RT Article
T1 Evolution of religious capacity in the genus homo: origins and building blocks
JF Zygon
VO 53
IS 1
SP 123
OP 158
A1 Boone, Margaret S.
A1 Corbally, Christopher J. 1946-
LA English
PB Wiley-Blackwell
YR 2018
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1571393994
AB The large, ancient ape population of the Miocene reached across Eurasia and down into Africa. From this genetically diverse group, the chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and humans evolved from populations of successively reduced size. Using the findings of genomics, population genetics, cognitive science, neuroscience, and archaeology, the authors construct a theoretical framework of evolutionary innovations without which religious capacity could not have emerged as it did. They begin with primate sociality and strength from a basic ape model, and then explore how the human line came to be the most adaptive and flexible of all, while coming from populations with reduced genetic variability. Their analysis then delves into the importance of neurological plasticity and a lengthening developmental trajectory, and points to their following article and the last building block: the expansion of the parietal areas, which allowed visuospatial reckoning, and imagined spaces and beings essential to human theologies. Approximate times for the major cognitive building blocks of religious capacity are given.
K1 ape
K1 bottleneck
K1 cognitive evolution
K1 effective population size
K1 founder effect
K1 genetic drift
K1 Natural Selection
K1 Plasticity
K1 population genetics
K1 Sociality
DO 10.1111/zygo.12386