Deep History and the Biopsychosocial Paradigm

Richard Bolstad, 2026

A Deeper Materialism

Over the last decade, as I’ve trained as a historian, I’ve been searching for a way of understanding history that is rational, and also makes sense of my life’s work in both “collective trauma recovery” and “spiritual exploration”. A new model called Deep History promises a background for doing this, and this is my introduction to this profound way of understanding the human story. I am not saying this new model is the “only scientific way” to understand history, or even the most useful for all historians or all historical questions. I am saying that without this understanding as a part of how we frame historical questions, we are missing key scientific elements.

In 1885, Karl Marx wrote famously about his historical materialist approach to history “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” (Marx and Engels, 1975, p. 96). Anthropologist and Archaeologist Michael Winkelman explains why he thinks that we need to go deeper, to understand that this “dead weight of tradition” is neither dead, nor a weight. It is in fact a biological inheritance which forms the materialist basis for human decision-making, and which prioritises bliss and safety over even economic survival. It provides us not merely our nightmares but also our most beautiful dreams, and without understanding this, any materialist view of history will fail to provide a practical guide for human action in the present (as indeed Marxism has failed).

Winkelman argues “First I would say that the cross-cultural principles, even universals, of magicoreligious practices, especially shamanism, speak to some underlying biological factors that produce these similarities. Certainly the physical and social environment provide influences, but I think the notion of cross-culturally distributed principles of shamanism, religion, meditation and spirituality speaks strongly to the underlying biological bases as the structural foundations.” Put simply, biology trumps economic theory as a model for understanding what is important about human history.

Why did history, until recently, ignore the grounding of the human story in biology, which the Darwinian revolution in biology made quite clear? Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail (2011, p. 8-9) suggest “As creation gave way to nature, the assumption that humans are part of nature, and that human systems are natural systems, slowly took hold in the biological and behavioral sciences. Among historians and cultural anthropologists, however, the equation of cultural systems with natural ones has never been easy, nor has it been easily historicized. Both difficulties, we believe, are related to the lingering power of the metaphors that dominated history writing in the nineteenth century. The human story, in this worldview, is centered on the conquest of nature and the birth of political society.” That is to say, history, and most especially Marxist materialist history, has largely been the history of the human “conquest” of nature. This absurd misunderstanding (“Animals live in harmony with nature. Humans, by contrast, are at war with nature.” – Shryock and Smail, 2011, p. 9) leads us not to some communist utopia but to self-destruction.

To move beyond that, we need to confront the fact that we are an intrinsic part of nature and that the ‘dialectic” of nature has more control than the superficial patterns of economic production and social organization studied by Marx. It will help if we can accept that nature has not gifted us nightmares so much as loving guidance for survival. As someone who works both with healing collective social trauma, and with the neuroscience of transcendent states, this is a crucial reframe which I believe has not even been understood in the behavioural sciences, let alone in history. It is my purpose in this article to restate this self-evident truth, in terms of modern biology.

The Biological History of Crises

The History of Violence

Until very recently, history was largely the history of wars. Herodotus, often called the father of History, begins his work of “enquiry” or ἱστορία  (writing around 440-430 BCE) by saying “Herodotus of Halicarnassus here displays his inquiry, so that human achievements may not become forgotten in time, and great and marvelous deeds – some displayed by Greeks, some by barbarians – may not be without their glory; and especially to show why the two peoples fought with each other.” (Kierstead, 2011). So the first historian wrote partially to answer this question: Why do wars happen? My claim is that the answer, and the solution, can best be understood in relation to our biology.

Understanding how wars happen, and how to stop that, is now obviously crucial to our survival. For those readers cynical enough to have considered already that maybe it is our determination to exterminate other species and other tribes that was once the critical factor in our survival, rather than our cooperativeness … Hare and Woods point out that the truth may be even worse, because the two factors are linked. While claiming that cooperative communication is humanity’s evolutionary “superpower”, they caution “But our friendliness has a dark side. When we feel that the group we love is threatened by a different social group, we are capable of unplugging the threatening group from our mental network—which allows us to dehumanize them. Where empathy and compassion would have been, there is nothing. Incapable of empathizing with threatening outsiders, we can’t see them as fellow humans and become capable of the worst forms of cruelty. We are both the most tolerant and the most merciless species on the planet.” (Hare and Woods, 2021, p. xxvi)

Abigail Marsh, Professor of Neuroscience at Georgetown University (2017),  studied the brains of extreme altruists and extreme psychopaths, and maintains that the explanation for both lies in the learned responses of their amygdalae (tiny “pea sized” organs in the central brain). Our amygdalae (there are two actually, one on each side of the brain) record our emotional assessment of experiences, and Marsh notes that research on “psychopathic” people (who commit crimes of great cruelty without apparent emotional response) shows firstly that the amygdala is reduced in size, and secondly that they not only feel less fear themselves, but are also unable to correctly identify from photographs when someone feels fear (although they continue to be able to identify anger correctly). People, by contrast, who are extremely altruistic (such as people who donate kidneys to strangers to save their life) seem to be highly responsive to faces showing fear, and such faces trigger their own emotional responses in the amygdala, and stimulate release of oxytocin (a so-called “bonding hormone”) from the nearby hypothalamus (Marsh, 2017, p. 82, 150).

Memory Encoding and Crisis

Our brains have evolved to cooperate and also to create the in-group/out-group experience. And the amygdala may be central to both responses. Let’s step back for a moment and get clear how the amygdala fits into the larger story of being a human being, learning from experiences and responding to challenges.

