Chapter 14. The neurobiological origins of primitive religion Implications for comparative mythology

Abstract. This paper describes a testable neurobiological model of the origins of primitive religion and myth. The paper is divided into four parts. Reflecting the aims of this conference, part one discusses the need for such a model in comparative mythology. Topics covered include the help such a model can give in distinguishing similarities in myths arising from shared ancestry or cultural transmission from those due to parallel invention; in establishing the maximum time depth possible in reconstructing ancient myths; in dating the oldest mythic thinking, which neurobiological data suggest predated ana-tomically modern man (placing the earliest myths long before ca. 200,000 years BP, and undermining claims they were ‘inventions ’ of some later period); in picturing how myths were transformed in the last 5,000 years of literate religious, philosophical, and cosmological traditions; and in explaining the remarkable persistence of myth in modern political and religious thought. Sections two and three review earlier naturalistic models of religion and myth and introduce the first testable model of the origins of these phenomena. The model builds on recent neurodevelopmental findings that picture models of the world as high-dimensional elaborations of lower-level perceptual maps heavily biased to process social information; in humans, the emergence of these models can be traced from infancy through adulthood as they unfold in the cortical and subcortical systems of the so