As noted in Chapter 1, the project that resulted in this volume had initially explored the notion that the role of religion in the early farming societies of the Middle East and Anatolia could be explained in terms of power and property. It was assumed that religion was produced by the need to create communities, explain power, and justify differentiation and specialization. But the evidence from Çatalhöyük did not support these assumptions; neither did a critical evaluation of the evidence from many other Neolithic sites in the Middle East. While religion undoubtedly played such roles and had many other instrumental functions, as the chapters in this volume demonstrate, it cannot be fully explained in these terms. More generally, while religion has evolutionary significance at many scales it can also be understood as a cognitive by-product of other distinctly human processes and mechanisms.

The Universality of Vital Matter

Several of the authors, especially in the first part of the volume, explore the question of the evolutionary significance of religion. Religion is as vital for humans as food because it is tied to fundamental cognitive and social capacities. But what is this tie? Van Huyssteen considers the question of whether religion is an evolutionary adaptation related to reproductive fitness, or a by-product of various cognitive capacities of the human mind (such as attachment or altered states of consciousness). Following Wesley Wildman he suggests that some mixture of both views best supports the evidence. Religion is evolutionarily conditioned and specific religious traits have adaptive value, but many aspects of religion can be seen as side effects of traits adapted for some other nonreligious purpose.