The alternative to such particular niches is a variety of environmental zones that belong to a category of agriculturally marginal landscapes. The spread of Homo sapiens across the surface of the globe is evidence of the adaptability and “Environmental Pragmatism” innate to the species. The examination of environmental and settlement data, taken up in this chapter, suggests that settled agriculturalists like mobile pastoralist societies take strategic risks on the predictability of environmental variables. The differences in variability between the two categories of landscapes could not, it appears, be greater. Agriculture seems to require a specific formula of variables that remain relatively stable across time and space; whereas agriculturally marginal landscapes are defined by the very instability (both across and within zones) of these variables. 

Despite the limited estimates of agriculturally viable land across the globe, the production of material culture and preservation of written records have expanded the historical footprint of settled agriculturalist societies. Scott writes, 

The states in question were only rarely and then quite briefly the formidable Leviathans that a description of their most powerful reign tends to convey. In most cases, interregna, fragmentation, and ‘dark ages’ were more common than consolidate, effective rule. Here again, we—and the historians as well—are likely to be mesmerized by the records of a dynasty’s founding or its classical period, while periods of disintegration and disorder leave little or nothing in the way of records…This is entirely understandable if the purpose of a history is to examine the cultural achievements that we revere, but it overlooks the brittleness and fragility of state forms.¹

Scott’s comments recall the discussion in the last chapter regarding the perceptions of settled agricultural “civilizations” regarding mobile pastoralist societies. In addition to the inconsistency of historical data available on mobile peoples, Scott’s observation points to the significance of agriculturally ideal landscapes as contexts for these perceptions. Settled agricultural activities seem to rely on certain levels of environmental predictability, reliability, and continuity that appear to contribute to the perception of settlement (or “civilization”) as comparably stable. However unstable or incomprehensible mobile pastoralist societies appear to settled peoples throughout history, they seem to be viewed, as the Shasu from Egypt, as predictably belonging to a stable category of “Other.” As noted in the last chapter, artificially homogenizing perceptions of mobile pastoralism persist in the modern world. In his argument for the Non-Uniform Complexity Theory, Frachetti remarks on the need for more nuanced (and thus realistic) perspectives.² He writes, “Archaeological research increasingly illustrates that Bronze Age societies of the Eurasian steppe were inherently more diverse in their ways of life than their related material culture might imply. Bronze Age steppe communities illustrate comparatively different scales of social, economic, and political organization, as well as local variability in their extents of mobility and geographic ranges of interaction.”³ The diverse forms of “mobile pastoralism” emphasized by Frachetti are directly connected to the variety of environmental contexts that fall within the category of agriculturally marginal landscapes. 

In stark contrast to agriculturally ideal conditions, the variety of “everything else,” that groups agriculturally marginal landscapes, presents mobile pastoralist societies with a wide assortment of opportunities for innovation. The strategic “Environmental Pragmatism” (core to Frachetti’s theory) that appears necessary for survival in such natural environments underlies cultural developments such as the building blocks of the worship of Ahura Mazda and YHWH. In evolutionary terms, the environmental pressures of survival offer a creative challenge to mobile pastoralist societies. The social landscapes that result from variously divergent or discontinuous pragmatic responses to diverse patchworks of physical environmental contexts further shape the development of cultural evolutionary pressures. Frachetti writes, 

the Bronze Age landscape of the steppe may be depicted as a ‘jigsaw puzzle’ of fluctuating socio-economic arenas that served to link otherwise discrete and localized pastoral populations.  Pastoralist strategies, by definition, contribute to a heightened degree of variation in mobility and subsistence strategies, in settlement ecology, and in commercial activity – both within and across regions…Differing degrees of mobility, productivity, and interaction, as well as environmental factors, are essential to the way pastoralists practically define and change the landscape within which they live, and this variation structures the venues and geographic extent of their interaction and assimilation with their neighbors.⁴

Frachetti argues for the power of mobile pastoralists as agents, active in the process of determining and deploying strategies required to survive in agriculturally marginal landscapes. 

