You say “There’s still a lot of debate as to when Australopithecus became Homo, and there are a few examples that are still in dispute, so I’m not going to go there, and I think trying to drag that into the discussion is a) a straw man…”.

No it is not a straw man, I point you to your original claim:

“I’d wager that there has never existed a human society that didn’t have some form of law and religion, no matter how rudimentary.”

Its debatable as to when early great apes became human and you haven’t made the case that upright walking Australopithecus are not human, and even if we say the advent of the human species was some time after that there is a HUGE gap between the advent of humans and the examples of religion/magic you give of up to 18000 years ago. You are simply in no position to make any claims about the nature of early human society, religion, and law because virtually nothing is known about those things.

You question the ability of chimps and bonobos to have abstract thought that accomodates religion and yet you assume that neanderthals 60,000 years ago had religion because there is some evidence that they buried their dead even though chimps and bonobos sometimes do the same thing. If chimps and bonobos burying their dead is not evidence of the abstract thought of religion then neither is neanderthal burials.

Speaking of 60,000 year old neanderthal burials, could you please give me a link to the specifics you are refering to. I don’t keep right on top of this topic but I don’t recall any concrete evidence of “offerings” in neanderthal burials so I’d appreciate it if you’d show me evidence to support your claim. Some scholars may theorize of religious belief as far back as 300,000 years ago but they are decidedly in the minority and the evidence to support such conclusions is extremely scanty and highly speculative, as is likely the case with your claims about “offerings” in 60,000 year old neanderthal burials.

“Don’t let yourself be trapped by the idea that religion must necessarily involve a priesthood or organized worship.”.

That never even crossed my mind, I’m not even remotely thinking of religion as being in those types of relatively advanced stages. I’m thinking of religion in terms of a belief in the supernatural and a god(s) that commands certain forms of behavior.

“My position is simply that by the advent of fully modern humans, ca. 100,000 years ago, we’re dealing with a group whose brains can handle abstract concepts such as “spirit,” whose ideas of law are most likely to be how the ancestors did it, perhaps coupled with some idea of fairness and/or compensation for injury, and who already have a long tradition of politics as the practice of social interaction.”.

You need to read Carl Sagan’s “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors”. Chimpanzee and bonobo societies show an understanding of fairness and/or compensation for injury and also have a tradition of politics as the practice of social interaction.

If that’s your basis for claiming human societies had law and religion then it necessarily follows that chimpanzee and bonobo societies have law and religion.

“So, yeah, I stand by my original statement — the idea of a human society as “pre-religion” or “pre-law” is, to echo Brian, “pre-posterous.”.”

Before you can make that claim you need to define what you mean by “human”, “law”, and “religion”. You haven’t even remotely established reasonable boundaries for any of those and as such your claim is totally without merit.

I’ll loosely define human as a great ape that normally walks upright. On that basis there is no doubt humans existed pre religion and pre law but still had what could be called societies. Some would say that a key feature of being human is language but once again there is no clear place to draw the line between language and non-language. Vast numbers of species communicate in simple terms, warning of danger, expressing anger, affection and even chimpanzees have been known to use specific sounds to refer to specific objects. Language is a continuum with no sharp dividing line between the language of a gopher and the language of modern humans.

There’s no doubt that chimpanzees and bonobos have societies and unless you want to acknowledge that they also have laws and religion then you necessarily have to acknowledge that there was a time in human history when human societies had neither as well – whether that was 60,000, 200,000 or 1 million years ago.

Those 60,000 year-old graves, by the way, were Neanderthal. Burial of the dead is generally considered a marker for religious belief of some sort. Some scholars have theorized that religious belief in some form may go back as far as 300,000 years, although I don’t know if I’m ready to credit that. 60-70,000 seems reasonable, though, since we have evidence that far back.

Don’t let yourself be trapped by the idea that religion must necessarily involve a priesthood or organized worship. That’s the late development, and does seem to have grown up among agricultural societies.

I have no way of knowing what chimps and bonobos are thinking, but my reservations about the possibility of their having developed some form of religion are centered more on questions about their ability to conceptualize in the abstract. They can be taught to use language, but their use tends to be fairly concrete, which leads me to wonder if their brains have the capacity to formulate concepts as abstract as “god” or “spirit.” (Most high-school freshmen have not developed enough abstract reasoning ability to handle algebra, which is actually a function of the development of their brains.)

