This raises some key questions: how and why could something as horrifying and costly as human sacrifice have been so common in early human societies? Is is possible that human sacrifice might have served some social function, and actually benefited at least some members of a society?
According to one theory, human sacrifice actually did serve a function in early human societies. The Social Control Hypothesis suggests human sacrifice was used by social elites to terrorise underclasses, punish disobedience and display authority. This, in turn, functioned to build and maintain class systems within societies. My colleagues and I were interested in testing whether the Social Control Hypothesis might be true, particularly among cultures around the Pacific. So we gathered information on 93 traditional Austronesian cultures and used methods from evolutionary biology to test how human sacrifice affected the evolution of social class systems in human prehistory.
The ancestors of the Austronesian peoples were excellent ocean voyagers, originating in Taiwan and migrating west as far as Madagascar, east as far as Easter Island and south as far as New Zealand.
These cultures ranged in scale from the Isneg , who lived in small, egalitarian, family-based communities, to the Hawaiians , who lived in complex states with royal families, slaves and hundreds of thousands of people.
Events that called for human sacrifice included the death of chiefs, the construction of houses and canoes, preparation for wars, epidemic outbreaks and the violation of major social taboos. The physical act of sacrifice took a wide range of forms, including strangulation, bludgeoning, burning, burial, drowning, being crushed under a newly-built canoe, and even being rolled off a roof and then decapitated. The Spanish conquest of the Inca could be considered an example of the survival of the fittest society, in this sense.
They probably saw the rejection of human sacrifice as a logical extension of the golden rule, or as a religious imperative. The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has argued that societies became less violent as they became better at abstract reasoning. Turchin and colleagues disagree: With staggering frequency, they argue, it was religion rather than reason that turned people away from ritualized brutality. These new religions—such as Judaism and Zoroastrianism—were born roughly during the first millennium B.
Without these religions, the researchers think, the complexifying process would have stalled long before it produced the nation-states and multistate federations of today. Neither the Seshat nor the Pulotu team claims to have solved the puzzle of human sacrifice, but together they feel they are building toward an answer. Whitehouse thinks social evolution was driven by two opposing forces—persuasion and coercion. Persuasion might have taken the form of reassuring, nonviolent religious rituals, for example, and coercion the form of cruel diktats from a god-king.
By statistically analyzing large amounts of cross-cultural data, researchers can start to explore which combinations of the two produced the most peaceful and prosperous societies in history, and then apply those lessons to the governance of modern societies.
That prospect is some way off. But the big-data approach to history has already provided a fascinating glimpse into the roots of social complexity. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic.
Northwestern University. What makes people willing to sacrifice their own self-interest for another person? Retrieved November 10, from www. It plays a critical role in cognition, New research now calls for early planning, and at the same time shoots down Improving working memory or cognitive ScienceDaily shares links with sites in the TrendMD network and earns revenue from third-party advertisers, where indicated. Print Email Share. Just a Game?
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