Why Did Ancient Humans Believe in Gods?

Why did ancient humans believe in gods? It's almost midnight, the house is quiet, and a small dry click comes from the dark kitchen. Before you've had a single thought, your brain has skipped the fridge and the pipes and decided that the click has an owner. We go back sixty thousand years to a small fire on an East African grassland, where the grass hisses and two green lights hold still at the height of your knee. Then come Stewart Guthrie's bet (better to mistake a boulder for a bear than a bear for a boulder), Justin Barrett's hyperactive agent detection device, faces in power sockets, the 1944 Heider and Simmel film where three shapes become a bully and a couple, a Swiss robot that makes people feel a stranger standing behind them, and Ernest Shackleton's fourth man on South Georgia. Then the detector fills the world: kids who think rocks are pointy so animals can scratch on them, scientists who slip under a stopwatch, spirits in all thirty three hunter gatherer societies, and the dead who come back in dreams. We pull a stone giant with carved hands up a hill at Göbekli Tepe, eleven and a half thousand years ago, follow Klaus Schmidt's "first came the temple, then the city", and finish with Ara Norenzayan's big gods and the eyes above an office honesty box that made people pay almost three times more for their milk. 🔔 Subscribe for more videos about ancient humans, human evolution, prehistoric life, stone age survival, and the strange reasons your own brain works the way it does. CHAPTERS 0:00 Someone in the kitchen 1:54 Eyes past the firelight 3:47 The bet your brain makes 5:16 Faces in your power sockets 7:13 The stranger behind you 8:59 A world full of someones 10:55 The hill with hands 12:03 First the temple 13:37 When the watchers got bigger 14:55 Who's watching? SOURCES Guthrie, S.E. (1993) Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion. Oxford University Press. Barrett, J.L. (2000) Exploring the natural foundations of religion. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Barrett, J.L. (2004) Why Would Anyone Believe in God? AltaMira Press. Hadjikhani, N. et al. (2009) Early (M170) activation of face-specific cortex by face-like objects. NeuroReport. Wardle, S.G. et al. (2022) Illusory faces are more likely to be perceived as male than female. PNAS. Nass, C., Moon, Y. & Carney, P. (1999) Are people polite to computers? Journal of Applied Social Psychology. Heider, F. & Simmel, M. (1944) An experimental study of apparent behavior. American Journal of Psychology. Blanke, O. et al. (2014) Neurological and robot-controlled induction of an apparition. Current Biology. Shackleton, E. (1919) South: The Story of Shackleton's Last Expedition 1914-1917. Heinemann. Kelemen, D. (1999) Why are rocks pointy? Children's preference for teleological explanations of the natural world. Developmental Psychology. Kelemen, D., Rottman, J. & Seston, R. (2013) Professional physical scientists display tenacious teleological tendencies. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Peoples, H.C., Duda, P. & Marlowe, F.W. (2016) Hunter-gatherers and the origins of religion. Human Nature. Schmidt, K. (2010) Göbekli Tepe: the Stone Age sanctuaries. Documenta Praehistorica. Curry, A. (2008) Göbekli Tepe: The World's First Temple? Smithsonian Magazine. Banning, E.B. (2011) So fair a house: Göbekli Tepe and the identification of temples in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of the Near East. Current Anthropology. Clare, L. et al. (2019) Göbekli Tepe, Turkey. A brief summary of research at a new World Heritage Site (2015-2019). e-Forschungsberichte des DAI. Norenzayan, A. (2013) Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict. Princeton University Press. Bateson, M., Nettle, D. & Roberts, G. (2006) Cues of being watched enhance cooperation in a real-world setting. Biology Letters.