The first rudiments of civilization appeared on Earth even before the appearance of religions, which speaks of the "holding together", but not the leading role of ideas about highly moral and omnipotent deities in the birth of the first states of the world. Mathematicians and anthropologists write about this in the journal Nature.
Over the past few decades, anthropologists have paid great attention to the role that faith played in the development of mankind. Many scientists today believe that man is biologically predisposed to religion, as such beliefs helped the communities of the first people to pull together.
For this reason, historians and anthropologists today suggest that the emergence of religions and more primitive ideas about the supernatural served as a trigger for the emergence of the largest communities so far - states and civilizations.
Their origin, for example, is associated with supernatural forces in that the belief that karma or gods can punish "sinners" and criminals helped maintain order in groups and strengthened bonds between members of their groups. This helped such groups of believers to survive and continue their lineage, gaining a competitive advantage over the "atheists".
This is also supported by the fact that religions and related moral norms appeared at about the same time, about 13-15 thousand years ago, when people mastered agriculture and began to live in large communities of individuals who are not related to each other.
This hypothesis, as noted by Turchin, gave rise to a kind of anthropological problem of “chicken and eggs”. It allows one to explain the emergence of large societies of people, religions, and civilization, but it is not able to show which of these social phenomena arose first and caused the birth of the other two "pillars" of civilization.
Almost a decade ago, Turchin and his colleagues, including dozens of renowned archaeologists, anthropologists, sociologists, and historians, began working on solving this puzzle. To do this, they systematically collected and studied all the information about how the religious, social and state structure of four hundred centers of civilization that existed on Earth in the past ten thousand years has changed.
Scientists were interested in two specific things - the time when the "embryos" of these political formations became the so-called "mega-communities", complex social formations, which included about a million individuals, and when the first ideas about the supernatural appeared in them.
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This analysis revealed several interesting things that scientists did not initially expect to see. First, in virtually all of these centers of civilization, complex societies appeared about 200-500 years before the first rudiments of organized religions appeared within them.
For example, highly moral deities appeared in Ancient Egypt only during the reign of the second dynasty of the pharaohs, several hundred years after the appearance of the first large kingdoms in the Nile Valley. Likewise, ancient Roman deities associated with the maintenance of foundations arose around 500 BC, shortly before the overthrow of the last king of Rome.
Second, the size and complexity of society grew most strongly in the several hundred years before the advent of religion, at a time when social rituals of a non-religious nature began to appear in the groups of the future founders of civilization, which contributed to the growth of the level of cooperation and order in these communities of ancient people.
In turn, the further complication of the structure of societies, as the calculations of Turchin and his colleagues show, almost inevitably led to the emergence of religions at a time when the number of people in them reached the mark of a million. The researchers suggest that this is due to the fact that non-religious rituals that helped maintain order in smaller groups of people lost their effectiveness and gave way to more effective beliefs.