Rituals originate when one person’s emotional outburst is copied and formalized

Evidence

Such spontaneous, idiosyncratic emotional reactions were probably the basis for the earliest rituals. But to become a ritual, an individual’s demonstrative outburst had to be formalized and copied by others. A woman whose mate had been killed by a male from a competing tribe might have haphazardly outstretched her arm and thrust it upright with a clenched fist. Her friend might have copied that motion, refining and elaborating it with a sweeping arc. The two angry women would have moved together, echoing each other’s movements. What began as a nervous need to express a deep feeling in one woman morphed into a dance between two; others, catching their contagious emotions, would have joined in emulation with their own danced outbursts. A few catchy or comforting snippets of a mournful moan, repeated and extended with a high or low note at the end for emphasis, turned the whimpering wail into a vengeance-seeking song. — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 299

Categorization

• SEED: A vivid micro-origin story — an article on how invention happens could open with the grieving woman’s clenched fist becoming choreography.
• DEEPTHINKING: A falsifiable process model for the birth of culture: the individual emotional artifact becomes collective tradition through imitation and embellishment.