In an animal such as a human being, the brain and nervous system, made up of billions of nerve cells (“neurons”), glial cells and other specialised cells, coordinate actions across the body. To do this, these cells need to react to the world differently as a result of your previous experiences. If a dog bites a child, their brain needs to react differently next time they see that dog. This “plasticity” (changeability) of nerve cells and their synapses (connection points) is what we usually call memory.  Memories, then, are changes in the nervous system’s functioning which enable you to more effectively respond to current events. These changes in functioning are only incidentally related to the structure of the real previous events which they were initiated in response to. Sure the changes happened as a result of some past experiences, but the changes are not a faithful video recording of those experiences.

So what actually changes when a memory is created? Well, firstly, there are simple changes at the synapses (the gaps between nerve cells, where messages are transferred from one cell to another), and that happens everywhere that nerve cells registering an event are activated. There are increases in neurotransmitter release (neurotransmitters are the messenger chemicals that pass across the gap between nerve cells to carry the messages), and these changes may last for seconds or minutes. Secondly, long-lasting memory depends on wider scale changes such as the physical growth of new nerve cell connections (dendrites), and increases in the number of synaptic connections on those cells.

The most important early changes after a new experience happen in the amygdala and hippocampus, two brain areas in what is called the limbic system, in the centre of the brain. To be exact, the amygdala records the emotional valence (how important it is either positively or negatively – so the amygdala responds especially to things that generate fear, anger, sexual desire, hunger etc.), and the hippocampus records the spatio-temporal coordinates (where and when it happened).

Not all human experiences are as important as each other. When any new event occurs in your life, a “neural network” is set up in the brain with memories of the event, instructions about possible responses, and an “emotional significance rating” or “valence”. If the emotional significance rating is zero, the event is “boring”. If the emotional significance is highly positive (an experience of delicious food, a romantic evening, or something absolutely, fascinatingly new, for example) the memory needs to be stronger so you can recreate it or recognise it quickly in future. If the emotional significance is highly negative (something that physically hurt, or was scary, for example) the memory needs to be stronger so you can avoid it recurring in future.

If the negative rating is high enough then at least for some time a panic-style response will occur each time the person thinks about the experience, and the person may have severe difficulty performing normal daily functions. The aim of this “alarm” response is to ensure that if the emergency recurs, the “panic” reaction will override conscious thinking and cause the person to act quickly to save their life. You can understand that in a physical disaster, this is a very sensible body response. While this panic response mostly saves lives, occasionally it results in panic being triggered accidentally by sensory stimuli that are themselves not dangerous (like reading the morning news). Even in that case most people will gradually edit the neural network over the next couple of months so that it no longer interferes with everyday functioning, a pattern called Recovery. Some people have a pre-existing thinking style which makes recovery difficult (e.g. a pattern of constantly checking in case something bad is about to happen again) and they will then continue to have problems long term, a pattern called Chronicity.

How many people fit in each category? Well, let’s take an example of such a “crisis” event. A population-based survey conducted one month after the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City estimated that 7.5% of Manhattan residents would meet criteria for PTSD and that another 17.4% would meet the criteria for subsyndromal PTSD (high symptom levels that do not meet full diagnostic criteria; Galea, Ahern, et al., 2002). However, most respondents evidenced a rapid decline in symptoms over time: PTSD prevalence related to 9/11 dropped to only 1.7% at four months and 0.6% at six months, whereas subsyndromal PTSD dropped to 4.0% and 4.7%, respectively, at these times (Galea et al., 2003 quoted in Bonanno, 2004, p 24). That means that while the “Recovery” pattern was seen in perhaps 30% of people, “Chronicity” levels were around 2%. “Resilience”, of course, was the result for 70%. Resilience means coping by “bouncing back” and even learning positively from the event. In a sense, history (as described above by Herodotus) is intended to be a response of resilience.

Society and Individual Variations In Crisis Response

It is important to emphasise that, from the research listed by the American Psychological Association, the way people respond to a crisis depends more than any other factor, on their sense of social support and connection. As with fish, who respond to stress in the fish around them (Barcellos et alia, 2011) our human experience of crisis is not an isolated event, but affects and responds to those who are around us.

Furthermore, the percentage of people who respond to a traumatic event by being disabled with chronic PTSD varies from culture to culture (partially because different cultures respond to major crises with different levels of social support for the people involved, and not all members of a particular community have the same access to its social supports). In the research by Schnurr et alia (2004), studying response to major trauma in Hawaii, Japanese ancestry Americans had only 14% of the incidence of PTSD that European ancestry Americans had. Polynesian (in the research, specifically Hawaiian; in many ways the same culture as New Zealand Maori or Samoan) ancestry also reduced PTSD rates to 35% that of other Americans. This means that not all the causes of resilience are individual. Cultural background has an effect, both by shaping peoples individual reaction, and by creating different levels of useful social support.

Within a country such as Great Britain, Germany or the USA, we can chart the prevalence of personality characteristics such as high anxiety (a process called Geopsychology – Ebert et alia 2022). For example, in studies in Great Britain, we find that “Significantly high levels of Neuroticism appeared throughout most of Wales and in a number of districts throughout the Midlands, suggesting that large proportions of residents in these areas were comparatively anxious, depressed, and temperamental.” (Rentfrow et alia, 2015)). Since my grandfather came from the heart of this area, this is of considerable interest to me. It has been a tradition in the study of cultural history to maintain that no culture is “better” than any other. It is important to notice however, that cultures bear the marks of their previous experience. 

Remember that the hippocampus stores the data about where and when an event happened. The hippocampus is so central to the initial storage of each new memory that if the hippocampus is damaged, new memories are unable to be laid down, even though memories in the distant past may well be intact (Squire and Paller, 2000). Initially, as a person stores a new memory, the hippocampus is the site at which most of the brain changes occur. Over the first 7 or so days after the event, the memory is primarily stored in changes in the hippocampus, but over the next few weeks it is “reconsolidated”, and “storage” of these changes is transferred more widely to other brain areas such as the sensory cortex (the outside of the brain) and even to the cerebellum (the lower brain, which eventually stores behavioural sequences such as walking and dancing, so that these remain intact even if the original sites of these memories in the sensory cortex are damaged by Alzheimers or another condition). Sleep and times of stillness (like meditation or relaxation) seem to be crucial to this process as it is only when the Hippocampus is not getting new memory inputs that it can effectively reconsolidate memories.

