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The darker link between ancient

human sacrifice and our modern world

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By Sarah Kaplan April 5 Follow @sarahkaplan48

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Hawaiian sacrifice, from Jacques Aragos account of French navigator Louis de

Freycinets travels around the world from 1817 to 1820. (Jacques Arago)

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In Japan, it was said that sacrificing a woman at a rushing river

would placate the spirit who lived there, allowing for the
construction of bridges and the safe passage of boats. In Greek
myth, the warrior king Agamemnon decides to kill his own
daughter in exchange for a favorable wind on the way to Troy.
The Egyptians buried some of their pharaohs with dozens of
servants when they died, ensuring that their needs would still
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servants when they died, ensuring that their needs would still
be met in the afterlife. Bodies found entombed in bogs across
Europe may have been slain as gifts for higher powers. The
great civilizations of Mesoamerica killed people, smashed food

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SeaWorld, plus a
Christian football
coach

and sank treasure to pay their debts to their gods.

The ancients could kill you in a million different ways and give
you a million different reasons why it needed to be done. In
much of the pre-modern world, ritual sacrifice was framed as
necessary for the good of the society at large the only way to
guarantee, say, a plentiful harvest or success in war.
But the priests and rulers who sanctioned such killings may
have had another motive, a new study suggests. An analysis of
more than seven dozen Austronesian cultures revealed that
the practice of human sacrifices tended to make

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societies increasingly less egalitarian and eventually gave rise

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to strict, inherited class systems. In other words, ritual killings

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helped keep the powerful in power and everyone else in check.

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helped keep the powerful in power and everyone else in check.

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That finding might seem intuitive societies in which some

members are habitually killed probably value certain lives over
others but it has broader implications, the researchers said
in the journal Nature. It suggests a darker link between

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religion and the evolution of modern hierarchical

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societies, they write, in which ritual killings

helped humans transition from the small egalitarian groups of
our ancestors and the large, stratified societies we live in

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today.
Lots of sociologists have theorized about this connection, the
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researchers say, but there havent been many rigorous

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scientific studies of how it came about until this one.

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Play Video 2:21

Excavations of an ancient mound built by prehistoric Native Americans in

Wisconsin's Aztalan State Park have revealed evidence of grisly practices.
(Smithsonian Channel)

The scientists behind the Nature study used phylogenetic

analysis a tool that was originally used to plot
evolutionary family trees but can also be applied by
sociologists to study the development of languages to map
the relationships between the 93 cultures they were
examining. This allowed them to see whether the traits they
were looking for were inherited or adopted from other
cultures, and it helped determine the causal relationship
between human sacrifice and stratification. (The same
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scientists used the technique last year for a study arguing that
belief in supernatural punishment gave rise to political
complexity.)
The cultures studied all descended from an ocean voyaging
society that originated in Taiwan, but they ranged across the
Pacific as far south as New Zealand and as far east as Easter
Island. The group was also hugely diverse, including both the
small, egalitarian family-based communities of the Isneg in
the Philippines and the huge societies of the Hawaiian islands,
which were home to complex states with royal families, slaves
and more than 100,000 people who often came into conflict.
Relying on historical and ethnographic accounts, the
researchers rated the cultures according to their level of
stratification and identified which ones practiced ritual
sacrifice.

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The motivation and method of the killings differed across

cultures, the researchers explain in a piece for the
Conversation: Sacrifices could be demanded for the death of a
chief, the construction of a home, the start of a war, the
outbreak of disease or the violation of a social taboo. The
victims might be strangled, drowned, bludgeoned, burned,
buried, crushed with a newly built canoe, or rolled off a roof
and then decapitated.
But the link between the sacrifices and social
hierarchies seemed to transcend those differences. The
victims were almost always of low social status, and the more
stratified the culture was, the more prevalent ritual killings
were likely to be.
Of the 20 egalitarian societies they studied so termed
because they didnt allow inheritance of wealth and status
between generations just 25 percent practiced human
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sacrifice. By contrast, 37 percent of the 46 moderately

