In many ways, Homo Sapiens is a very successful species, a lot more so than our ancestors. The usual story about why we are more successful is that biological evolution resulted in us having more enhanced neural hardware. But that story doesn’t add up chronologically. If we look closer, what we see is that it was the cultural institution of religion, and its ability to create large tribes, that made us into modern humans, argue Victor Kumar and Richmond Campbell.

For the first 200,000 years of our existence, Sapiens remained few in number and relatively unaccomplished, confined to a portion of the African continent. Everything began to change roughly 100,000 years ago. Sapiens populations expanded into other parts of Africa and Eurasia. They made the first voyage to Australia an astonishing 50,000 years ago. Western European colonization took longer, beginning only 40,000 years ago. 15,000 years ago, Sapiens entered North America by walking across the temporary land bridge between Siberia and Alaska and traversing sea passages along the northwest coast. Within just 2-3000 years, wanderers established residency near the very tip of South America. Soon enough, Sapiens occupied virtually every terrestrial habitat on the planet.