This thesis gives anthropology the temporal dimension missing in its approach to social origins, and it agrees with the doctrines of the religions about themselves. From the moment when the prehuman creature, the human-to-be, passed over a certain threshold of mimetic contagion and the animal instinct of protection against violence collapsed (the dominance patterns), mimetic conflicts must have raged among humankind, but the raging of mimetic conflict quickly produced its own antidote by giving birth to the single victim mechanism, gods, and sacrificial rituals.
