Dawkins must be grinding his teeth.
Ways of looking at history go through trends. In Breasted's time, the idea of moral progress was popular: primitives to marvelous us! Class structures, climate changes, environment, geography, economics, game theory--all have had their hey-day.
Many of these theorists disagree with each other. Mention individual choice/desires/wants, however, and many of the aforementioned groups join together to shout down the opposition.
No, no, something less...troubling must be at the back of history! Right now, CRT is popular, and it is, inherently, a theory devoted to the idea of segregation: segregate messy individuals with their messy lives and their odd dispositions into tidy, branded categories that can be applauded or denigrated or pitied, all at a remove.
In contrast, there is some evidence that in very messy individual ways, hunters/gatherers took rituals and artistic impulses and sacred objects and stuck them in a single location because, well, why not? For generations, they came and went from these locations.
And then they said, "Hey, you know, it might be easier just to settle down here."
Like Paglia and others, I see religion as the original art--
So, art came first--then a bunch of pompous, joyless rebukers took it upon themselves to explain life to others: "No, no, this theoretical idea of mine is what motivated you, not--gasp gasp--liking stuff."