The changes in the memory do not stop once it is transferred to permanent storage areas however. Each time you “think about” a memory, what you do is activate the same neural network as when you first experienced it, or the network of neurons to which that memory has been transferred in the process of reconsolidating it. That means that you “reconsolidate” it again – i.e. by activating the memory, you bring it back into a state of activation, and so over the following 15 minutes or so, the memory has new changes added to it (after all, the principle that “neurons which fire together wire together” still operates, so if you remember an event, your current experiences and thoughts are now connected to the memory of the original event). As we will see, reconsolidation can significantly and permanently alter a “memory” changing the entire emotional valence of the memory (making a memory that was fear inducing become desire-inducing, for example). There is no “undo” function in the brain by which you can go back and reverse previous edits to get to the “original” memory. Memory, then is an active and synthetic process, and memories are changed irreversibly at every re-membering of them.

Reconsolidation of memories eventually organises them into very different places in the brain. At one time in my life, I needed to use my conscious mind to tie my shoelaces. Now days, my “unconscious mind” performs that function. What do I mean when I say that last sentence? I mean that another area of the brain now runs my shoelace tying strategy automatically when it is triggered by the sight of my shoes untied. Even a person severely affected by the memory loss of Alzheimer’s disease may continue for some time to be able to tie their shoelaces, because such strategies are stored in areas of the brain less affected by that condition (Schacter, 1996, p 134-137). Such memories are called “procedural memories”. Memories that were disturbing are reorganized into the “Precuneus”, an area on the inner-facing parts of the cortex (Iriye and St Jacques, 2020), where they are stored using “observer memory” (if you think of the event after that, you see yourself in the movie rather than experiencing the movie from inside as if you were back there with all the bad feelings).

Reconsolidation of temporary memories into the cortex (outer brain) permanent storage areas happens during sleep, and has two steps. In the first step, which happens in deep sleep, the temporary memory is activated and transferred to the new cells. In the second step, which happens in REM sleep (rapid eye movement or dreaming sleep) the new memory is cross-referenced with all other relevant memories, so it can be used. “Generally, earlier dreams in the night include memory fragments from recent experiences, whereas later dreams incorporate memory fragments from increasingly farther back in the past…. dreaming exposes a mechanism whereby emotional issues can be worked through and behavioral strategies can be developed and adjusted with reference to experiences from the preceding days as well as older experiences.” (Paller and Voss, 2004, p.667).

The Neuroscience of War and Genocide

There is a neuroscientific background to the formulation of beliefs and actions that support war and genocide (Németh et alia 2024, p. 3-5). Researchers note that susceptibility to over-simplified political ideologies (Donald Trump’s populism, and Fascism, for example) is heightened after an economic crisis (people are more likely to decide to collectively engage in war or genocide after an economic crisis). They propose a “Threat-based Neural Switch Theory”, in which stress downregulates cortex based planning and goal directed assessment of events, and opens emergency circuits which evoke habit-based responses at the expense of planning. This explains in the brain how “fatal” peril happens, as the person feeling more stressed cannot afford to devote mental energy to thinking through their goals and planning the best action, and opts to allow their habit-based responses to take over. Jost et alia (2014) surveyed the research on the neurobiology of political viewpoints. They noted studies, for example, that showed the amygdala is faster to activate this kind of emergency response to reports of danger from people not identified as in our own group.

Kuo et alia (2012) showed that while PTSD in combat veterans resulted in an increase in the volume of the amygdala, for those veterans who had traumatic events in their childhood, the result instead was a reduction of the amygdala volume. This suggests that the amygdala may be preset to ignore high stress events later in life, if the person experiences severe stress in early life. Experience of the holocaust in childhood is associated with lifelong changes in several regions in the brain. (Fňašková et alia, 2021). They found that, 70 years after the Holocaust, “Holocaust Survivors experienced significantly higher frequency of depression symptoms, posttraumatic stress symptoms, and posttraumatic growth, and lower levels of well-being. The MRI shows a lifelong neurobiological effect of extreme stress. The areas with reduced grey matter correspond to the map of the impact of stress on the brain structure: insula, anterior cingulate, ventromedial cortex including the subgenual cingulate / orbitofrontal cortex, temporal pole, prefrontal cortex, and angular gyrus.” Looking at the areas affected, we can speculate that the symptoms of PTSD and depression that these people experienced 70 years on were based in brain alterations. All the people studied had survived to old age of course, so they are a remarkably resilient subgroup. Furthermore, none of the people studied experienced starvation and many had been hidden throughout the time of danger, so the observed effects were a result of the collective trauma and not due to brain starvation. Ferren (1999) studied teenage survivors of the Bosnian genocide and found that while there was a large population with PTSD symptoms, the perceived self-efficacy of this group was higher than the non-traumatised. That is to say, they believed they could handle challenges more than usual, despite the fact that they had more disturbed symptoms. This tells us that often, symptoms of PTSD and apparent “resilience” occur together.

