Survival stress, not water scarcity per se, predicts moralizing deities

Evidence

The one apparent exception among the nine premissionized societies with a morally concerned High God was the Yukaghir who lived along the upper Kolyma River in Eurasia. They were rated as having low precipitation but high surface water and thus an adequate water budget but, nevertheless, their pantheon included a morally concerned and beneficent Supreme Deity. Their Supreme Deity, called “Pon,” controlled all visible phenomena of nature: When the evening came, they said “Pon-yulec” (Supreme Deity makes dark); if it began to rain, they said “Pon-tiboi” (Supreme Deity makes rain.… The river along which they lived, being located in northern Siberia, was frozen over for eight months of every year. “The Yukaghir territory,” in fact, “has the severest climate of all Siberia.… Nowhere on the earth’s surface does the climate affect so severely vegetable and animal life, including that of man.” … Although the Yukaghir’s water-budget rating used in this study is technically accurate, they obviously lived on the “edge” as much as High God desert peoples. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 423

Categorization

• XREF: Supports the reader’s integration: Norenzayan is refining what variable actually drives Big God emergence — ecological hardship operationalized through water metrics but really proxying general subsistence stress.