Religious and political power went hand in hand in the Pacific

Publicly released:
Australia; New Zealand; Pacific
Polynesian Cultural Center - Fale Fakatu'i (Queen's Summer House) Credit: Daniel Ramirez, Flickr https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
Polynesian Cultural Center - Fale Fakatu'i (Queen's Summer House) Credit: Daniel Ramirez, Flickr https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Religious and political authority developed together in the Austronesian language family of countries in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, according to NZ and German research. The study looked at 97 Austronesian language societies and found that political and religious authority co-evolved - but they could not say that one drove the other. The authors say this co-evolution of religious and political authority could have been the result of them influencing each other, or could also reflect a third element, such as authority itself, that caused these to be linked. 

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conference:
Nature Human Behaviour
Research:Paper
Organisation/s: University of Otago, University of Auckland, Victoria University of Wellington, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany
Funder: Open access funding provided by Max Planck Society
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