Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods Quotes

“Great empires require great gods and great religions.”
― E. Fuller Torrey, Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods: Early Humans and the Origins of Religion

“Great empires require great religions.”
― E. Fuller Torrey, Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods: Early Humans and the Origins of Religion

“To have been accompanied on life's journey by the symbolic and monumental props of the gods has been a continuing and reassuring source of solitude. Such props quiet the inner voices that whisper about the inevitable end of life's drama.”
― E. Fuller Torrey, Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods: Early Humans and the Origins of Religion

“The presence of gods has been enormously comforting as we have continued to dutifully cross the stage of life, going about or daily tasks, yet knowing that Pale Death was waiting in the wings.”
― E. Fuller Torrey, Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods: Early Humans and the Origins of Religion

“Prior to about 40,000 years ago, hominins had been observing other hominins die for more than six million years. They were intimately acquainted with death as something that happened to others. They observed people die within their living group - children from disease, women from childbirth, men from hunting accidents, and older adults from starvation. They also occasionally encountered deceased hominins as they foraged for food or followed herds of deer. Unlike today, when the biological realities of death are relegated to the offices of medical examiners and morticians, early hominins saw corpses in all stages of decomposition, since even the occasional burial of bodies was apparently not practiced until the last 100,000 years.”
― E. Fuller Torrey, Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods: Early Humans and the Origins of Religion

“...a mature understanding of death appears to be one of the last milestones in the cognitive development and evolution of the human brain.”
― E. Fuller Torrey, Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods: Early Humans and the Origins of Religion

“In short, early Homo sapiens had adquired the cognitive ability to enter into a conversation with the gods, just as modern Homo sapiens does today.”
― E. Fuller Torrey, Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods: Early Humans and the Origins of Religion

“But wait - where did the gods come from 100,000 years ago? Early Homo Sapiens certainly had conversations with other early Homo Sapiens regarding what they thought of one another, and what they thought about a third early Homo Sapiens who had insulted them, and why they were no longer on speaking terms with the other person, ad finitum, just as happens today. But you cannot have such conversations about the gods or with the gods unless you have gods.”
― E. Fuller Torrey, Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods: Early Humans and the Origins of Religion

“The ability of humans to speak a modern language and the evolution of our ability to think about ourselves thinking about ourselves thus appear to parallel each other.”
― E. Fuller Torrey, Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods: Early Humans and the Origins of Religion