include evidence of totemic and anthropomorphic representations as
well as chimeras. The archaeological evidence, then, supports two
important elements in our psychological description of supernatural
concepts: that they require decoupling (to draw a chimera one must
learn to represent something that never could be perceived) and that
they violate intuitive expectations at the level of ontological domains.
So it would seem that we now know when people "invented" reli-
gion: when such representations could occur in people's minds and exert
enough fascination to be painstakingly translated into material symbols.
Things are a little more complicated, however, because religion as we
[324] know it is not just a matter of counterintuitive concepts. Religion is not
just about flying mountains, talking trees and biological monsters but
also about agents whose mental states matter a lot, about connections
with predation and death, about links with morality and misfortune.
We do not really know when these other essential features of reli-
gion appeared, because we know very little of the prehistory of the
inference systems concerned. All we can say with some confidence is
that they probably have a long evolutionary history, given their com-
mon features in all human minds. Most archaeologists and anthropol-
ogists assume that early modern humans did what humans now do the
world over: they used massive stores of information to extract
resources from their environment, formed exceedingly complex social
systems, joined coalitions, spoke a complex language, seduced other
people, protected and nurtured their offspring, fell for fashion and
snobbery, manufactured tools, had political dealings and found other
people's customs ridiculous. (The list of such uniquely human activi-
ties should of course be much longer; the point is simply that many
apparently modern behaviors, like fashion or petty politics, probably
have a long evolutionary history.) Since all this is evidence for capaci-
ties that alsohappen to shape religious thoughts and beliefs as we see
them today, it is probable that the latter too have a long history.
The psychological evidence mentioned in the previous chapters
also adds a cautionary note to the notion of hominization as a libera-
tion. It is tempting to think that people acquired religious thoughts
because they somehow made their minds more flexible and open. But
the evidence gathered by anthropologists, archaeologists and psychol-
ogists suggests a slightly different vision. Human minds did not
become vulnerable to just any odd kind of supernatural beliefs. On the
contrary, because they had many sophisticated inference systems, they
became vulnerable to a veryrestrictedset of supernatural concepts: the
RELIGION EXPLAINED