Epigenetics and Trauma Recovery

One of the key markers of traumatic emotional responses is the production of epigenetic alterations in the body cells. “Epigenetic” refers to the information that surrounds our genetic database for creating proteins our body needs. An epigenetic change such as a “methyl group” added to a set place on a person’s genes can prevent that gene producing a specific protein, creating a cascade of effects that leaves their entire hormonal system on a kind of “permanent alert”. Because the epigenetic change is stored even in the cells that produce offspring (sperm and ova) the “alert status may then be transferred to children that the person has. For example, research found that methylation on a specific genetic site “FKBP5” is higher than normal for Jewish holocaust survivors, but lower than normal for their children. (Kellerman, 2013; Yehuda et alia, 2016). Natan Kellerman explains, “Specifically, epigenetics may explain why latent transmission becomes manifest under stress.” It is important to emphasise that these epigenetic changes are not appropriately described as “damage” since obviously this is an adaptive mechanism that evolution has found useful for survival. When people experience a “major collective disaster”, it is useful that their children be born with an ability to be hyperalert. Of course, evolution would also provide mechanisms for calming down again ….

I work in the field of trauma recovery and here we have increasing evidence that such responses, transferred epigenetically, can none-the-less be changed. Amazingly, methylation on the “ZFP57” DMR  (Differentially Methylated region) on the human genome increases within a short time after successful Eye Movement (EMDR) psychotherapy for PTSD. One of the first studies showing this was done in 2019 at the University of Utrecht (Vinkers et alia, 2019). “We examined genome-wide DNA methylation profiles from blood before and after trauma-focused psychotherapy in both responding and non-responding PTSD patients as well as trauma-exposed controls. Significant DNA methylation findings from this treatment cohort were then related to the development of PTSD in an independent prospective military cohort before and after deployment.” The results: “Successful treatment of PTSD was accompanied by significant changes in DNA methylation at 12 differentially methylated regions (DMRs) in the genes…. In conclusion, this study demonstrates that successful psychotherapeutic treatment of PTSD is associated with specific DNA methylation changes. Of these epigenetic changes, the finding of ZFP57 methylation is the most consistent, as DNA methylation in this region decreases during the development of PTSD but increases following its successful treatment. This study is the first step to identify the epigenetic mechanisms underlying a successful treatment of PTSD.” (Vinkers et alia, 2021, Yehuda et alia, 2013, Ziegler et alia, 2016)

A similar study showed successful results in the epigenetics of people diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, although over a longer time period. The researchers explain that the anxiety and aggression seen in Borderline Personality Disorder were known to have some environmental and possibly some epigenetic components: “M. Linehans’ model of a biosocial development suggests that BPD is a disorder resulting from biological vulnerability combined with harming environmental influences. A depreciating and emotionally unstable environment during childhood together with genetic vulnerability could result in the disturbances of emotion regulation which is typical for BPD (Crowell et al., 2009, Linehan, 1993). Whereas twin and family studies suggest a heritability of BPD between 35% and 65% (Distel et al., 2009, Torgersen et al., 2000), individual risk genes could not be identified for BPD thus far (Calati et al., 2013, Gunderson, 2009). Over the past years, evidence emerged that epigenetic mechanism play a major role in the mediation of genome–environment-interactions.” (Knoblich et alia, 2017). The “Dialectical Behaviour Therapy” used included:

  • Core Mindfulness – training in accepting awareness of internal responses
  • Distress Tolerance by using distraction, self-soothing, and assessment of the value of the reaction
  • Interpersonal Effectiveness by using listening skills and gentle assertive communication
  • Emotional regulation by naming and changing emotional responses.

We might consider these kinds of “psychotherapy” as retraining the brain to make goal directed and self-aware choices rather than emergency habit-based choices. A large part of history involves the shifting balance as humans deal with this kind of crisis and crisis recovery. However a large part of history is also about an entirely different biological inheritance: our ability to feel profound states of joy.

The Biological History of Joy

For Humans, Compassion is Happiness

At the beginning of this essay, I referred to Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods’ book “Survival of the Friendliest” (Hare and Woods, 2021). They say “What allowed us to thrive while other humans went extinct was a kind of cognitive superpower: a particular type of friendliness called cooperative communication. We are experts at working together with other people, even strangers. We can communicate with someone we’ve never met about a shared goal and work together to accomplish it.” Like David Hamilton (2010), they present the case that our survival as human beings has depended primarily not just on our ability to survive crises, as discussed above, but on our ability to be empathic and feel at one with life.

Dr. Richard Davidson, director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin used an fMRI machine to map the brain of over 175 people, showing that he could accurately predict their level of happiness by checking the level of activity in two specific areas of the brain – the left prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. When he studied Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard (Oser), with 30 years experience in “compassion meditation”, Davidson found something dramatic. Ricard’s left frontal cortex was way off the scale. Daniel Goleman explains, “While Oser was generating a state of compassion during meditation, he showed a remarkable leftward shift in this parameter of prefrontal function… In short, Oser’s brain shift during compassion seemed to reflect an extremely pleasant mood. The very act of concern for others’ well-being, it seems, creates a greater sense of well-being within oneself.” (Goleman, 2003, p.12) The same results were gained when other compassion meditators were wired up. In his non-meditative state, one geshe (abbott) from a Buddhist monastery, for example, was far off the scale of normal happiness. Davidson describes the geshe as “an outlier” on the graph – his reading was “three standard deviations to the left”, far beyond the rest of the bell curve for positive emotion.

Can the results be duplicated? A tentative answer to that last question has come from a study that Dr. Davidson did in collaboration with Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester. After 3 hours of Buddhist meditation a week, for two months, volunteers trained by Kabat-Zinn produced a dramatic shift towards brain-measured happiness. Their immune functioning was also boosted, as were their subjective reports of calmness and happiness. How do you do it? The 19th century Patrul Rinpoche suggests the following technique for compassion meditation: “Think of someone in immense torment – a person cast into the deepest dungeon awaiting execution, or an animal standing before the butcher about to be slaughtered. Feel love towards that being as if it were your own mother or child.” Patrul Rinpoche then urges that the meditator repeatedly imagine, not merely that this unfortunate person or animal has been released from suffering, but that we ourselves have released them (Khyentse, 2013).

