Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion

by Barbara J. King

  Religion has been a central part of human experience since at least the dawn of recorded history. The gods change, as do the rituals, but the underlying desire remains—a desire to belong to something larger, greater, most lasting than our mortal, finite selves.   But where did that desire come from? Can we explain its emergence through evolution? Yes, says biological anthropologist Barbara J. King—and doing so not only helps us to understand the religious imagination, but also reveals fascinating links to the lives and minds of our primate cousins. Evolving God draws on King’s own fieldwork among primates in Africa and paleoanthropology of our extinct ancestors to offer a new way of thinking about the origins of religion, one that situates it in a deep need for emotional connection with others, a need we share with apes and monkeys. Though her thesis is provocative, and she’s not above thoughtful speculation, King’s argument is strongly rooted in close observation and analysis. She traces an evolutionary path that connects us to other primates, who, like us, display empathy, make meanings through interaction, create social rules, and display imagination—the basic building blocks of the religious imagination. With fresh insights, she responds to recent suggestions that chimpanzees are spiritual—or  even religious—beings, and that our ancient humanlike cousins carefully disposed of their dead well before the time of Neandertals.   King writes with a scientist’s appreciation for evidence and argument, leavened with a deep empathy and admiration for the powerful desire to belong, a desire that not only brings us together with other humans, but with our closest animal relations as well.  

Genres: Religion, Anthropology, Science, Spirituality, Psychology, Nonfiction, Evolution

301 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 16, 2007

About the author

Barbara J. King
The College of William and Mary
Ph.D., University of Oklahoma

Barbara J. King is a biological anthropologist and Professor of Anthropology at The College of William and Mary. Professor King received her B.A. in anthropology from Douglass College, Rutgers University, and earned her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma.

Professor King’s research interests concern the social communication of the great apes, the closest living relatives to humans. She has studied ape and monkey behavior in Gabon, Kenya, and at the Language Research Center at Georgia State University. The recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, she has published three books on anthropology, including The Information Continuum: Social Information Transfer in Monkeys, Apes, and Hominids.

At William and Mary, Professor King has won four teaching awards: The William and Mary Alumni Association Teaching Award, the College’s Thomas Jefferson Teaching Award, the Virginia State Council of Higher Education’s Outstanding Faculty Award, and the designation of University Professor for Teaching Excellence, 1999–2002.

Reviews

[Raed · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the first part of the review I will summarize the book, in the second part i will give my idea about Evolution, Religion and God.

Part I
Barbara J. King believe that science can explain something meaningful about the evolution of the religious imagination : "The religious impulse is rooted in a deep longing for the emotional meaning-making with other beings that is so fundamental to the prehistory of our species. We crave belongingness, and we seek it with other people, with other animals, and with spirits, gods, and God, on earth and in unearthly realms"

The story that has been told in these pages is one of engagement with the mysteries all around us, the mysteries that humans have for so very long experienced in ways seamlessly bound up with emotional meaning-making, with creativity in art and dance, and with emotional mutuality among social partners.

For millions of years, human ancestors derived meaning from mutuality, late in our prehistory, humans began to seek belongingness in the sacred realm as well as in the daily rhythms of small-group life. Emotions that we had been content, before, to create with those we could see, hear, and touch, we now began to create in relation with sacred beings.

Part II
The concept of God is untestable In other words, no scientist can open his mouth and say that God exists or not. The only scientific approach that can lead us to God is to understand what was going on before 10-43 seconde (0,000...001. 43 zeor, Temps de Planck ) after the Big Bang. And I'm sure while writing this review, Scientist and engineers at CERN are trying to understand the hidden part of the beginning.

I believe no one needs to divorce God from knowledge and reality, and no one needs to fear that evolution can add nothing to divine accounts of life in the universe.


I’m still not against Darwinian evolution on theological grounds. I’m against it on scientific grounds. I think God could have made life using apparently random mutation and natural selection.
but i can never accept that a tornado had picked up a pile of metallic trash and deposited it as a fully-assembled Boeing 747.

I can never accept that life is a building blocks game driven by Dices to a breathtaking history of 3.5 billion years (At least the first parts aren't random) ...

I like this kind of books, and I'm not looking for answers, I'm looking for more questions,
I gave it 3 because I didn't get what I was looking for (questions).

[Terence · Rating 3 out of 5]

Barbara King argues in this book that humans evolved a need to believe in something that transcended physical reality and the concrete bonds between individuals within family and tribal groups, and that this need is expressed as “religion.” “Religion” is a fairly slippery term but for purposes of her argument, King defines it as “a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.” (based on Clifford Geertz’s definition) (p. 18) Thus, it’s possible to encompass the first evidence of ritual in hominid life as well as the most involved theology of a literate, urban, 21st century civilization.

Much of the book is taken up with finding evidence for the four cognitive abilities that King believes form the basis from which religion springs: the primate need to belong (expressed by the awkward “belongingness”).

“Empathy” – the ability to walk a mile in another’s shoes – is the first characteristic, and King points to many examples (not just among primates) in the animal kingdom. The second ability is “meaning-making,” which is an animal’s ability to convey meaning through gestures, vocalizations, posture, etc. Primates are quite good at this – humans most of all. Not only do we make meaning about immediate events (e.g., “stop messin’ with my girl,” “I’m hungry,” “ha, ha, ha, that’s funny”) but we impute deeper purposes to things (e.g., “this ring means he loves me,” “God caused our crops to fail because we failed to obey the Law”). The third factor is the ability to make and enforce rules. Humans are, again, masters at this but King presents evidence for rudimentary rule-making in our ape cousins. The final pillar upon which “belongingness” (and hence religion) rests is the capacity to imagine. There’s some really fascinating information here about chimpanzees imagining companions and toys that reveal just how narrow the gap between us and other animals is. (pp. 56-58) All these come together to make us (primates) the quintessential social animal.

At this point in the book, King is on pretty solid, if still largely theoretical, ground. She’s extremely careful not to overly anthropomorphize nonhuman behavior – after all, can we really know that a chimp is “imagining” a toy or “mourning” the death of a group member? – but it’s unlikely human cognition is so qualitatively different from other animals that similar behaviors don’t reflect similar responses. (Here let me inject a personal anecdote: I have cats. Usually, they treat me as one of their own – curling up with me, napping with me, even grooming me. But when I’m sick, they leave me alone. They don’t abandon me but they refrain from the usual jumping on my stomach or grooming or kneading until I’m better. Granted this may not be empathic compassion but it does appear to reflect a cognitive parallel.)

The rest of the book is an examination of hominid evolution, looking for evidence of “belongingness” and religion. As one might expect, there’s precious little that even hints at this before Neandertal. And even this is extremely late. From my readings elsewhere, I gather that evidence of ritual among the Neandertal is sketchy and often found in temporal and/or physical proximity to modern humans. (So Neandertal were excellent mimics but not innovators. Even if they did assimilate sapiens technology, it’s anyone’s guess who they interpreted it.)

The following are some interesting and, I think, important insights found in the book:

Despite a relative lack of imagination and innovation, there is evidence that Neandertal and other pre-sapiens hominids had diverse cultures: bear cults at Regourdou, deep-cave activities at Bruniquel or cannibalism at Moula-Guercy. (pp. 122-126) There’s evidence for this among modern chimps, as well – some of whom use a particular toolkit while others in similar environments do not.

Sedentism and communal living preceded agriculture but when human societies began that fundamental switch to farming, a qualitative change occurred that transformed religion. King only touches on this, mentioning the enormous temple complex found at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey that’s at least 10,000 years old.

The relationship between socialization, religion, “belongingness” and all the other components that make up human cognition and culture is not linear but a complex interaction that involves a little understood system of feedback and mutually reinforcing relationships.

In her chapter “Is God in the Genes,” King makes a very strong case that there is no “God gene.” There isn’t even a package of genes that make us religious. At most, our genome predisposes us to act and perceive in certain ways expressed spiritually and in religion.

Ultimately, though, King doesn’t push her argument into speculation about the separate reality of a god-gods-spirits. I get the impression that she personally wants to believe in something beyond mere existence and fears pushing her evidence to the logical, scientific conclusion. I believe King makes a good case for the four bases of “belongingness” (heck, Aristotle argued the same thing 2-1/2 millennia ago) but she hasn’t convinced me that they ultimately form the basis for religion. Nor has she answered the question “Is religion our brain’s attempt to understand a universe where god-gods-spirits really exist or is it the byproduct of our need to belong carried to an irrational and unjustified extreme?” (viz, Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos, where he fictionally tackles the same question)

I’m more convinced by the arguments of David Lewis-Williams in Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness Cosmos and the Realm of the Gods, where he argues that the brain processes sensory input that our consciousness interprets and organizes into insights, ritual and religion. That is to say, religion is an outgrowth, an accident, of cognition reflecting no external reality. (I don’t know if Lewis-Wallace believes this personally but that’s all that we can conclude based on presently available evidence.)

In sum, this is an interesting book and definitely recommended to those interested in the “religious” sensibility and human evolution.

[Zach Brandt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Basic argument: if we identify religion as essentially a feeling of belongingness, we can make progress in our description of the evolutionary origins of religion. The study of contemporary great apes sheds light on our evolutionary past since we share a common ancestor with these apes. The apes experience empathy, consciousness, imagination, etc. As humans evolved, this empathic sense of belongingness deepened and manifested itself in symbolic rituals that connected us with a felt divine.

Response:

Great tone throughout the book. Thoughtful and charitable.

I appreciate the resistance to simple genetic explanations of religion. How does King’s view of belongingness compare to memetic inheritance in a Richard Dawkins sense?

At the end of the day, all attempts I’ve encountered to explain religion in evolutionary prehistory are hugely speculative. This is no exception.

At one point King asks a far more important question, though she commits herself to agnosticism on the answer: did humans discover God or imagine him? Explaining the development through history has not yet answered this question in my mind.

[Tom Uytterhoeven · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read the Dutch translation of this book. That edition's title has a better fit with the content than the English one. Translated back to English it says: "The Spiritual Monkey: Why We Believe in God". And that is more or less the basic thesis of the book: we are spiritual creatures by nature.
King develops this through seven chapters, with an added eight chapter on the relation between religion and science. The first chapter is introductory, offering the main thesis of the book. We are spiritual creatures, King argues, because evolution has enabled us to empathize with other living creatures. We have a natural desire to feel connected with others, we are social beings and because of the emotional charge this desire for social belonging we developed a sense for connection with supernatural agents. Chapters 3, 4 en 4 offer data, mostly from archeology, to support this thesis. Unfortunately this does not always come across as strong as King seems to think. For instance: she does not address thoroughly the evolution of emotions, although she mentions neurological research on a few occasions. But what troubled me the most that she readily jumped from establishing a case for imagination and the use of symbols as an important development in human culture - which sounds reasonable enough - to taking the evidence for that case as proving the role of emotions in the development of religion - which to me seems a bit like stretching the evidence. Actually, King seems to take her thesis more as a given and less as what has to be examined.
That does not mean I am in total disagreement with her thesis. I read this book with "The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition" by Michael Tomasello in the back of my mind. Although I would not go as far as to say that both books defend the same thesis, much of what King offered seemed acceptable to me because of Tomasello's work.
One last remark on why I gave three stars, and not four: the language. Popularizing science means balancing between over- and underestimating your audience. Maybe it's due to the translation, but I sometimes had the impression that King did the latter.

[Tucker]

This book has a lot of beautiful moments, though the argument is a complex tapestry that is a bit hard to follow as a whole. Religion is defined here alternately as a kind of human emotion associated with social "belongingness" and as a particular system of symbols. These two prongs work together, since symbols are defined collectively and are a way of communicating, co-constructing meaning, and establishing social bonds. The anthropological analysis is bolstered by anecdotes about empathetic and signing primates. It is in our hominid history to care and to communicate; religion is about caring and communication; hence, religion evolved. Insofar as people claim that supernatural beings exist, this belief is a kind of imagination, projection, or co-construction of another humanlike social being, elevated to the level of a symbol.

At the very beginning of the book, King declares herself agnostic about the question of whether God exists, and she acknowledges that some religions, like Judaism and Buddhism, do not traditionally consider God's existence to be a question of central importance.

In the last chapter, however, she explores the contemporary American assumption about religion as propositional statements about God that are placed in opposition to scientific understanding, and in doing so, she assumes a slightly different definition of religion as belief in God. She expresses frustration with the "New Atheists" who insult religious belief. She indicates that religious feelings and thoughts are more than arbitrary illusions--they are meaningful illusions--and she implies that there may be something to them, some underlying reality to which they are pointing. She mentions the Catholic theologian John Haught, who, "in his book Deeper Than Darwin, notes the dismissiveness inherent in assuming that humans began to 'imagine' God in the sense that God is imaginary. (p. 233) Well...in what other sense should we possibly take it? She doesn't say.

As far as I can tell: if people are imagining God, then if some God happens to exist, that God is basically unrelated to the God they are imagining. This is where "imagination" differs from "perception" or "knowledge." When we say we "know" something, we mean that our belief is somehow connected to a reality, even caused by that reality. When we say we "imagine" something, we mean that our belief is disconnected from reality. We are creatively inventing something that wasn't there to begin with. If we imagine something, it isn't necessarily bad or childish or even dispensable, but it is definitely imaginary. The artistically imagined God may still be meaningful on an emotional and/or social level, but the act of imagining this God doesn't constitute scientific evidence for whether any kind of God exists. It seems as though King wants to be agnostic on this point, and I think that's pushing agnosticism too far. It's one thing to be agnostic about the question of whether God exists. It is another matter to be agnostic about the question of whether human imagination points to God in such a way that the imagination should be considered a valid scientific data point as evidence for God. Since she is writing as a scientist (a biological anthropologist), I wanted her to push a little harder on this question--or perhaps to have left out the last chapter altogether, since wading into atheist/theist arguments diverges from the much more interesting and successful message about emotion and symbol that the rest of the book is devoted to.

[Clif Hostetler · Rating 3 out of 5]

The anthropologist author of this book interpolates between the probable behavior of the common ancestor with apes (using modern apes as a guide) and the behavior of humans to speculate on the development of religious behavior during the intervening time period. Archeological evidence is used to further support these speculations. Humans are social animals, and religious behavior is evidence of the human desire to show social behavior toward things not seen or understood. The author refers to this motivation as a desire for "belongingness."

There is more anthropology than religion in the first half of this book. We learn a lot about skeletal structure, tool making, and geographic spread of hominids. But the origin of religious behavior is largely inferred from subtle clues.

The author observes that almost all sentient beings, including mammals, fish and birds, show some degree of social behavior toward others of their own kind. This is particularly true with primates and very much so for humans. This human characteristic led to religious imagination.

"The religious imagination thrives on the human yearning to enter into emotional experience with some force vaster than ourselves. This pattern, then - in its essence rather than in its details - stretches back far into our prehistory. For millions of years, human ancestors sought belongingness within their social groups; and spiritually, humans began to seek an emotional connection with god, gods, or spirits."

The author goes out of her way to thoroughly debunk the "god gene" hypothesis. She believes the human brain is far too complex and plastic (as in ability to adapt) to be dependent on a single gene.

The author includes a complete chapter at the end titled, "God and Science in 21st Century America." She summaries the spectrum of attitudes regarding this subject as follows:
1. Accept creationism, scorn evolution.
2. Accept intelligent design, claim to be an alternative view of science.
3. Scorn religion (à la Dawkins).
4. Embrace both (religion and science), but then keep separate (à la Gould).
5. Science (including evolution) helps us understand the actions of God (à la Haught).
The author prefers the fifth approach listed above. She proceeds to conclude as follows:

"A strong dissatisfaction with the gene- and brain-centered scenarios --- motivated me to write this book. Science can look head-on at humanity's hunger for the sacred, a hunger that is far more than a mere offshoot of the workings of our genes or brains ..."

The following are my comments, not necessarily from the book:
Humans are graced with a godlike ability to transcend time and space in our minds but are chained to death. Homo Sapiens are an example of a species who's minds have advanced faster than their physical bodies. They can understand the concept of time, they can know and consider events in the past before they existed, they can imagine and conjecture about events in the future after they no longer exist, but still they remain captive inside a physical body that experiences birth, life and then death. Religion may be the result of the human mind's striving to transcend the limitations of space-time assigned to their physical body.

The following is a link to my review of the book, A Short History of Myth. It is similar to this book in subject material.
(link to my review of A Short History of Myth.)

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating consideration of how religion might have evolved in humans by observation of our nearest relatives, the great apes.

[Iftekhar Sayeed · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good book - but.

Barbara J. King has to be commended for emphasizing belongingness, rather than the supernatural, as the essential ingredient of religion. That clears the way for the analysis of social behaviour among the great apes.

Empathy, meaning-making, rule-following and imagination appear to be exhibited by primates. However, she insists that these traits do not reveal primate religion. That's quite correct.

On the definition of religion, she draws on Clifford Geertz, and rather cursorily: the core of religion, she observes, is "symbolic representation". She gives a few examples: the flag, the wedding ring, wine as Jesus' blood. The first and second would count as religion, as I will show, but not the second.

She congratulates Geertz on avoiding all talk of faith, God, gods, spirits, eternal life or sacred texts. And this is the first weakness of the book. She has no time for "secular religions", like nationalism, Marxism, fascism or democracy. Secondly, these religions do not emphasize belongingness or compassion: they assert belonging and not-belonging, love of members and hatred of non-members.

Her entire thesis of religion-as-belongingness-and-compassion falls apart.

It is remarkable that she nowhere mentions the very workable definition of religion offered by Ninian Smart in his "The World's Religions". Having identified seven dimensions of religion, Smart goes on to observe meticulously how nationalism and Marxism are both religions.

In the last chapter, King comes clean about her atheism. She no longer believes in a science-religion consilience. Her belief in science appears pathetic.

"We can't know what's beyond our cosmic horizon," she says in the last chapter, explaining, "beyond the point at which light has traveled since the Big Bang".

That means, we know a great deal.

Any A-level student of logic could have told her that every tested scientific theory/hypothesis (King is very careful to separate these two terms in terms of their greater or lesser certainty, alas!) commits the fallacy of affirming the consequent.

"If I'm in Paris, then I'm in France; I'm in France; therefore, I'm in Paris."

"If hypothesis H is true, then test implication T is true; T is true ( as the experiment shows); therefore, H is true."

Non sequitur. No scientific theory can EVER be proven true.

For instance, in 2016, gravitational waves, as predicted by Einstein's theory, were detected.

"If Einstein's theory is true, there are gravitational waves."

"(As the experiment shows) There are gravitational waves."

"Therefore, Einstein's theory is true."

That's a non sequitur.

Furthermore, she seems totally ignorant of P. K. Feyerabend's convincing contention that our choice between competing worldviews - scientific vs nonscientific - depends on our subjective prejudices. Feyerabend famously avers that we might as well choose between science and voodoo. His thesis is rigorously developed from the history of science.


She briefly pauses to note that Buddhism lacks gods; then asserts that Buddhists do, in fact, believe in gods.

"A look at Buddhism reveals why religion cannot always be equated with faith in supernatural beings." Later: "Yet Buddhist belief in gods and goddesses surely exist."

True enough, but Confucianism has no gods, officially or in practice. In her desperate attempt to nail compassion as religion, she ignores both a major Axial Age religion and the modern hate-filled ones.

She has to take this path to show that primate compassion harks back to a primeval religious thread running through human (and even animal) evolution.

Her equation of compassion with religion is inspired by Karen Armstrong's book "The Great Transformation", where she speaks of the Axial Age religions. Sure, but a great deal has happened since then.

As a daughter of the Enlightenment, with her belief in science combined with her atheism, she should be aware of the toxic religions of modernity.

That said, her book provides immense pre-historical perspective. The temple at Gobekle Tepe appears, without prehistory, to have occurred overnight: it is as if Homo sapiens woke up one morning and decided to build a mammoth sacred structure.

Surely, there were religious stirrings before that epochal event.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

When popular books on the evolutionary origins of religion are written they all seem to miss the fact that religion is a cultural phenomenon and neglect the discipline that works directly in studying culture: ethnography. Barbara J. King is a biological anthropologist and takes us on a ride through ape and hominid evolution to illustrate her thesis. This thesis is much better than the recently popular geneticism and evolutionary psychology approaches (which she welcomely critiques). She presents a much less reductionist, if poorly defined, approach.
For King the key to the evolution of religion is emotional. Emotion's role in religious experience is obvious to anyone who is a participant in religion, yet this is lost entirely on the evolutionary behaviorists. King describes this emotional component as "belongingness." I would explain what belongingness means but I still don't have a clear idea after reading the book. Another key concept is transformation. In ascribing transformation to religious experience King could have an actual beginning to a real understanding of religion as an evolutionary phenomenon. But transformation never transforms this book to a level of really unpacking religion.
The final chapter is a colossal disappointment as the author shifts into a discussion of the anti-scientific religious movements of creationism and intelligent design in America. Her reflections at the end are the standard NOMAish protestations. The conflict of science and creationism can tell us nearly nothing about religion except a very recent history of political economy of a segment of the religious right.

[Peter van de Pas · Rating 1 out of 5]

What an excruciatingly boring read. It takes about 60 pages to get the concept across that apes have something called cognitive empathy. We've already finished a quarter of the book and no God (or gods or spirits, as she duly adds) in sight. And no humans either. When we get to the short(!) debate about the primacy or not of human consciousness she brushes aside a lot of research by major experts in this field (calling them 'hardliners') saying that for her consciousness is central. This disdain for psychology reminded me of a remark recently on Dutch television by Frans de Waal, a primatologist she greatly admires, who said that all psychology is about is filling out questionaires.
Apart from cognitive science, linguistics and communication theory are also severely misrepresented. To state that communication theory goes no further than seeing communication as sender - message - receiver without taking context into account is indicative of not having read further than chapter 1 of Introduction to Communication Theory.
But what mostly bothered me was the interminable list of stories from what she calls her 'favorite anecdote grab-box'. When explaining the phenomenon of 'social information donation' (not a very hard concept to grasp) we get a 13 line story on how she bakes christmas cookies with her daughter. While I don't mind a few well chosen anecdotes to elucidate hard concepts this is really taking that too far. I prefer my non-fiction works more concise and to-the-point. This book could have been made into an article of no more than 20 pages, which would have spared us all the yawn-inducing 'fun' stuff.

[Jc · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intriguing read; a unique, thought provoking examination of how the hominoid line of African apes may have developed “religion” and “sacredness.” The work is necessarily speculative—obviously no early Homo Socrates, let alone an Australopithecine Thales, has left behind any philosophical discourses!), but King’s thoughts as to what natural developments may have led to this aspect of H.s.s.’s behavior fascinates. One of my favorite parts of Dr. King’s work is her critique of the God Gene (Hamer) and Religion Explained (Boyer), effectively showing the issues with those attempts to explain humanity’s “sacred” side.

[full disclosure: Dr. King was my wife’s undergraduate advisor, and I have met and spoken with her at multiple bioanthro and primatology meetings in the 1990s. But these personal encounters did not affect my approach to the book.]

[Lynn Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very well done. Excellent research and well written. It did get a bit lengthy in detail at times, but that did not distract from the wonderful job Ms King has done.

Lynn K Russell
Author of: The Wonder of You: What the Near-Death Experience Tells You about Yourself

[The Inquisitive Biologist · Rating 4 out of 5]

Less provocative than it claims to be, Evolving God is an interesting read on how the human religious imagination evolved. See my full review at https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2017...

[Riversue · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting hypothesis on the origins of religion but I believe this is an incomplete picture. It is a great addition to the literature.

[Devon · Rating 4 out of 5]

While reading Evolving God, I had described the book to some of my friends as King's view on how Religion was formed, not why. Although, she does address a popular opinion on 'why' in the last chapter of the book.

If you've ever listened to her lectures from the Teaching Company, then you'll feel right at home with this book. Barbara J. King is a Biological Anthropologist which really shines through with this book. I would say any person interested in Anthropology would enjoy those sections of the book.

The premise of Evolving God is that religion was formed through humans yearning for belongingness, which creates an emotion base behind religion. King discusses emotions within animals and even belongingness. She travels past Homo Sapiens and delves into the possibility of hominids like Neanderthal feeling emotion or even belongingness.

I think people who believe solely in Intelligent Design or Creationism might not be comfortable with the book especially if they are against the theory that hominids are Homo Sapiens evolutionary ancestors.

One thing in the book, made me realize how dated the material is. King addresses (at the time, keep in mind her book was published in '07) the possibility of Neanderthal and Homo Sapiens interbreeding. Although, she doesn't state her opinion. She references a source that states that Neanderthal DNA and Human DNA are so different that it is unlikely for them to have interbred.

Now, what makes this dated? In 2010, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology published an article about their Neanderthal Genome Project and that non-African Humans contain Neanderthal DNA.

I thought it would be interesting if she updated that section to see what her opinion on the matter. Also, her thoughts on the interactions of early Homo Sapiens and Neanderthal. Since they had to interact in some way for this to have occurred. Unless one species were the precursor of the Vikings.

[George Mills · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was very disappointed by the book. It offers a rather long description of a rather straight forward concept "belongingness" as evidenced by modern primates, some ideas how early man may have expressed this need, and an unnecessary and unoriginal attack on intelligent design. No attempt is made to demonstrate how the truly great monuments of pre-agricultural man such as Stonehenge, the temples of Malta, Gobekli Tepe, etc. were driven by her ideas of what paleolithic man's religion or conception of God, gods, or the divine might have been.

[PastAllReason · Rating 3 out of 5]

A subject that is of interest to me, I found the book worth reading, though it seemed to wander aimlessly at times. The science seemed to me on the iffy side, though the commentary on The God Gene in the latter part of the book caught my attention.

[Scott]

King takes a non-denominational anthropoligist's look at how religion evolved among humans and how it impacts societal structure. A clear look at a potentially muddy topic. King does a great job shedding light on the origins of religion among the human species.

[Amanda May cross · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like academic papers, this books used more words to make a point than the non-scientific reader needs. That made it a slow read, but there were some worthwhile examples and tidbits from much deeper anthropology than I'll ever have the chance to do myself!

[ShareStories · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is very heavily weighted towards anthropology, much of it about apes. It was not enough about either "man" or "God" to suit me.

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is extensively researched and is very informative.