Today is publication day for my book, Shamanism: The Timeless Religion. To celebrate, here are some of my striking clips of shamanic rituals that I came across while working on the book: Across these videos, you'll see the core features of shamanism. Specialists enter altered states, engage w/ unseen forces, & deliver services like healing & divination. But you'll also see incredible diversity. Shamanism is near universal yet its expressions are endlessly varied.

People often claim that psychedelics have been used globally, for millennia, & in contexts of psychological healing.

In today's @Guardian Long Read, I show what these stories get wrong & why the reality is far more interesting.

Excerpted from Shamanism: The Timeless Religion Key points:
1. Reliable evidence of early psychedelic use is limited to a small set of cultures in the Rio Grande region (modern-day border b/w US & Mexico) & southward. There's no strong evidence of classic psychedelic use outside the Americas [though see note @ end].

Are dancing and infant-directed song (incl. lullabies) human universals? Like many people, I've long thought so.

But in a new paper in @CurrentBiology, Kim Hill & I report that the Northern Aché (Paraguay) lacked both behaviors, likely losing them during cultural declines. Our paper is based on >10 years of fieldwork(!) conducted by Hill b/w 1977 & 2020. He's fluent in the Aché language, has amassed thousands of hours of behavioral observation, and has recorded & translated music. But he's never observed the Northern Aché dance or sing to infants.

About whether "Indian" & "Western/American" culture are compatible: Ppl seem to forget that Indians have been here since the 1800s. They've melded w/ other groups & helped shape this country's cultural landscape. Take, for example, the Punjabi Mexican Americans of California. 🧵 You may have seen this video, which went viral a couple weeks ago. What's great about these guys is not how unusual they are but how they express a cultural amalgam that goes back more than a century.

I've seen debate on here lately about Black Africans in the Greco-Roman world.

The best book on the topic is probably Frank Snowden Jr.'s "Blacks in Antiquity". Here's a recap of what he found: Snowden Jr. focused on the period from ~600 BC to 400 AD. Greeks & Romans were clearly familiar with Black Africans, who they called "Ethiopians". They interacted most with the people of Nubia (then, the Kingdom of Kush, whose capital was Meroë for most of this period).

Advocates of Paleo-inspired carnivore diets (e.g., @PaulSaladinoMD @SBakerMD) often point to the Inuit as having a traditionally carnivorous diet. Yet there are at least five problems with using the Inuit as the quintessential ancestral carnivores: 1. The Inuit lifestyle is relatively new. Human migrations into the Arctic occurred just a couple thousand years ago. If the idea is to return to an ancestral diet, they are arguably a less appropriate model than early agricultural populations who lived thousands of years before.

Did we evolve to respond to music? In our new @NatRevPsych article, @samuelmehr & I address this question, focusing on the universality, domain-specificity, & development of emotional & behavioral responses to music.

Free here: rdcu.be/dcmlZ
nature.com/articles/s4415… Starting with emotional responses, we review evidence of universality & early expression: People are pretty good at identifying emotions in foreign music (though culture still matters), & even infants can discriminate between some expressed emotions (see figure for ontogeny).

Stories of Spanish conquest in the Americas often focus on rapid events like the fall of the Aztecs or the capture of the Inca Atahualpa, creating the impression that conquest was fated. Yet look at the Maya, who took far longer to conquer, and a different story emerges. To start: People often talk about a Mayan "collapse" in 900 CE. Yet Mayan civilization lived on. Yes, cities in the Southern Lowlands (see map) were abandoned, but other Mayan states prospered, especially in the Northern Lowlands (the Yucatan Peninsula).

A trope of historical narratives is that superstitious natives believed European invaders to be gods. Yet the more I read, the more it seems these stories are post-conquest propaganda. Take the claim that the Aztecs (Mexica) thought Hernán Cortés was the god Quetzalcoatl. You’re probably familiar w/ the standard story: The Aztecs believed that the feathered serpent, Quetzalcoatl, was destined to return from the east on a certain date. When the conquistador Hernán Cortés pulled up, they mistook him for the deity, making them easier to conquer.

In my recent @WIRED essay (wired.com/story/health-b…), I implied that there is little evidence of cognitive benefits of fasting. People have since sent me a lot of research, & I realize the story is more complicated. So here's what I've learned about how fasting affects cognition: In thinking about effects, the 2 most important dimensions are:
(1) The duration of fasting (e.g., 1/2 day fast vs 1 year of intermittent fasting)
(2) The time-scale of effects (e.g., performance on the day of fasting vs cognitive performance after 6 months of fasting)

Just accepted @EvolHumBehav: @HSB_Lab & I argue for social diversity during the Late Pleistocene w/ bigger groups, more hierarchy, etc. Preprint & summary in this older 🧵, so I’ll focus on how our argument differs from @DavidWengrow's #TheDawnOfEverything

https://mobile.twitter.com/mnvrsngh/status/1371466783035564036

Like @DavidGraeber & @DavidWengrow, we argue that the classic story (small, mobile, egalitarian bands before agriculture) needs a facelift. We point to some similar evidence (e.g., social flexibility & diversity among Holocene hunter-gatherers). Yet there are 4 major differences:

In 1966, Marshall Sahlins famously claimed that hunter-gatherers work 15-20 hours a week, which he took as evidence of an “original affluent society”. People (like @SebastianJunger @ThatChrisRyan) still cite this statistic. Yet it’s built on shoddy data & interpretation. [thread] Sahlins relied mostly on data from two populations: Aboriginal Australians & the Kalahari !Kung.