Michael Winkelman explains “These systems developed in Buddhist and other Asian philosophies have provided extensive knowledge of the nature of the alteration of consciousness …. The importance of incorporating these Asian perspectives into Western consciousness studies was indicated by Laughlin, McManus, and d’Aquili’s (1992) observations that Eastern descriptions of consciousness have congruencies with Western neuropsychology’s views of how the brain and the nervous system work. Both note that the brain and mind work as a complex of hierarchically functioning levels that progressively model and test models of reality. Mystical systems characterize consciousness in ways similar to the neurological perspectives on consciousness as involving entrainment of circuits and networks, regulation of sensory input, information processing, and determination of adaptive action.” (Winkelman, 2010, p. 7)

Altered State of Consciousness

Winkelman and Baker suggest that behind most of what would be considered “religious experiences” is a universally available “integrative mode of consciousness” which gives experiencers a sense of “immortality” or “timelessness” and of oneness with all that is (Winkelman and Baker, 2010: 69). This experience is the focus of religious attention in every known human culture. “The alterations of consciousness induced through such diverse means as fasting, pain induction, sleep deprivation and ritualized sleep, drumming, chanting, singing, dancing, stimulants, hallucinogens, alcohol, sensory stimulation and deprivation, exposure to extremes of heat and cold, and exhausting exercise all produce similar effects in the brain: synchronized slow brain wave patterns. These are typified in theta waves (3–6 cycles per second) that originate in the serotonergic circuitry linking the lower regions of the brain (Mandell 1980).” (Winkelman and Baker, 2010: 69).

William James (1961) was the first westerner to systematically explore the altered states of consciousness induced in religious and spiritual experience. The search for religious states of mind, says James (“The Varieties of Religious Experience”, p398) is the source of Religion, not the complex beliefs which encrust that word. “Disregarding the over-beliefs, and confining ourselves to what is common and generic, we have in the fact that the conscious person is continuous with a wider self through which saving experiences come, a positive content of religious experience which, it seems to me, is literally and objectively true as far as it goes.” By the 1970s Charles Tart had coined the term “Altered States of Consciousness” or ASC, and was building a neuroscience description of how these states might differ from normal consciousness states such as waking, deep sleep and dreaming. Laughlin et alia (1992) pointed out that “warps” between the more “normal” states can be built into an ASC, as when Shamanic dancers stay up all night, and shift into dream-like hypnogogic states simply due to lack of sleep. ASC appeared to result in an integration of the cortex with deeper brain areas such as the limbic system, as slower theta brainwave patterns (3-6 cycles per second) spread across the brain. These “integrative patterns” were identified by Arnold Mandell as being produced by “reduction of the inhibitory serotonin regulation of temporal lobe limbic function” (Mandell, 1980). Serotonin, a feel-good chemical, then floods the cortex, he suggested. Previc (2009, p. 21) suggests that the integrative experience is also induced by the freeing of Dopamine pathways that results from the alteration of Serotonin transmission. Long distance running, hunger, thirst, sleep loss, rhythmic auditory stimuli such as drumming and chanting, sensory deprivation, dream states, meditation, physical injury, and drugs such as psychedelics could all produce this effect (Winkleman, 2010, p. 26). Dai et alia (2023) showed that newer psychedelic-like drugs such as Ketamine, and classical psychedelics such as LSD perform similar functions in the brain, reducing connections within conscious networks, while increasing brain-wide integration.

Andrew Newberg studied integrative consciousness in Buddhist monks engaged in meditation and Christian nuns in contemplative prayer (D’Aquili and Newberg, 1999). He particularly studied the cessation of usual activity in the posterior superior parietal lobe (the Orientation Association area) that usually gives the person a sense of where they are in their body, and the distinction between them and their environment. Without input to that area, the area generated an alternative experience which Newberg called “Absolute Unitary Being”, a sense of being one with God, or one with all that is. He replicated the study with Muslims engaged in prolonged Islamic prayer, and reports (Newberg et alia, 2015) that in all cases he observed reduced activity in the orientation association area and in the default mode network of the brain. The decreased activity in the prefontal cortex which is also seen in all these types of inner quieting also occurs in glossolalia (speaking in tongues) and mediumistic practices, he notes (Newberg et alia, 2006). The classical psychedelics such as psilocybin, DMT and LSD also interrupt the functioning of the brain’s Default Mode Network: the pattern of thinking and interpreting experiences that a person reverts to when not focused on any particular task (Gattuso et alia, 2023). That means that the person starts to experience the world much like an innocent child might, as a place of wonder.

Newberg and D’Aquili speculate that the same stilling of the OAA occurs in peak sexual experiences, and that earlier in human history this may have been the main source of such states of oneness (and may be its evolutionary “purpose” in the brain — Newberg, D’Aquili and Rause, 2002, p 126)

