Religious congregation at sacred sites may have driven the adoption of farming

Evidence

Göbekli Tepe suggests the idea that early stirrings to worship Big Gods motivated people to take up early forms of farming, and not the other way around. An analysis of the blades made of volcanic ash found on the site suggests that it attracted pilgrims from a wide range of locations. This raises the possibility that the temple was an early cosmopolitan center. Schmidt argues that the initial religious impulse to periodically congregate and worship among at least some hunter-gatherer groups in the Middle East might have led to semipermanent settlements around the sacred area. People likely continued to lead a hunter-gatherer existence, possibly for a long time. Eventually, however, settlements swelled. Hunting and gathering cannot feed large populations. This might have created the impetus for experimentation with an agricultural lifestyle in addition to hunting. Animal and plant domestication, in turn, would have led to food surpluses, and larger population sizes. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 392

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s integration: a concrete case where the ‘Big God’ prosociality mechanism is proposed as causing demographic growth rather than following from it.
• SEED: Possible angle: sacred architecture as the original public-goods problem — what collective action does worship perform that farming alone cannot?