There’s still a lot of debate as to when Australopithecus became Homo, and there are a few examples that are still in dispute, so I’m not going to go there, and I think trying to drag that into the discussion is a) a straw man, and b) pointless. My position is simply that by the advent of fully modern humans, ca. 100,000 years ago, we’re dealing with a group whose brains can handle abstract concepts such as “spirit,” whose ideas of law are most likely to be how the ancestors did it, perhaps coupled with some idea of fairness and/or compensation for injury, and who already have a long tradition of politics as the practice of social interaction.

And as for marriage’s place in all this, I’m happy with a definition of marriage that establishes it as community recognition of a new couple (or household, to bring it forward a few thousand years into a more agricultural context) and a new status for those two individuals as members of the community. It’s worth noting in this context that the blessings of a priest have, as often as not, been optional.

So, yeah, I stand by my original statement — the idea of a human society as “pre-religion” or “pre-law” is, to echo Brian, “pre-posterous.”

Would you argue that our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos have culture, law and religion? Both are known to sometimes bury their dead, they have ways of group behavior that vary a bit from tribe to tribe and a tendency to reward nice members of the tribe and punish mean members. I think very few people would argue that they have religion and law in the sense of human understanding of the terms.

There is no solid line demarcating when the ancestors of chimps and humans became human. What I think we can agree on is that those proto-humans had no religion and no law as we understand it and those things developed gradually as humans evolved. Unless your definition of a human is a hominid that has religion and law there is no doubt that there were early humans with neither.

You’ve got to remember that for the vast majority of human history there were no settlements, no buildings, no form of government or law enforcement other than the ways of behavior that didn’t get you beaten by the alpha humans in the tribe of perhaps 20 to 50 hunter gatherers.

There is simply no way to know what the “offerings” in a 60,000 year old grave meant to the people at that time. Perhaps they did think there was some sort of afterlife but its a stretch to call that belief alone religion. Or it may be simply a way of demonstrating that the dead person was valued and would be missed. In any event while you may think 60,000 years ago is a long time, it is in fact a small fraction of the time humans have existed and certainly humans coupling happened far, far before humans had anything we today would recognize as culture, law, or religion.

Whether you recognize it as “law” or “religion” is largely irrelevant. For most of our history, and in most cultures, “law” was simply custom — the way the ancestors did it. The idea of codified laws is fairly recent — maybe you get something like that in ancient Babylon or Egypt, but by the time of the Romans, it was an established concept — although certainly not universal: Anglo-Saxon law was custom, pure and simple.

As for religion, we’re talking about a time before the monotheisms, or any idea of “organized religion” at all. If you look at early cultures — pre-Colonial Africa, pre-Columbian America, pre-Christian Europe, ancient Japan, Siberia — you find the idea that everything is imbued with spirit, and you negotiate your way through the world on that basis. If that’s not religion, what is it? (It would be fascinating to be able to find out when the idea of actual “gods” — personifications of those forces people were trying to explain — gained currency.)

And it was Stone Age humans who left those 60,000 year old grave offerings. What’s the basis of that, if not religious?

That on its face is nonsense. I’d wager that there has never existed a human society that didn’t have some form of law and religion, no matter how rudimentary. We know of 60,000 year-old grave offerings, and you can bet that any people thinking in those terms also had some form of law, if nothing more than custom”.

I think your claim is on its face nonsense. Humans have existed more or less in our present form for about 200,000 years. For most of our history we lived in small groups of hunter gatherers and no doubt there was no such thing as a codified law for much of human existence and highly unlikely anything we would recognize as a religion existed for those early small groups of humans struggling to survive in the stone age.

That on its face is nonsense. I’d wager that there has never existed a human society that didn’t have some form of law and religion, no matter how rudimentary. We know of 60,000 year-old grave offerings, and you can bet that any people thinking in those terms also had some form of law, if nothing more than custom. (Which, after all, is what the English Common Law was based on.)

I admire you for having the patience to wade through something that, from this sample, is badly conceived and poorly argued.

Just like with Robert George, when you remove all of Brandon’s irrelevant talk about procreation and religion, all that’s left are sex organs.