Winkelman and Baker recommend the use of the Hood’s Mysticism Scale to evaluate experience of such “Altered States of Consciousness” (ASC) in a cross-culturally valid way (2010: 64, 324-325). In 2024, as part of my degree in Archaeology and Ancient History, I studied the 7 day Integration training run by Transformations International in Paphos, Cyprus. My aim was to simulate the internal experience of pilgrims attending the sanctuary of Aphrodite Kypris in Palaepaphos during the Archaic Age (750-500 BCE) and evaluate this using a well established research tool. This experience included use of massage and inhalation of essential oils (Cinnamon, Myrrh, Frankincense, etc), Shamanic nature rituals and journeys with drumming, Chi-Kung-like body posture and movements, ecstatic dance and chanting, and trance-work. The effect of these processes had been studied in Crete by archaeologists such as Christine Morris (Morris and Peatfield, 2001) – the Minoan cult there had many overlaps with ancient Cypriot cult activity. We had course participants fill out the 32 question “Hoods Mysticism Scale” and answer several open questions about their experiences over the week. The scale gives an assessment of how profoundly different from normal consciousness the people’s experience was, where the result is expressed as a ratio (a ratio of 1.000 would mean that the person had experienced the most profoundly “altered state” of consciousness imaginable, and 0.200 would mean they had a complete lack of such experiences). The ratios from the “normal” population over their lifetime were 0.683 for men and 0.746 for women, meaning that most people have had some times when they felt at one with everything, or when they felt a sense of awe or bliss etc. (Hood, 1975). When this well researched scale is used with people who have just had a psilocybin (hallucinogenic) experience, the ratio resulting from their experience is 0.875 (Griffiths et alia, 2006:277). In our study the ratio was 0.894, which is to say, attending Integration was, for these 12 people, at least as profound on average as taking a psychedelic drug. The one technique most strongly associate with this state in the research was “Transcendence”. This is confirmed by many of the comments about their experience in response to the open questions, where people said, for example:

  • “totally freeing, I lost the sense of time/awareness, was totally one with the universe.”
  • “overwhelming sense of emotion generated from initial connection to love. Compassion and connection, tears flowed, can’t describe the feeling, words are not enough.”
  • “I feel I have had a quantum shift in personal awareness and spiritual connection.”

The purpose of recreating such ancient experiences is not to urge a “return to nature”, but to reconnect us with an essential resource that enabled our success as human beings over 300,000 years of our species existence, and far before, and which is cast aside at our peril. “The collective effects of shamanic ritual practices imply an effect of group selection in our ancient past. Those groups capable of exapting the ancient hominid bases of collective rituals for more effective group solidarity would have been more effective in acquiring social support to survive and reproduce. The net effect was an ancient hominin population in which the capacity for ritual enhancement of well-being was a common feature of humanity. It is at our individual and collective peril that we ignore these health-enhancing aspects of our biological, social and psychological nature.”(Winkelman, 2010, p. 277).

Moving Beyond “Grand Schemes of History” to the Grander Scheme of Nature

Beyond The Last 10,000 Years

To allow that our human nature, our neuroscientific base, has shaped history, is to shift away from the myth of an inevitable “progress” in the last mere 10,000 years and to accept that humans have always been humans. In 2021, David Graeber and David Wengrow published a book, The Dawn of Everything, which confirmed the shift in discussion in Archaeology. As they say “A conceptual shift is also required. To make that shift means retracing some of the initial steps that led to our modern notion of social evolution: the idea that human societies could be arranged according to stages of development, each with their own characteristic technologies and forms of organization (hunter-gatherers, farmers, urban-industrial society, and so on). As we will see, such notions have their roots in a conservative backlash against critiques of European civilization, which began to gain ground in the early decades of the eighteenth century. The origins of that critique, however, lie not with the philosophers of the Enlightenment (much though they initially admired and imitated it), but with indigenous commentators and observers of European society, such as the Native American (Huron-Wendat) statesman Kandiaronk.” (Graeber and Wengrow, 2021, p. 5)

What they are pointing out is that all these fancy “stages of history” models that place ourselves at the peak of human evolution emerged because non-Europeans found the political and social thinking of their European conquerors primitive and brutal. It was the critique of the “native” theorists, reported to France and other countries in the 18th century, that led to the development of “enlightenment” thinking in Europe, challenging the brutal Feudal “Ancien régime” and the mass impoverishment it had created.

Graeber and Wengrow’s work turns most grand theories of history on their head. Most of them held that “modern” civilisation was the peak achievement of a very recent progression that began with primitive humans just surviving and ended with wise human living in cooperative bliss in megacities. Perhaps the most obvious of such systems is what was once called “Whig history” which claimed, as British Lord Action said in 1895 (Burrow, 2009, p. 405) that “We have no thread through the enormous intricacy and complexity of modern politics, except the idea of progress towards more perfect and assured freedom.”

“Spiral Dynamics” developed by followers of Clare Graves, and also part of what I was taught at my NLP Trainer Training, had a similar self-assured story. Graves contended that there was a predictable unfolding of human “values systems” through recent history, “As man solves the problems of existence at a level, Graves contended, ‘new brain systems may be activated and, when activated, change his perceptions so as to cause him to see new problems of existence.’ Instead of beginning only as passive hardware without content (Locke’s tabula rasa or blank slate view), it turns out the normal human brain comes with potential ‘software’-like systems just waiting to be turned on – latent upgrades!” (Beck and Cowan, 1996, p51). “Spiral Dynamics” claimed that there was a predictable unfolding of human “values systems” through that last 10,000 years of history, “As man solves the problems of existence at a level, Graves contended, ‘new brain systems may be activated and, when activated, change his perceptions so as to cause him to see new problems of existence.’ Instead of beginning only as passive hardware without content (Locke’s tabula rasa or blank slate view), it turns out the normal human brain comes with potential ‘software’-like systems just waiting to be turned on – latent upgrades!” (Beck and Cowan, 1996, p51). Mysteriously, all this potential lay dormant for the first 300,000 years of our existence, while we were trapped in the “purple kinspirit” (shamanic) level.

But, as Graeber and Wengrow show, when Europeans met native Ameicans, it was the “Purple Kinspirit” societies, to use a Spiral term, that found Europe primitive, and not the other way round. As a reaction against this, conservatives in Europe tried to justify their “savage civilization” as somehow “further along” a predetermined path. The postmodernists call this type of history “Evolutionism” — the idea that there is a grand plan or “metanarrative” behind history (Johnson, pp 126, 187-196). Another example is the grand plan of Marxism that suggests that just as Slave societies “naturally” evolve into Feudal societies and Feudal societies “naturally” evolve into Capitalist societies, so in the near future Capitalist societies will “naturally” evolve into Socialist societies.

