Expert: John Shea - 7/7/2007

Question
Hi,

I'm currently writing an essay discussing the development of religion within prehistoric man of the upper paleolithic period. My essay is based upon Nietzsche's theory of the development of religion which relies upon a specific structure of human society in that period. I've read some articles which suggest that modern day humans actually evolved from a bottleneck population which would have implications for the strength of Nietzsche's theory. However I'm unsure as to the accuracy of the articles I've read - as with anything on the internet you never have to look far to find conflicting information. I was hoping you'd be able to elucidate upon the matter. Thanks for your time,

Naomi

Answer
Naomi
Your best scholarly reference on Upper Paleolithic human society in Europe  would probably be Clive Gamble's (1999) Paleolithic Societies of Europe, or his new book (title = "Individual in Prehistory", or something like that).  This is pretty dense stuff, if you have no formal training in anthropology and archaeology.
Needless to say, generalizing about Upper Paleolithic society, even if you restrict yourself to the region with the best archaeological record (Europe) still involves shoe-horning a lot of variation into one model -the Upper Paleolithic lasted around 25,000 years.  You're also dealing with one of the aspects of human society that we archaeologists find most difficult to reconstruct.
I hope this helps.  
FWIW:  Given that Nietzche was writing back before archaeologists had even begun to do serious scientific work on the Upper Paleolithic, it would be extraordinarily prescient for him to have correctly deduced the nature of those societies organization and religion.  Like a lot of his peers, he was probably extrapolating to UP society by arranging living ethnographic cultures into some sort of "evolutionary" ranking and projecting their characteristics back into the past.  This is pretty much what early ethnologists did as a matter of course (e.g., Marx, Engels, Freud, even Darwin [to a degree]).  The problem with this approach of course is that it ignores the role that the recent history of these ethnographic groups plays on the characteristics of their society.
Cheers,
John Shea