stratified societies where wealth and status could be
inherited, but it wasnt necessarily linked to wildly different
living standards or pronounced social classes had the
practice. And among the 27 highly stratified cultures, where
inherited class differences were strictly enforced with little
opportunity for social mobility, a whopping 65 percent
committed ritual killings.
The phylogenetic trees illustrated that ritual killings tended to
precede social hierarchies, and once stratification occurred,
they served to reinforce it. It was very difficult for a culture to
return to egalitarianism after class differences had set in.
This finding supports the social control hypothesis of
human sacrifice, the researchers said. This idea suggests that
ritual killings are a way to terrorize people into submission,
allowing the religious and political leaders (and in many
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cultures, those were one and the same) who ordered the
killings to consolidate power unopposed.
Speaking to Smithsonian Magazine, lead researcher Joseph
Watts noted that ritual killings often occurred in elaborate
ceremonies that exploited gore as effectively as an HBO
show: Its not just a matter of killing efficiently. Theres more
to it than that, he said. The terror and spectacle [of the act]
was maximized.
The fear that sacrifices inspired allowed the practice to
function as a stepping-stone to help build and maintain
power in early hierarchical societies, Watts, a psychologist at
the University of Auckland, wrote on his website. Once their
authority was absolute, elites could use more traditional
methods policing, taxation, war to keep the class system
in place.

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People often claim that religion underpins morality,

Watts told Science. But he says his study illustrates how
religious rituals like human sacrifice are often designed to
serve someone other than the gods: It shows how religion
can be exploited by social elites to their own benefit.
This is a pretty grim notion, to be sure. But it may also have
been necessary. The division of people into groups of unequal
wealth and status was vital to the development of modern
civilization, Watts writes. Hierarchies helped give rise to great
cities and vast empires capable of undertaking massive publicworks projects and creating priceless works of art. Certainly,
countless people were oppressed (and, according to this study,
killed) in the process. But still, class was critical to getting us to
where we are today.
I think its absolutely an important project, University of
British Columbia psychologist Joseph Henrich told the New
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Scientist. Sacrifice does seem to have been performed in

societies all around the world.
But he urged some skepticism about the studys broad
conclusions. Though human sacrifice may have been
correlated with stratification in the Austronesian societies,
Henrich was dubious of the phylogenetic analysis the
researchers used to prove that the relationship was causal.
That tool assumes that social strata and religious rituals are
passed down and evolve through generations in the same
manner as languages.
Theres no real reason to think thats true and in fact theres
reason to think its not true, Henrich told the New Scientist.
For proof, he pointed back at the Austronesian societies Watts
and his colleagues studied. Human sacrifice has all but
vanished from that region in the past few hundred years, but
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languages are still being passed down from parent to child

demonstrating that those two aspects of culture dont
necessarily evolve in the same way.
Theres also danger in overgeneralizing the studys
conclusions. What is true of ritual killings in Austronesian
cultures may not necessarily apply to the Aztecs or ancient
Egyptians. And whatever role human sacrifice may have
played in those societies, its still only one aspect of culture
it cannot entirely be blamed for the complex hierarchies and
rigid class systems that have long dominated much of the
modern world.
Nevertheless, religion researchers said they were glad to see
rigorous data analysis like the kind used in the Nature study
injected into their field.
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Stories that will be the talk of the morning.

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The study of religion has been plagued in many ways by an

abundance of ideas and a shortage of strong quantitative tests
of these ideas, Richard Sosis, a human behavior ecologist at
the University of Connecticut at Storrs, told Science.
These methods have power, and they are certainly an
advance in the way we can evaluate ideas. Are they the last
piece to the puzzle? No. But, he added, at least the
conversation can begin here and begin in a systematic way
that hasnt happened before.
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Sarah Kaplan is a reporter for Morning Mix.

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