Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Letter
  • Published:

Ritual human sacrifice promoted and sustained the evolution of stratified societies

Nature volume 532, pages 228–231 (2016)Cite this article

Subjects

Abstract

Evidence for human sacrifice is found throughout the archaeological record of early civilizations1, the ethnographic records of indigenous world cultures2,3,4,5, and the texts of the most prolific contemporary religions6. According to the social control hypothesis2,7,8, human sacrifice legitimizes political authority and social class systems, functioning to stabilize such social stratification. Support for the social control hypothesis is largely limited to historical anecdotes of human sacrifice2,8, where the causal claims have not been subject to rigorous quantitative cross-cultural tests. Here we test the social control hypothesis by applying Bayesian phylogenetic methods to a geographically and socially diverse sample of 93 traditional Austronesian cultures. We find strong support for models in which human sacrifice stabilizes social stratification once stratification has arisen, and promotes a shift to strictly inherited class systems. Whilst evolutionary theories of religion have focused on the functionality of prosocial and moral beliefs9,10, our results reveal a darker link between religion and the evolution of modern hierarchical societies11,12.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Buy this article

  • Purchase on SpringerLink
  • Instant access to full article PDF
Buy now

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Figure 1: Summary of the two series of analyses performed in this study.
Figure 2: Phylogenetic distribution of human sacrifice and high social stratification in Austronesia.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Bremmer, J. N. The Strange World of Human Sacrifice (Peeters, 2007)

  2. Carrasco, D. City of Sacrifice (Beacon Press, 1999)

  3. Beatty, A. Society and Exchange in Nias (Claredon Press, 1992)

  4. Burt, B. Tradition and Christianity: the Colonial Transformation of a Solomon Islands Society (Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994)

  5. Del Castillo, B. D. The History of the Conquest of New Spain . (Univ. New Mexico Press, 2008)

  6. Johnson, T. M. & Grimm B. J. The World’s Religions in Figures: an Introduction to International Religious Demography (Wiley, 2013)

  7. Winkelman, M. Political and demograpic-ecological determinants of institutionalised human sacrifice. Anthropol. Forum 24, 47–70 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Turner, C. G. & Turner, J. A. Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistroic American Southwest (Univ. Utah Press, 1999)

  9. Norenzayan, A. et al. The cultural evolution of prosocial religions. Behav. Brain Sci. 39, http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X14001356 (2014)

  10. Watts, J. et al. Broad supernatural punishment but not moralising high gods precede the evolution of political complexity in Austronesia. Proc. R. Soc. B 282, http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2014.2556 (2015)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Cronk, L. Evolutionary theories of morality and the manipulative use of signals. Zygon 29, 81–101 (1994)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Marx, K. & Engels, F. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Collected Works (International Publishers, 1975)

  13. Girard, R., Hamerton-Kelly, R. G., Burkert, W. & Smith, J. Z. Violent Origins: Walter Burkert, René Girard & Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation (Stanford Univ. Press, 1987)

  14. Burkert, W. Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions (Harvard Univ. Press, 1998)

  15. Price, B. J. Demystification, enriddlement, and Aztec cannibalism: a materialist rejoinder to Harner. Am. Ethnol. 5, 98–115 (1978)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Harner, M. The ecological basis for Aztec sacrifice. Am. Ethnol. 4, 117–135 (1977)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Gould, S. J. & Lewontin, R. C. The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B 205, 581–598 (1979)

    Article  ADS  CAS  Google Scholar 

  18. Wilson, E. O. On Human Nature (Harvard Univ. Press, 1978)

  19. Coulanges, F. The Ancient City: a study of Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome (Lee and Shepard, 1877)

  20. Flannery, K. & Marcus, J. The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistroic Ancestors Set The Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (Harvard Univ. Press, 2012)

  21. Wheatley, P. The Pivot of the Four Quarters (Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1971)

  22. Dow, M. & Eff, E. Global, regional, and local network autocorrelation in the standard cross-cultural sample. Cross-Cultural Res . 42, 148–171 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Pagel, M. & Meade, A. Bayesian analysis of correlated evolution of discrete characters by reversible-jump Markov chain Monte Carlo. Am. Nat. 167, 808–825 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Watts, J. et al. Pulotu: database of Austronesian supernatural beliefs and practices. PLoS ONE 10, e0136783 (2015)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Gray, R. D., Drummond, A. J. & Greenhill, S. J. Language phylogenies reveal expansion pulses and pauses in Pacific settlement. Science 323, 479–483 (2009)

    Article  ADS  CAS  Google Scholar 

  26. Goodenough, W. Oceania and the problem of controls in the study of cultural and human evolution. J. Polyn. Soc. 66, 146–155 (1957)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Kamakau, S. M. Ka Po’E Kahiko: the People of Old (Bernice P. Bishop Museum Press, 1968)

