We most often perceive human sacrifice as an attribute of uncivilization. Meanwhile, not everything is so simple. Recently, a group of New Zealand anthropologists published an article in the journal Nature, stating that the practice of ritual murder contributed to the development of a class structure in society and strengthened the rule of those in power.
Austronesians and statistics
To prove their hypothesis, scientists collected statistics on 93 traditional Austronesian cultures. The peoples who speak the so-called Austronesian languages are called Austronesian. These include individual peoples of the island of Taiwan, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Madagascar, Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia.
It is believed that once they all spoke the same proto-language, the speakers of which lived in the subtropics in the territory of present-day China from Fujian to Shandong. They were engaged in agriculture (growing millet and rice), as well as sailing. The Austronesians built ships with balance arms, which were the prototype of the catamaran, and knew how to make fabrics from bast (the prototype of paper). In the area of the Bismarck archipelago, the Austronesians founded the culture of lapitoid ceramics, which covered the islands of Fiji and Tonga in the 13th century BC.
In the IV-V millennia BC, the Austronesian community disintegrated. Part of the Austronesians moved to the Japanese Islands, where they later assimilated with the indigenous population. The other part settled in the Malay Archipelago and Indochina, the northern coast of New Guinea, Polynesia and Micronesia. Finally, in the 1st millennium AD, people from Kalimantan settled in Madagascar.
The Austronesian tribes were characterized by ritual killings with human sacrifice. At the same time, experts also investigated the level of social organization of these societies, which was usually either egalitarian or hierarchical.
Egalitarian is a society based on the idea of equality of political, economic and legal opportunities for all its members. The opposite of egalitarianism is elitism. The elite society is divided into elite and mass. It usually has a hierarchy - a vertical social structure, at the top of which is a leader or ruler, and at the very bottom - ordinary subjects.
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At the next stage, the authors of the study built a tree of the language evolution of the Austronesians, which could serve as an objective chronological indicator.
The phenomenon of "hierarchy"
It turned out that, although the practice of sacrificing living people existed in many world cultures, such sacrifices were regularly practiced only by societies that were distinguished by strict stratification, that is, social stratification. Among those included in the "selection" were two thirds. As for egalitarian societies, only a quarter of them engaged in human sacrifice.
Most of the victims were slaves, prisoners or criminals. Rituals were tied to socially significant events, they were performed by leaders or priests, everything happened in front of the tribe or community. Thus, the sacrifice was a social act that cemented power and its relationship with subjects. After all, only those who stood on the lower levels of the hierarchy perished.
Also, sacrifice could serve as a punishment for some kind of offense, which forced members of the tribe to obey the leader and the laws and rules established by him, otherwise they could face the same fate as the disobedient.
Scientific controversy
New Zealand scholars believe that it was the institution of sacrifice that formed the basis of a complex social structure in which the leader had supreme status, and power was inherited.
True, not all members of the scientific community agreed with this conclusion. Thus, according to Joseph Henrich of Harvard University, the development of culture and society was closely related to language evolution. Some practices could simply be borrowed from some cultures and peoples by others, for example, during trade contacts or conquest.
So it is too early to talk about the “evolutionary” role of sacrifice in human history. And no one has proven that a "caste" society is more "advanced" or effective, something where everyone has equal rights. And in any case, “strengthening power” could have been somehow different than by means of murders …