Early hunter-gatherer gods cared about ritual, not moral behavior.

Evidence

A startling fact about the spirits and deities of foraging and hunter-gatherer societies is that most of them do not have wide moral concern. At first glance, this seems absurd—people steeped in the Abrahamic faiths are so accustomed to seeing religion tied up with morality that it is hard to recognize that this association is a peculiar cultural innovation of the recent ages, and present only in some places. But anthropologists tell us that in small bands resembling ancestral human groups, the gods may want to be appeased with sacrifices and rituals, although they are typically unconcerned about moral transgressions such as theft and exploitation, which preoccupy the Big Gods of major world religions. Many gods and spirits are not even fully omniscient to be good monitors of moral behavior—they perceive things within village boundaries but not beyond; they may be tricked by humans or be manipulated by other rival gods. Religion’s early roots did not have a wide moral scope. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 41

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s analytical integration: it delineates exactly which religious features the Big God mechanism added, and why an omniscient policing god is the distinctive later invention the fumi-e targets.
• DEFINE: Defines the moral scope of early gods against that of Big Gods,
• CANDY: Simple twist on conventional assumptions: early gods were appeased by sacrifice, not concerned with theft — good dinner-conversation material.