A new study in Nature claims that big, complex societies arose before people started believing in major gods or powers that enforced social rules. That’s a new twist in the debate over whether such “moralizing” religions were a prerequisite for social expansion.

A common theme in most of the world’s major religions today is that some supernatural power will enforce a set of rules that do two things: proscribe how people worship and dictate how they relate to each other. This can be enforced via an omnipotent god or a mechanism like karma.

People have believed in, and worshipped, supernatural powers for a very long time, but the gods they worshipped haven’t always done both these things. Many early ones didn’t always care whether humans played nicely with each other as long as the gods got their prescribed due. If any supernatural entity enforced human social norms, it was often a minor god or spirit, not one of the big cosmological players.