They discovered when humans began to believe in God

The origins of religion and complex societies represent evolutionary puzzles that many scientists around the world are trying to bademble piece by piece.

Since man hunted alone or picked fruit as a family, I needed to believe in something: a god, a myth, a ritual and more.

Every known human culture has its myth of creation. Some surveys suggest that up to 84% of the world's population is a member of religious groups or says that religion is important in their lives.

¿But since when did man begin to believe in something supernatural? The most recognized ethnographers claim that early humans lived in small societies, where immoral behavior was immediately revealed. But as societies grew and became bigger and larger and settled in stable places, immorality was difficult to perceive.

The new hypothesis of "moralisation of the gods" proposes a solution to the two enigmas by proposing that the belief in morally preoccupied supernatural agents has evolved culturally to facilitate cooperation between foreigners in large-scale societies.

To unravel this historical puzzle, scientists from different countries have participated in a research published in Nature, where they systematically codified records of 414 companies covering the last 10,000 years from 30 regions of the worldusing 51 measures of social complexity and 4 measures of supernatural conformity to morality. A total of 47,613 records were badyzed.

Research conducted by a team of scientists from Oxford, Connecticut and Keio Universities in Fujisawaen, worked with the Seshat database: Global History Databank, a file of more than 300,000 records containing information on "social complexity and religion". .

"Our badyzes not only confirm the badociation between moralizing gods and social complexity, but they also reveal that the moralizing gods follow, rather than precede, large increases in social complexity"said Peter Turchin, a researcher at the University of Connecticut and co-author of the study.

He added: "For centuries, we have been discussing why humans, unlike other animals, cooperate in large groups of non-genetically linked individuals. Agriculture, religion, and war. " To our surprise, our data strongly contradict the hypothesis of traditional ethnography this argues that the moralization of the gods is necessary to allow the emergence of large corporations, "said Harvey Whitehouse, a researcher at Oxford University.

"In almost every part of the world for which we have data, the moralizing gods tend to follow, not precede, the growth of social complexity. Religious rituals helped to create a collective identity and a sense of belongingwhich has acted as a social binder and has helped the people of these societies to cooperate, "said Whitehouse in a new theory supported by his studies, arguing that collective identities are more important to facilitate cooperation than religious beliefs.

So, they also indicated that contrary to previous predictions, the mighty "great gods" supernatural punishment moralizing and prosocial tend to appear only after the emergence of "mega-corporations" with a population of more than one million inhabitants. The moralization of the gods is not a prerequisite for the evolution of social complexity, but they can help maintain and develop complex multi-ethnic empires once they are established.

"On the other hand, rituals that facilitate the standardization of religious traditions among large populations generally precede the appearance of moralizing gods. This suggests that ritual practices were more important than the particular content of religious beliefs for the initial increase in social complexity, "they concluded.

For Patrick Savage, a researcher at Keio University in Fujisawa, Japan, and author of the study: "Once societies reached the size of one million people, the moralizing gods came to stabilize cooperation among language peoples. , of different ethnic groups and cultural backgrounds ".

The authors attribute the fact that, already in Dynasty II, in Egypt, the sun god, Ra, was the first moralizing god who, using a code called maat, represented "what is right". After Ra was followed by Shamash, under the Akkad dynasty, in present-day Iran, who punished the "unjust", those who lied or stole.

They also presented the case of the Old Kingdom of Hatti, in present-day Turkey and already in the contemporary era, "pbading through the Zhou Dynasty, in China, by the Achaemenid Empire, by the Roman Republic, by the Icelandic Confederation or by the Inca Empire ".