Rituals signal mate quality
Peter Maňo, Radek Kundt, and Eva Kundtová Klocová, together with Dimitris Xygalatas, published an article on rituals as signals of mate quality in the journal Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology.
Missing gods or data?
Using open data and code of the recent article published by Whitehouse et al. (2019) in Nature, Beheim et al. argue that the detection of beliefs in moralizing gods is crucially dependent on the presence of writing in past societies.
However, assuming the absence of such beliefs pre-writing is at odds with the ethnographic record that documents such beliefs in non-literate societies. Therefore, the sole reliance on writing may bias our conclusions about such beliefs in past societies as well as the related inference on the causal role of these beliefs in increasing societal complexity.
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