HUMANS alone practice religion because they’re the only creatures to have evolved imagination.

That’s the view of anthropologist Maurice Bloch of the London School of Economics, who has challenged the popular notion among some anthropologists that religion evolved and spread because it promoted social bonding.

According to ABC News, Bloch argues that at first:

We had to evolve the necessary brain architecture to imagine things and beings that don’t physically exist, and the possibility that people somehow live on after they’ve died.
Bloch believes our ancestors developed the necessary neural architecture to imagine before or around 40-50,000 years ago, at a time called the Upper Palaeological Revolution, the final sub-division of the Stone Age.

At around the same time, tools that had been monotonously primitive since the earliest examples appeared 100,000 years earlier suddenly exploded in sophistication, art began appearing on cave walls, and burials began to include artefacts, suggesting belief in an afterlife, and by implication the “transcendental social”.

Says Bloch:

The transcendental network can, with no problem, include the dead, ancestors and gods, as well as living role holders and members of essentialised groups. Ancestors and gods are compatible with living elders or members of nations because all are equally mysterious invisible, in other words transcendental.

Religious-like phenomena in general are an inseparable part of a key adaptation unique to modern humans, and this is the capacity to imagine other worlds, an adaptation that I argue is the very foundation of the sociality of modern human society. Once we realise this omnipresence of the imaginary in the everyday, nothing special is left to explain concerning religion.