  28. Ronay, R., Greenaway, K., Anicich, E. M. & Galinsky, A. D. The path to glory is paved with hierarchy: when hierarchical differentiation increases group effectiveness. Psychol. Sci. 23, 669–677 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Lammers, J., Galinsky, A. D., Gordijin, E. H. & Sabine, O. Illegitimacy moderates the effect of power on approach. Psychol. Sci. 19, 558–564 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  30. Bellah, R. N. Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Harvard Univ. Press, 2011)

  31. Sahlins, M. D. Social Stratification in Polynesia . (Univ. Washington Press, 1958)

  32. Ko, A. M. et al. Early Austronesians: into and out of Taiwan. Am. J. Hum. Genet. 94, 426–436 (2014)

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  33. Team, R. Core. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing . (R Found. Stat. Comput. 2015)

  34. Orme, D. et al. Caper: Comparative Analyses of Phylogenetics and Evolution in R. R package version 0.5.2. http://cran.r-project.org/package=caper (2013)

  35. Fritz, S. A. & Purvis, A. Selectivity in mammalian extinction risk and threat types: a new measure of phylogenetic signal strength in binary traits. Conserv. Biol. 24, 1042–1051 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  36. Mace, R. & Pagel, M. The comparative method in anthropology. Curr. Anthropol. 35, 549–564 (1994)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  37. Mace, R. & Holden, C. J. A phylogenetic approach to cultural evolution. Trends Ecol. Evol. 20, 116–121 (2005)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  38. Xie, W., Lewis, P. O., Fan, Y., Kuo, L. & Chen, M.-H. Improving marginal likelihood estimation for Bayesian phylogenetic model selection. Syst. Biol. 60, 150–160 (2011)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  39. Raftery, A. E. in Markov Chain Monte Carlo in Practice 163–188 (Chapman & Hall, 1996)

  40. Maddison, W. P. & FitzJohn, R. G. The unsolved challange of phylogenetic correlation tests for categorical characters. Syst. Biol. 64, 127–136 (2015)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  41. Drummond, A. J., Suchard, M. A., Xie, D. & Rambaut, A. Bayesian Phylogenetics with BEAUti and the BEAST 1.7. Mol. Biol. Evol. 29, 1969–1973 (2012)

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  42. Paradis, E., Claude, J. & Strimmer & K. APE: analyses of phylogenetics and evolution in R language. Bioinformatics 20, 289–290 (2004)

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank K. Sterelny for feedback on an earlier version of the manuscript as well as M. Pagel and A. Meade for assistance with BayesTraits. We would also like to thank The John Templeton Foundation (28745), Templeton World Charity Foundation (0077), a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship (RDF-OUA1101), a PhD scholarship from the University of Auckland, and the Marsden Fund (UOA1104, VUW1321) for funding.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Psychology, University of Auckland, Auckland, 1142, New Zealand

    Joseph Watts, Oliver Sheehan, Quentin D. Atkinson & Russell D. Gray

  2. Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, 07743, Germany

    Oliver Sheehan, Quentin D. Atkinson & Russell D. Gray

  3. School of Art History, Classics and Religious Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, 6014, New Zealand

    Joseph Bulbulia

  4. Research School of the Social Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra, 2601, Australia

    Russell D. Gray

  5. Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution, Palmerston North, 4442, New Zealand

    Russell D. Gray

Authors
  1. Joseph Watts
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Oliver Sheehan
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Quentin D. Atkinson
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Joseph Bulbulia
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Russell D. Gray
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

J.W. designed the study with Q.D.A., J.B. and R.D.G. J.W. and O.S. jointly created and coded the variables. J.W. performed the analyses with input from Q.D.A and R.D.G. J.W., O.S., Q.D.A., J.B. and R.D.G. reviewed the results and wrote the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Joseph Watts.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Extended data figures and tables

Extended Data Figure 1 Phylogenetic distribution of human sacrifice and social stratification in Austronesia.

Ancestral state reconstruction of human sacrifice and general social stratification on a maximum clade credibility consensus tree of 93 Austronesian languages. This analysis was run for 2 × 109 iterations and replicated three times. Pie charts at the nodes represent the probable ancestral state inferred in an unconstrained dependent reversible-jump Markov chain Monte Carlo23 analysis. Grey represents the proportion of our sample of 4,200 trees in which that node is absent.

Related audio

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

This file contains Supplementary Tables 1-26. Please note that Supplementary Table 1 documents the sources used to code each culture with links to additional references and Supplementary Tables 2-26 provide additional results from our phylogenetic analyses. (PDF 2385 kb)

PowerPoint slides

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Watts, J., Sheehan, O., Atkinson, Q. et al. Ritual human sacrifice promoted and sustained the evolution of stratified societies. Nature 532, 228–231 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature17159

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature17159

Comments

By submitting a comment you agree to abide by our Terms and Community Guidelines. If you find something abusive or that does not comply with our terms or guidelines please flag it as inappropriate.

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing