Yes, I’ve read your articles, and I’ve got the impression that you don’t agree with the “standard” explanations that unanimously define religion as a higher-level construct built on top of other, more fundamental cognitive processes.
I agree with you that ritual behavior is (almost certainly) the cornerstone of human religiosity. I don’t agree, however, that religiosity is some primary drive in human psyche. Thus, I don’t think we can talk about religion sooner than 7–5 millennia before present.
The same holds true for my understanding of commerce and warfare which I see arising from benevolence and violence respectively, and which took their shape (in the modern sense of the word) in the same period as religion did. That is also the reason why I focus on early phases after neolithic revolution.
I would also say that to understand how early animism came to be, we have to look back further than pre-literate, pre-agrarian cultures, and study the whole transition that led to Homo sapiens. In the same vein, it’s also worthwhile to look at animal behavior and cognition. After all, we are still animals.
Yesterday I came across a book that (apparently) talks exactly about that (and seems to tackle also the “evolutionary jury” we’ve discussed).
