Did Telling Stories Help Us To Evolve As Humans?

Anthropologists have long theorized that humans developed “moralistic high-gods” as a way of promoting shared norms and prosocial behaviors. What is religion, after all, but a patchwork quilt of stories reminding humans how to behave—and, more importantly, how not to behave? But religion is thought to have emerged only with the advent of agriculture and large-scale, politically complex human settlements.