ spirits, but there is no evidence that these spirits were transcendent. The people who gathered at Göbekli Tepe 11,000 years ago may have been worshiping the spirits of their ancestors, but the ancestors had apparently not yet become deities. However, sometime during the next 4,000 years, it seems likely that some of the ancestors were gradually elevated to deities. The gods had finally arrived, and when they came, they came to stay.

  MESOPOTAMIA: THE FIRST DOCUMENTED GODS

  The first god for which there is written, and thus unequivocal, evidence of his existence was Enki, the Mesopotamian god of water. We know this because a temple dedicated to Enki, dated to about 6,500 years ago, was excavated in Eridu, in what was then Mesopotamia and is now southern Iraq. Mesopotamia and surrounding southwest Asia had undergone a rapid increase in population in the preceding years; one study estimated that the increase had been 50-fold, from 100,000 to five million people between 10,000 and 6,000 years ago. By 5,500 years ago, Mesopotamian cities such as Eridu had populations of 35,000 or more; by 5,000 years ago, Uruk is estimated to have had 50,000 to 80,000 inhabitants and to have been the largest city in the world. Thus, from the very beginning, the higher gods were associated with large populations.1

  Mesopotamia, generally regarded as the world’s first civilization, rose to prominence between 6,500 and 4,300 years ago. Socially and economically it was a complex society. There was a high degree of job specialization that included farmers, overseers, laborers, fishermen, brewers, bakers, merchants, soldiers, artists, architects, scribes, and priests. The core of the economy was trade: textiles, wool, leather, sesame oil, and barley were exported in exchange for copper from Oman, lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, carnelian from Pakistan, seashells and pearls from India, wood from Lebanon, obsidian from central Turkey, and tin, silver, ivory, and slaves from a variety of sources. Trade took place by sea and land and was so important that the Mesopotamians maintained permanent trading stations in other countries to develop and protect their interests. The Mesopotamians are credited with the first use of a plow, a potter’s wheel, a chariot, a sailboat, a legal code, and standardized weights and measures. Most important, they had a written language that accounts for why we know so much about them. For the first time in history, there was a permanent record of what Homo sapiens was doing and thinking.2

  The original temple at Eridu was a modest, 45-square-foot room with “one entrance, an altar, and an offering table.” When the temple was excavated, archeologists found that “hundreds of fish bones, including the complete skeleton of a sea perch, still lay on the offering table.” The temples at Eridu and other Mesopotamian cities were rebuilt multiple times over the years, becoming increasingly larger and more elaborate. The temple at Ur, for example, was accessed by three sets of stairs, each consisting of 100 steps, and was covered with “tens of thousands of small clay cones that had been dipped in different colors … [and inserted] in such a way that they formed polychrome triangles, lozenges, zigzags, and other geometrical designs.” The temple was so impressive that it is thought to have been the origin for the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. The inner walls of some temples were “painted with frescoes of human and animal figures” and decorated with precious metals and stones, including silver, gold, carnelian, and lapis lazuli.3

  In each Mesopotamian city, “the temple was the largest, tallest, and most important building in accordance with the theory … that the entire city belonged to its main god, to whom it had been assigned on the day the world was created.” Just as Enki was the god of Eridu, so was An the god of Erech, Utu the god of Larsa, Enlil the god of Nippur, Inanna the goddess of Uruk, Nanna the god of Ur, Shara the god of Umma, and Ningirsu the god of both Lagash and nearby Girsu. When the god was on earth, it was believed that he or she actually lived in the temple.4

  What do we know about Enki and the other Mesopotamian gods? Thorkild Jacobsen, a Danish archeologist, did an extensive study of these gods and concluded that “the earliest form of Mesopotamian religion was worship of powers of fertility and yield, of the powers in nature ensuring human survival.” Thus, the earliest Mesopotamian gods included Utu, the sun god; Nanna, the moon god;
Enlil, the god of wind; and Enki, the god of water. Two major themes were evident: the importance of the fertility of the earth to provide food needed for life, and the fate of people after they died. The themes of life and death were thus interrelated in the earliest known religious thought.5

  The dedication of the first-known Mesopotamian temple to Enki, the god of water, was consistent with the themes of nature and fertility. Enki was called “the fertilizing sweet waters” and “Lord of the soil.” According to a Mesopotamian hymn of praise, the duties of Enki included the following:

  To clear the pure mouths of the Tigris and Euphrates,

  to make verdure plentiful,

  make dense the clouds, grant water in abundance

  to all ploughlands,

  to make the grain lift its head in furrows

  and to make pasture abundant in the desert.

  In addition to the fertility of the land, Enki was also responsible for the fertility of animals and people. According to Jacobsen, the Mesopotamian language “does not differentiate semen and water: one word stands for both.”6

  Another early Mesopotamian god, Dumuzi, combined the themes of life and death. On the one hand, Dumuzi was the “god of fertility and crops,” especially grain. Dumuzi was also married to Inanna, the goddess of the food storehouse. According to Jacobsen: “That these two powers are wed means that the power for fertility and yield has been captured by the numen of the storehouse,” thus ensuring an adequate food supply for the community. As such, Dumuzi and Inanna represent life and protection from starvation.7

  As the god of grain, Dumuzi was also “the power in the barley, particularly in the beer brewed from it.” Dumuzi was assisted by Ninkasi, “a special goddess in charge of beer preparation” whose name means “the lady who fills the mouth.” Beer was the most popular drink in Mesopotamia, usually drunk with straws communally by several people sitting around a large shared beer jar, as depicted on a clay seal dated to 5,850 years ago. The fact that some of the earliest Mesopotamian gods had responsibility for the brewing of beer is a measure of its importance. The word alcohol is, in fact, Mesopotamian in origin.8