Warfare and resource competition drove the rise of large groups and Big Gods

Evidence

But this raises the more fundamental question: how much competition and conflict do we see in human history? The trajectory, intensity, and underlying causes of conflict and warfare continue to be debated. Moreover, we still do not know to what extent warfare contributed to the process of scaling up of groups at the dawn of agriculture in the Middle East. Recent archeological evidence at Tel Brak, a prehistoric mass grave in Syria, suggests that it has. There is no shortage of evidence in the historical and ethnographic record showing that violent and nonviolent conflict has been endemic to human existence. In fact, one driver of large group size in cultural evolution is the intensity of between-group competition for resources and habitats. For example, in the 186 societies of the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (discussed earlier), prevalence of conflict among societies, resource-rich environments, group size, and Big Gods all go together. In places with rich natural resources, there is more intergroup conflict, larger groups, and watchful gods. What causes what is not always easy to know, but one possibility is that conflict over resources led to competition and political expansion of victorious groups, which in turn festered more conflict at the peripheries of these expanding empires. One argument is that these were precisely the antecedent conditions that gave rise to politically centralized states. As Charles Tilly puts it, war made states, and states made war. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 473

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s analytical project: conflicts over resources created the high-stakes environments where Norenzayan’s Big God mechanism and Baumard’s partner-choice dynamics would operate. Also echoes Tilly’s war-made-states thesis central to state formation literature.
• QUESTION: The passage admits causal direction is unclear — did resource-rich environments invite conflict, or did expansion create the perception of richness? Worth tracing in the reader’s integration.