The more egalitarian a society, the smaller the chance its citizens being ritually burned, bludgeoned or crushed to death under a new canoe, research shows

Ritual human sacrifice played a powerful role in the construction and maintenance of stratified societies, according to new research.

The more egalitarian the society, the less likely it was that a human being would be chosen to die for it; the more stratified and rigid, the more likely someone from the lower orders would be selected as a sacrificial victim, scientists from Australian and New Zealand report.

Why the Incas offered up child sacrifices Read more

They analysed data and observations from 93 traditional cultures that flourished from Taiwan to Madagascar, and from New Zealand to Hawaii to Easter Island, to confirm the hypothesis that human sacrifice “stabilises social stratification once stratification has arisen, and promotes a shift to strictly inherited class systems.”

And they add, in their paper in Nature: “Whilst evolutionary theories of religion have focused on the functionality of prosocial and moral beliefs, our results reveal a darker link between religion and the evolution of modern hierarchical societies.”

Joseph Watts of the University of Auckland and colleagues acknowledge that human sacrifice featured in many early human societies: Germanic, Arab, Turkic, Inuit, African, Chinese and Japanese, and in North, Central and South America. But archaeological records cannot always distinguish between ritual human sacrifice and any other violent death.

So they focused on what they called the Austronesian cultures, because these have been well-studied, and share a common origin. These cultures spread from an ancestral homeland in Taiwan, across a range of environments from tiny atolls to continents, and evolved into small, egalitarian, family-based cultures and into highly complex political structures, distributed across a vast area, encompassing more than half the world’s longitude and a third of its latitude.

Religious beliefs were remarkably diverse, but the practice of human sacrifice – recorded in 43% of them - was widespread. So were the methods of sacrifice. These included “burning, drowning, strangulation, bludgeoning, burial, being crushed under a newly built canoe, being cut to pieces, as well as being rolled off the roof of a house and then decapitated.”

Aztec skull trophy rack discovered at Mexico City’s Templo Mayor ruin site Read more

And there was a lot of overlap between religious and political authority. “For example in Polynesia, it was often believed chiefs were descended from gods. Human sacrifices were generally orchestrated by social elites such as chiefs or priests and victims were chosen from the low status groups such as slaves or captives,” says Watts.

“In this study, we didn’t really look at the vestiges of human sacrifice in modern societies, though that is an interesting question.”

They identified 20 egalitarian societies, and found that human sacrifice had been practiced in just five of them. They identified 27 highly stratified societies, and found that 18 of them depended on ritual human sacrifice. But although the study has implications for modern political systems, the researchers are not talking about Downton Abbey, or the court of Louis XIV.

“For a death to be called human sacrifice it must be religiously motivated,” Watts says. “While human sacrifice is not used for control in modern societies, religion more broadly could still serve this function. Our study highlights how religion is vulnerable to exploitation by social elites and can become a tool for building and maintaining social control – the use of human sacrifice as a means of social control provides a grisly example of just how far this can go.”