There is no evidence of some predictable evolutionary path in terms of human values. And there is no “original human state” from which we gradually diversified or evolved. This is just neo-Creationism.  “It’s becoming increasing clear that the earliest known evidence of human social life resembles a carnival parade of political forms, far more than it does the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory.” (Graeber and Wengrow, 2021, p.119) After all, we now know there were human species for many millions of years before our species, building houses out of wood, creating art, using boats to navigate across the globe by careful reference to the stars and planets, creating cultural centres, cataloguing therapeutic plant uses that modern science is only slowly verifying now, and so on. Our human story is part of a vast story that has always depended on both self-preservation and on cooperation. And for the time our species has been our species (maybe 300,000 years) there has been no time when we weren’t able to think logically through the effects of social actions and creatively and experimentally design our societies to meet changing needs. There has been no sudden triggering of an 8-9 stage evolutionary values process in the last mere 4,000 years.

Human Flexibility

Graeber and Wengrow examine the vast evidence now accumulated, showing that human beings through most of their time on the planet have been enormously flexible about their values and their social organisation. “It’s becoming increasing clear that the earliest known evidence of human social life resembles a carnival parade of political forms, far more than it does the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory.” (Graeber and Wengrow, 2021, p. 119). They conclude, “We can see more clearly now what is going on when, for example, a study that is rigorous in every other respect begins from the unexamined assumption that there was some ‘original’ form of human society; that its nature was fundamentally good or evil; that a time before inequality and political awareness existed; that something happened to change all this; that ‘civilization’ and ‘complexity’ always come at the price of human freedoms; that participatory democracy is natural in small groups but cannot possibly scale up to anything like a city or a nation state. We know, now, that we are in the presence of myths.” (Graeber and Wengrow, 2021, p. 525-526).

There is no “natural evolution” of social forms or values systems. Humans have always had choices, and what is unique in the last few thousand years is simply the rigidity with which one section of humanity (the Eurocentric section especially) has held on to certain forms. Germans who broke out of medieval fragmentation and created the Third Reich are not more advanced in their values than Teutonic warriors, Israelis who called for extermination of the entire population of Gaza are not more advanced that the Jews who were swept into the death camps by those same Nazis. History is whatever we make it, and we have been doing an appalling job lately. Pretending it’s all part of some great evolutionary plan will not solve our problems.

Graeber and Wengrow were also the most recent scholars to urge a radical re-evaluation of the history of social dominance, when they argued convincingly that through most stages of human history, including some remarkably recent examples, hierarchy as we now experience it simply did not exist. “It’s not just that some early cities lack class divisions, wealth monopolies, or hierarchies of administration. They exhibit such extreme variability as to imply, from the very beginning, a conscious experimentation in urban form. Contemporary archaeology shows, among other things, that surprisingly few of these early cities contain signs of authoritarian rule.” (Graeber and Wengrow, 2021, p. 283). They also challenged the tendency of historians to imagine that humanity had always had the same gender dominance it does now. “Pretty much all the available evidence from Minoan Crete suggests a system of female political rule – effectively a theocracy of some sort, governed by a college of priestesses. We might ask: why are contemporary researchers so resistant to this conclusion? One can’t blame everything on the fact that proponents of ‘primitive matriarchy’ made exaggerated claims back in 1902. Yes, scholars tend to say that cities ruled by colleges of priestesses are unprecedented in the ethnographic or historical record. But by the same logic, one could equally point out that there is no parallel for a kingdom run by men, in which all the visual representations of authority figures are depictions of women. Something different was clearly happening on Crete.” (2021:438)

Graeber and Wengrow’s model also produced a radical re-evaluation of our view of history as a story of the rise and fall of great civilizations. They showed that much progress in human history depends on the sequence of “collapse”. Collapse of complexity preserves our humanity by enabling us to go back and create a society that is worth living in, rather than one that is merely complex. They say, for example that the periods after “collapse” of the Ancient Egyptian empires were often times when equality between men and women was greater, when city democracies emerged, when new scientific discoveries were made, and when war was less common. “Museumgoers will no doubt be familiar with the division of ancient Egyptian history into Old, Middle and New Kingdoms. Each is separated by an ‘intermediate’ period, often described as epochs of ‘chaos and cultural degeneration’. In fact, these were simply periods when there was no single ruler of Egypt. Authority devolved to local factions or, as we will shortly see, changed its nature altogether. Taken together, these intermediate periods span about a third of Egypt’s ancient history, down to the accession of a series of foreign or vassal kings (known simply as the Late period), and they saw some very significant political developments of their own…. However much future Egyptologists would come to appreciate them, the elegance of Middle Kingdom literature like The Story of Sinuhe and the proliferation of Osiris cults likely offered little solace to the thousands of military conscripts, forced labourers and persecuted minorities of the time, many of whose grandparents were living quite peaceful lives in the preceding ‘dark ages’.” (Graeber and Wengrow, 2021, p. 380, 382)

Deep History

Neither violence nor cooperation are “new” evolutionary inventions, and their long history is understood by looking at how they exist even in our only surviving primate relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos. Michael Winkelman looks at the evolutionary history of cooperation, healing, transcendence, ritual and group support. He shows that from the work of Jane Lawick-Goodall (1971) we can see the origins of all these phenomena in our chimpanzees and bonobos, who both wage brutal intertribal wars and also create “sanctuaries” of stones piled around trees, perform “rain dances” raising their hands appealingly to the sky during thunderstorms, seek out healing herbs specific for health conditions, etc.. Winkelman suggests that “The [human] shamanic capacity far exceeds the ritualized behaviors of chimpanzees, but the substantial homologies between ape displays and humans’ shamanic rituals indicate their evolutionary origins in the behaviors shared with our hominid ancestors. The hominid baselines of altruism were expanded over hominin evolution to provide healing practices derived from the enhanced effects of symbols and meaning, building on susceptibility to hypnotic engagement, suggestibility, and placebo responses. Shamanism integrated these and other qualities of a mammalian caring heritage into community ritual practices that provided healing and enhanced survival through a variety of mechanisms.” (Winkelman, 2010, p. 276)

The developers of Deep History argue that “Kinship … is the central story in the deep history of humankind” (Trautmann et alia 2011, p. 160, 173). As a metaphorical example of the continuity of our focus on kinship, they show that the ancient Sanskrit words for family members are still recognisable to English speakers today, perhaps 5000 years later (pitr, matr, svasa, bhratr, sunu, duhitr = father, mother, sister, brother, son, daughter).