The last chapter discussed Salzman’s conclusions regarding the significance of individual freedom and agency to the sustention of mobile pastoralist societies.⁵ The strategic pragmatism of these societies appears to be the direct result of consensus among autonomous individuals who choose to work together for common preservation and benefit. Norenzayan argues that a variety of pressures associated with pro-social “Big God” religions encourage cooperative behavior in critical areas necessary for one group of humans to outcompete another.⁶ He writes “Prosocial religions, with their Big Gods who watch, intervene, and demand hard-to-fake loyalty displays, facilitated the rise of cooperation in large groups of anonymous strangers.  In turn, these expanding groups took their prosocial religious beliefs and practices with them, further ratcheting up large-scale cooperation in a runaway process of cultural evolution.”⁷ Despite the incongruity of his emphasis on “large groups of anonymous strangers” and the focus of this dissertation on small-scale mobile societies, Norenzayan’s comments highlight the biological evolutionary consequences of cultural selection processes and social institutional development. Although the issues with Botero et al.’s article, discussed in the first chapter, make that research unreliable for supporting the argument of this dissertation, it is important to recall the general argument for purposes of the current discussion. Botero et al. argue that intraspecies cooperation is a survival strategy developed in response to environmental challenges that has proven successful among non-human animals.⁸ Botero et al. follow Norenzayan in suggesting that, among humans, the biological evolutionary fitness of this approach extends to the cultural adaptation of intragroup cooperation: religious developments that favor pro-social cooperation facilitate their own propagation by means of group survival.⁹ The arguments of Norenzayan and Botero et al., in broad strokes, appear to explain the strategic value of religions like the worship of YHWH and Ahura Mazda, respectively, in agriculturally marginal environmental contexts. 

In order for the worship to spread, the biological survival of the worshippers of Ahura Mazda and YHWH in their originating environmental contexts must have been supported, to some degree, by the development of these religions. If the emphatic concept of “Truth” conceived by these religions included pro-social components, it is reasonable to assume that they would have contributed to sustaining a critical number of followers for continuation of worship. Building blocks such as an emphatic concept of “Truth,” perception of “incompatibility” with other religions, and perspective that separates social or “ethnic” identities from religious identities seem to constitute a set of tools for cooperative survival and competitive expansion used by these (and other) religions deemed monotheistic. They could promote intragroup cooperation by defining the group as adherents or worshippers of YHWH or Ahura Mazda. The competitive advantage of this approach has been discussed earlier in this dissertation: by making membership to the group contingent upon choice or adherence, non-group members have the potential to opt out of “the fight” by converting and thus gain the benefits (and responsibility) of intragroup cooperation. 

It is important to comment, briefly, on the potential for so-called “free riders” to take advantage of benefits by joining the group without contributing to the community. In “The Evolution of Costly Displays, Cooperation and Religion” Joseph Henrich proposes a species-wide adaptation to guard against those who say one thing and do another.¹⁰ His theory of creditability-enhancing displays (CREDs) concerns the process of cultural learning and the evolutionary challenge presented by potential models/teachers who can manipulate or misinform observers/learners.¹¹ It is built upon a concept of “hard-to-fake displays” which can be summarized as a demonstration of skill or strength that communicates the fact in a self-evident manner (a show of physical strength, for example, is “hard to fake”).¹² Henrich writes,

A model, for example, might express the view that donating to charity is important, but not donate when given the opportunity. The action, not donating, should indicate to a learner that while the model may believe in some sense that giving to charity is a good idea, he is probably not deeply committed to it. As we will see, cultural learners under such conditions would simply acquire the practice of talking about how good it is to give to charity, without actually giving. Learners imitate the model, in both actions (talking about how important charitable giving is) and in degree of commitment (little). Conversely, when a model actually gives to charity at a cost to himself, learners more readily acquire both the representation that giving to charity is good and a deeper commitment to or belief in that representation. Cultural learners are using these actions to more accurately assess the models' degree of commitment or beliefs in the expressed representation. Such diagnostic actions are credibility-enhancing displays (CREDs).¹³

The application of this concept to the process of conversion is clear with regard to many religions deemed monotheistic in the modern world: in order to show belonging adherents must demonstrate belief and practice according to religious standards. Although this mechanism is not exclusive to either religions deemed monotheistic or mobile pastoralist societies, it is important to identify its expression in these contexts.

The category of agriculturally marginal landscapes includes the majority of environmental regions on the planet: nearly two-thirds of global land surface. This would seem to group too many different landscapes into a collection that is too broad to be useful for this research. However, the variety of ecological contexts, in which mobile pastoralist societies pragmatically strategize methods of survival, offers seemingly endless challenge to the creative power of human minds. From the innumerable innovations and ideas born in this variety of challenging contexts, biological and cultural evolutionary processes selected for fitness building blocks of religion that comprised the worship of YHWH and Ahura Mazda. These religions developed, spread, and survived based on the products of these processes and their religious descendants in the 21^stcentury CE bear the marks of mobile pastoralist origins in agriculturally marginal landscapes.