Religion and the Rise of Civilization

Jean-Paul Carvalho, another UCI Department of Economics faculty member, sent me this great article from the National Geographic. It's too long for me to make it a required reading for the class, but it may be of interest to you.

Here's the basic story. Archaeologists have long understood that human society took a dramatic change when it developed agriculture. They have thought that it was the development of agriculture that allowed for more complex human societies to form. Yet they are now beginning to understand that it may have happened the other way around: agriculture arose as a response to humans settling first.

And why did settlement occur? Religion, according to the article. Read the article for the details. It is a fascinating piece on how religion may have been tightly integrated with the very origins of our modern human society.