There is a lot more on the role of gods and magic in the book "The Secret of our Success" [1]. I'm not sure if all of the studies in there have been replicated, but it's certainly food for thought. One theory is that divination functioned as a kind of RNG for those cases when picking something at random was better than relying on your own bias, such as when and on which flank to attack an opposing army - where being unpredictable is a feature.

Another example from the book is that certain types of shark were taboo to pregnant women in ancient Polynesia; no-one could explain why except for things like "it would upset the gods otherwise". But it turns out that said animals' meat actually contain chemicals that are indeed bad to consume when you're pregnant.

I can also recommend Brett Deveraux' "Practical Polytheism" series [2]. One of his key quotes is "It is safe to assume that people in the past believed their religion." (Actually, I can recommend all of acoup.blog to HN readers, including the latest post on ChatGPT, but that's going off topic.)

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Our-Success-Evolution-Domestic... [2] https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polythei...

There's a book called "The Secret of Our Success" which covers this topic. https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Our-Success-Evolution-Domestic...

I have not read the book, but I've read a pretty good summary and blog post about it here (~7'700 words): https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...

I found the arguments fascinating. Especially surprising was the argument that e.g. using bones to divine where to hunt can serve a useful role despite the apparent uselessness of divination. In this case, the argument goes, it serves as a randomizing tool to prevent over-hunting in one spot by independent groups (though of course the tribes themselves could not provide that reasoning).

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Follow-up blog posts:

A list of excerpts chosen by the blog author: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/05/list-of-passages-i-hig...

Comments on the previous blog posts (useful particularly because some comments point out potential errors in the book): https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/11/highlights-from-the-co...