However this does still create a puzzle, because if kinship is so important, and if the origins of love and spiritual experience go so deep into our history, how did we get into the mess we seem to be in currently? In reality, human nature is flexible, and limited only minimally by our biology. Winkelman suggests that throughout our history, humans have taken advantage of the effect of transcendent states on our biology, to enhance that flexibility (Winkelman, 2010, p. 250-253). But here in biology we also find a model that can help us answer the question that Graeber and Wengrow raise but leave largely unanswered: “If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, maybe the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?’ How did we end up in one single mode? How did we lose that political self-consciousness, once so typical of our species? How did we come to treat eminence and subservience not as temporary expedients, or even the pomp and circumstance of some kind of grand seasonal theatre, but as inescapable elements of the human condition? If we started out just playing games, at what point did we forget that we were playing?” (Graeber and Wengrow, 2021, p. 115)

Daniel Lord Smail, in attempting to create a “deep history” model of humanity’s past suggests an answer which links back to the last two sections of this essay. Our current stressed, violent status makes sense in terms of neuroscience and epigenetics. “The neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky has offered the most vivid point of departure for this argument. Stress, he argues, is distributed unequally across the social spectrum, for the poorer you are—the lower you are on the totem pole—the more likely it is that you suffer from chronic stress. Transitions that have taken place in recent human history, that is to say the last ten thousand years, have created hierarchies of wealth and power that have institutionalized forms of stress. Because chronic stress is debilitating, this trend has had the effect of fixing social hierarchies in body chemistry through social imprinting.” (Shryock and Smail, 2011, p. 64)

James DeMeo (2009) was a Professor of Geography at Illinois State University and the University of Miami. He suggests that the collapse of more egalitarian societies (almost what we would now call “matriarchies”), and their replacement by patriarchal war-centered tyrannies, especially in Indo-European and Semitic cultures, was originally a result of the vast desertification that he calls Saharasia. Climate crisis created an amygdala-driven panic in our societies. He maintains (in Goettner-Abendroth 2009: 416) “I have concluded that there does not exist any clear, compelling or unambiguous evidence for the existence of significant, widespread or persisting patrism within any major region of the earth prior to c.4000 BCE…. However evidence exists for early and widespread peaceful matrist social conditions.” This implies that an egalitarian and flexible political system is our more normal state. Indeed, this would align us with our closest surviving primate relatives – the bonobo. De Waal (2006) notes of bonobos that “The species is best characterized as female-centered and egalitarian and as one that substitutes sex for aggression.”

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”

Let me summarise this essay as simply as possible:

  1. To understand human history, it is useful to begin with human biology, rather than with some theory based only in relatively recent social arrangements.
  2. Understanding how humans cope with the crises of life by storing learnings in the amygdala, cortex, and epigenetic code enables us to collectively heal these responses rather than be at their mercy.
  3. Understanding how humans transcend everyday stresses and reach integrative states of consciousness where they feel love and connection to all life reconnects us to the essential human evolutionary trait of love.
  4. From this perspective, we see recent history as an aberration in the longer story of human beings flexibly adapting and experimenting with social organisations and scientific learnings which enable a more satisfying and sustainable human community.
  5. One of the most meaningful activities of our time is thus to reconnect human beings, with all the advantages of modern science, to our biological nature as human beings.


The title quote of this concluding section is the final statement of eleven “theses” written by Karl Marx in a discussion about this exact topic: historiography, biology and materialism (Marx, 1845). The theses are written as a set of distinctions which Marx and Engels are making between their own ideas and those of the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. Engels ridicules Feuerbach’s identification of the motive force in history as Love (“With Feuerbach love is everywhere and at all times the wonder-working god who should help to surmount all difficulties of practical life…. Love one another – fall into each other’s arms regardless of distinctions of sex or estate – a universal orgy of reconciliation.” Marx and Engels, 1975, p. 606). Ironically, I am suggesting, based on the research above, that Feuerbach was in touch with a deeper materialism that Marx. If the purpose of history can truly be adapted to enable a more effective response to the real world situations we face as humans, then it is most effective when founded on an understanding of our actual human nature, and not merely on the kind of elaborate conjectures which that nature makes us prone to. And one of the most insistent messages of our biology is that Love, indeed, is a profoundly revolutionary force that shakes history.

If the insights of Graeber and Wengrow are taken seriously, then far from being part of a glorious predestined rise to civilization, the last few thousand years of history are a dangerous response to deep crisis in the evolution of our species, and our role as those who discover this is partially to create biological sound ways of reconnecting our species to the natural order in which it makes sense. Our true superpower is love, and finding ways to practically express that love offers a path to the only future that can sustain us. These new ways, some of which are discussed above, will include processes that we could describe as “trauma recovery processes”, and processes which we can describe as “spiritual discovery processes”, all founded in our biology and many first developed by our ancestors at least hundreds of thousands of years ago. These are not “individual solutions” but actually social solutions which require profound changes in our understanding of history and profound changes in social organisation to enact.

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