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In the nineteenth century, when European scholars started seriously studying “primitive” religion, they remarked on this absence of a clear moral dimension—the dearth of references to stealing, cheating, adultery, and the like. Edward Tylor noted in 1874 that the religions of “savage” societies were “almost devoid of that ethical element which to the educated modern mind is the very mainstream of practical religion.” Tylor wasn’t saying that savages lack morality. He stressed that the moral standards of savages are generally “well-defined and praiseworthy.” It’s just that “these ethical laws stand on their own ground of tradition and public opinion,” rather than on a religious foundation. As the ethnographer Lorna Marshall wrote in 1962, after observing the relationship between the !Kung and the great god Gaona: “Man’s wrong-doing against man is not left to Gao!na’s punishment nor is it considered to be his concern. Man corrects or avenges such wrong-doings himself in his social context. Gao!na punishes people for his own reasons, which are sometimes quite obscure.”

This isn’t to say that hunter-gatherers never use religion to discourage troublesome or destructive behavior. Some Australian aborigines used to say that the spirits are annoyed by people who are frivolous or chatter too much. And when Charles Darwin, aboard HMS Beagle, visited Tierra del Fuego, some of the local hunter-gatherers spoke of a giant who roamed the woods and mountains, knew everything you did, and would punish such wrongdoing as murder by summoning bad weather. As the ship’s captain, Robert FitzRoy, recalled one of the locals putting it, “Rain come down—snow come down—hail come down—wind blow—blow—very much blow. Very bad to kill man.”

But more typical of hunter-gatherer societies is the observation one anthropologist made about the Klamath: “Relations to the spirits have no ethical implication.” Even if religion is largely about morality today, it doesn’t seem to have started out that way. And certainly most hunter-gatherer societies don’t deploy the ultimate moral incentive, a heaven reserved for the good and a hell to house the bad. Nor is there anything like the Hindu and Buddhist notion of karma, a moral scorecard that will determine your fate in the next life. There is always an afterlife in hunter-gatherer religion, but it is almost never a carrot or a stick. Often everyone’s spirit winds up in the same eternal home. And in those societies where the land of the dead does have subdivisions, which one you wind up in often has—as some anthropologists have put it—more to do with how you died than with how you lived. Many Andaman Islanders believed that if you drowned, you wound up underwater, as a sea spirit, whereas otherwise you would become a jungle-roaming spirit. Haida who died by drowning would become killer whales.