ABSTRACT
The loss of the large mammals and an increasingly unpredictable climate encouraged hunter-gatherers, who had already broadened their diet to include more small game and an expanding variety of plants, to assume a greater role in ensuring food security. The Indo-European language family underpinning this text migrated from South and West Asia to Europe and then to North America, along with wheat, cheese, and beef. The rise of agriculture modified the scale, complexity, and professionalization of religion. Agricultural religions share features like care-taker deities, seasonal festivals, and offerings of crops. Shinto, the indigenous religion of Japan, identifies rice as sacred. Religious scholars have hypothesized that very productive farming cultures were the basis of early interregional religions and ultimately of world religions like Hinduism. The logical inference that rituals build cooperation among agriculturalists is not by itself a proof of the relationship.
