[Schatze]

edit: people chose agriculture where there were no other alternatives. That's key, to understand where these civilizations emerged but also what the surrounding area was like. The areas where agriculture emerged were areas undergoing climactic shifts into desert and necessitated a new means of finding a way of life. People were hunter gatherers first with probable some minor agricultural activity and perhaps primitive domestication, when the climate shifted such that this way of life could no longer be supported, they found another means to survive. . But primitive agricultural society, for the farmer, was a horrible life marked by malnutrition, extremely heavy labor, and short life spans. Why do you think when civilization began to spread to regions that were not desert that it was necessary to use main force to keep farmers farming and supporting the elite, to tie them to their land, etc?

The desertification of the middle east where civilization emerged and the development of the sahara which was the spur behind the pattern of living that enabled Egypt occurred after humans had already established themselves there. Full time agricultural life which enabled the emergence of cities was not something chosen, but something forced upon people initially to survive, and then forced upon them as government and social strictures and religion imposed social control on those individuals.
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Morality is the combination of instinctual social primate impulses combined with the ability to rationalize and conceive of abstract notions.

What we're saying is that instinctual social rules and laws and principles that existed before modern man in our ape like predecessors and cousins formed the basis, the root cause, for the development of morality in human beings.

Hell, we have mirror neurons. In cases of displayed pain or distress from one being, we experience a phantom experience of stress that is different but sourced from our observation of stress in the other. When we watch someone else perform an action, the regions of our brain that would conduct said action show activity. Mirror neurons were first detected and recorded in primates as you can't use humans in a wet lab.

Ignoring everything else, from this neurological quirk we get a large part of empathy from which we can derive one of the most basic rules of morality, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Except it's ultimately not rooted in religion, but in the neurological and cortical make up of higher primates. Which itself probably evolved in primates as a means to function in a cooperative complex society.

Without what is undoubtedly part of a major function of what we describe as empathy, how could morality even develop? If you fundamentally don't care about those around you and are only looking out for yourself, and this is neurologically ingrained, how would morality or even the idea of morality emerge? Without these neurological functions we'd all be sociopaths, or psychopaths (although not in the currently understood aberrant developmental pattern of ASPD). Sure, you could have laws passed from on high by main force to allow a society to succeed, but laws are not morality and never have been. Morality springs from empathy which is neurologically grounded in primates, and instinctual rules and guidelines that developed so as to allow us to live in small but complicated social structures better than those primates who were less cooperative; morality is derived from these basic traits which are common in most primates, except it uses our ability to reason to intellectualize and try to attain universality in what is moral and what is not.