Glad you took the time to read this.

I live to learn. haha

The paragraph “Religion likely evolved by building on morality, introducing supernatural agents to encourage cooperation and restrain selfishness, which enhanced group survival. Additionally, emotions like disgust play a key evolutionary role in moral judgments by helping to avoid threats to health, reproduction, and social cohesion.”

What I don't like about this argument is it must separate Humans from animals in order to make "Morality" and "Premoral behavior" different things, when it is clearly the same and we don't call other species exhibiting those traits "moral". It seems disingenuous when discussing precivilization humans living in small groups to not compare them to other animals in the same situation today and call what we had "premoral behavior" instead of calling it "morality".

We are just a species of animal at the end of the day, and should study ourselves with that lens.

You say that it’s required to bring together larger populations, but plant cultivation - the beginnings of farming will be far more significant.

This is also very important, but without the ability to maintain larger groups, plant cultivation is a hard skill to maintain an oral history for.

As a slightly sideways thought, take a look at e.g. African tribal social structures - relatively small population groups (villages) may exists with low/intermittent positive interaction (not fighting over resources), but can still share similar or near identical spiritual beliefs and moral codes. I.e. one does not automatically determine the other. They can develop side by side or independently.

They do not exist in isolation, and do interact with one another peacefully as you said.

I would argue the shared beliefs result in that lasting peace between tribes, and likely was negotiated in blood before it was in language.