You know what they say about headlines that pose a question -that the answer is always no. In this case, the findings are too complex for a mere yes or no, and the research itself is raising more questions. Some anthropologists believe that human sacrifice helped to establish and maintain the power of authority figures over the lower classes from whom sacrifices were chosen. Anyone who threatened that authority could be targeted as well. Societies that are structurally unequal are easier to rule and to hold together. To check that theory, scientists created databases that combine the many societies that practiced human sacrifice. One, called Pulotu, has information on 100 traditional Austronesian cultures. Another, called Seshat, contains data from 400 societies over 10,000 years. The idea that societies that practiced human sacrifice grew and became more complex appears to hold up -but only to a certain point.
The results coming out of Seshat—which have yet to be published—suggest that social control may not be the whole story, however. No society in Pulotu comprises more than a million people, while Seshat includes “mega-empires” whose subjects numbered in the tens of millions. Seshat’s founders therefore argue that it tracks social complexity closer to modern levels, and they find that, beyond around 100,000 people, human sacrifice becomes a destabilizing force. “Our suggestion is that this particularly pernicious form of inequality isn’t sustainable as societies get more complex,” says Whitehouse. “It disappears once they pass certain thresholds, because they cannot survive with that level of injustice.”
Rather than being an essential stepping stone to greater complexity, the Seshat team argues, at these thresholds human sacrifice became a parasitic practice—an attempt, often by military heroes who had transformed themselves into “god-kings,” to seize and maintain power, to the detriment of social cohesion. That’s because, whereas human sacrifice might have terrorized the members of a smaller, simpler society into obeying their self-styled leader, it could no longer do so in a large and ethnically diverse one. There, it was easier to disobey the ruler, or desert, and evade punishment—and the temptation to do so only grew stronger as societies grew larger.
So what held a society together when they grew past human sacrifice? Military might is one facet being studied, while religion is another. Read what scientists are saying about the subject at The Atlantic. -via Digg