Let’s start with the Australian data. They were collected in 1948 & covered 4 groups in Arnhem Land, each of which was observed for just 4 to 11 days.

Many people claim that indigenous psychedelic use consists of shamans giving plants to patients for mental healing. Yet for the last month, @sdpnayak & I have been visiting communities in the NW Amazon & have encountered a very different use: knowledge cultivation by non-shamans. We visited 3 communities: the Piaroa, Jiw, & Eastern Tukano. All of them use the psychedelic snuff yopo, which contains bufotenin (found in certain toads), DMT, & 5-MeO-DMT, often taking it with caapi/yagé (contains MAOIs). This picture shows yopo snuff w/ a bird-bone inhaler.

Government departments (like @USDA & @DHSCgovuk) frequently publish dietary guidelines. But looking at hunter-gatherers & forager-farmers, I'm struck by how many violate Western guidelines yet have healthier hearts & much less chronic illness.

Here are 3 well-studied examples: 1. Kitavans of Trobriand Islands (Papua New Guinea)
In 1990, Staffan Lindeberg spent several months w/ the Kitavans, observing their diet, physical activity, & daily habits. He also measured a slew of health & physiological variable for ~170 adults.

In the 1970s & 80s, anthropologists working in small-scale, non-industrial societies fastidiously noted down what people were doing throughout the day. I’ve been exploring the data & am struck by one of the most popular activities: doing nothing. [thread] Background: The anthropologists (e.g., Bob Bailey, pictured) visited random people during waking hours & recorded what they were doing, building a representative sample of time use. Most of these data were collected while an anthropologist lived with the community for a year+.

Our understanding of ancient religion is shaped hugely by the mythology ancient elites preserved in texts, tombs, & temples. Yet commoner religion was often very different from the official religion. Take, for instance, Bes, the stocky, ancient Egyptian household god: Bes was unlike other Egyptian deities. Part-lion & part-human, he was squat, rotund, & bow-legged. While Egyptian gods were normally shown in profile, Bes appeared in full-frontal portrait, often with his genitals dangling.

Today, prisons dominate criminal justice systems, partly because they're seen as more humane than earlier punishments. Yet after doing some reading, I'm struck that many peoples have known about prisons yet rejected them because they seemed brutal & dehumanizing. [thread] Leading Romans, especially in the 2nd & 3rd centuries AD, saw imprisonment as inhumane. The emperor Antoninus (86-161 AD) said the “penalty can be scarcely imposed [even] on a person of servile condition.” Hadrian (117-138 AD) forbade life imprisonment by provincial governors.

According to a popular narrative, hunter-gatherers lacked indigenous systems of writing. But as with so many of our assumptions about HGs, the story is both more complicated & much more interesting. Consider, for example, Australian message sticks. [thread] Ranging in length from 4.5 cm (~2 inches) to 1.4 meters (~5 feet), message sticks were used by indigenous Australians for long-distance communication. A person carved a “stick”, reviewed the message with a messenger, & had the messenger deliver it to someone in a distant group.

People often assume that the only states of pre-colonial Mesoamerica were despotic kingdoms. What’s rarely appreciated, however, is that one of the main rivals of the Aztec Empire—a city-state called Tlaxcallan—was a republic ruled by an assembly of commoners & nobles. [thread] <100 km from the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán, Tlaxcallan successfully fought off repeated attempts at subjugation. When the Spanish arrived, it was one of the last remaining autonomous polities in Central Mexico & was surrounded by Aztec-conquered territory. (Map @AztecEmpire1520)

People often assume that the Greeks invented democracy. But societies throughout history have independently built systems in which a large portion of the population shared political power. My new favorite examples are the ganas & sanghas, the republics of ancient India. [thread] We know about the ganas & sanghas from many texts, including the Vedas, ancient Buddhist texts & observations of Greek writers like Diodorus Siculus. Evidence of Indian republics goes back to the Vedic period, although they proliferated in northern India b/w 600 BC & 200 AD.

Many of our assumptions about the origins of urban civilization reflect what happened in the Near East &, to a lesser extent, China. But I'm reading up on the Harappan Civilization & am struck by how much it differed from other Bronze Age civilizations. [thread] For background: The Harappan (or Indus Valley) Civilization stretched from modern-day Afghanistan to NW India. Its “mature” period lasted from ~2600–1900 BC. With a population in the millions, its technologies (e.g., writing, metallurgy) rivaled those of Mesopotamia & Egypt.