Formalized rituals may have preceded the emergence of religions

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Notes

1 Based on our definition of coalitional signals (Lang & Kundt, in press), it could be argued that sharing supernatural beliefs might have been possible even without language. If an individual acted to affect a supernatural being they perceived, others in their coalition repeating this action would have gained a rudimentary understanding that the action is addressed to an imperceptible being. However, such sharing of supernatural beliefs would be necessarily vague. Yet, even with a fully evolved symbolic language to communicate these supernatural beliefs, it could be argued that ritualized coalitional signals would be a better communicative vehicle for sharing beliefs than symbolic language. Given that rituals are performative and this performance is understood by the whole group (due to ritual formalization), the ritual act is an unequivocal signal of membership in a specific “belief group” (Rappaport, 1999). I am grateful to Radek Kundt for this insight.