Walter Burkert's thesis in Homo Necans (1972) is deceptively simple: killing is not incidental to human nature. Killing is foundational. Humanity defined itself through the capacity and practice of hunting.
The archaeological evidence: For approximately 95-99% of human history, hunting was the primary subsistence activity. For hundreds of thousands of years, the relationship between humans and other animals was predatory. Humans were hunters. The hunt was not a technique among many; it was the human activity.
Burkert's claim: This hunting history shaped human consciousness, psychology, and culture at the deepest levels. We cannot understand human nature without understanding ourselves as killers.
Burkert's crucial move: the transition from practical hunting to ritual sacrifice is not a break but a continuity. Ritual sacrifice preserves and formalizes the structure of hunting.
In hunting: selection of victim, stalking, killing, consumption of flesh, distribution of prestige. The event is practical (securing food) but also spiritual (contact with otherness through death).
In sacrifice: selection of victim, ritualized killing, consumption or burning of flesh, distribution of prestige/meaning. The event has lost practical necessity (sacrificial animals often exceed food needs) but intensified spiritual significance.
What changed: the psychological meaning increased while the practical outcome became irrelevant. This reveals something essential: killing has a meaning independent of practical outcome. The meaning is intrinsic to the act itself.
Burkert notes something puzzling from a purely economic standpoint: hunting generates prestige far exceeding its practical value. The prestige of the hunt, the status of the hunter, the social power derived from hunting success—these are disproportionate to the food actually secured.
This reveals the non-practical dimension: hunting is soul-making. The prestige indicates that something essential is happening in the kill—something that generates identity, status, and psychological meaning.
When societies transition to agriculture, hunting could cease. Hunting provides calories that farming provides more efficiently. But hunting doesn't cease. It continues as ritual sacrifice, sport, spiritual practice. Why?
Because the soul still needs what hunting provided: encounter with necessity, confrontation with death, the transformation that comes through killing. The practical function can be replaced. The psychological function cannot.
Burkert's title makes the claim explicit: Homo necans—the killing human. Not homo sapiens (the knowing human) or homo faber (the making human). The defining feature is the capacity and compulsion for killing.
This is not a moral statement. It is an anthropological one. We are a species born from hunting, shaped by the structure of the hunt, oriented fundamentally toward the kill.
Modern consciousness tries to deny this heritage. We are civilized, rational, peaceful. We have transcended our killing nature. But Burkert's evidence suggests: we have not transcended it; we have repressed it. And repression creates pathology.
Gigerenzer employs Burkert's thesis to ground his argument about sacrifice's role in consciousness.
If humans are fundamentally hunters, and hunting is fundamentally about killing, then sacrifice is not a aberration but an enactment of what humanity is. Sacrifice is not perverse; it is primordial.
This does not mean sacrifice should continue. It means sacrifice cannot be simply rejected as barbaric. Sacrifice must be understood as expressing something genuine about human nature—our relationship with killing, with necessity, with the transformation that death produces.
Burkert's evidence allows Gigerenzer to argue: the soul's need for killing is not neurotic compulsion. It is the inheritance of 100,000+ years of human existence structured around hunting and killing.
Contemporary psychology's refusal to acknowledge this heritage creates a dissociation: we deny what we are fundamentally oriented toward, and the denial erupts as unconscious violence.
Burkert traces the continuity from hunting through sacrifice through modernity's structures. The prestige that hunting generated continues in modified form: in warfare (organized killing with prestige), in sports (ritualized competition and victory), in entertainment (vicarious participation in killing).
The forms change. The fundamental human orientation toward killing and its psychological meaning persist.
This suggests: modernity has not eliminated the hunting/killing imperative. Modernity has only repressed and displaced it. The hunter is still present in modern consciousness—disguised, denied, erupting in pathological forms.
Burkert's anthropological evidence grounds psychological understanding. The human psyche is not timeless or transcendent. It is shaped by 100,000+ years of evolutionary and cultural history structured around killing.
Psychology cannot understand the soul's operations without recognizing this history. The drives, the orientations, the fundamental structures—these are inheritances from the hunting past.
The handshake: Understanding why the soul requires killing (psychology) depends on recognizing that humans are creatures fundamentally shaped by killing (anthropology). This is not merely historical background. This is the foundation that contemporary psychology denies, with disastrous psychological consequences.