Recent advances in archaeology, chronobiology, and history of science have made it possible to decipher hitherto obscure passages related to planets in the Indian books of the third millennium BC. A brief summary of this knowledge is presented. It is argued that the period of Mercury was obtained near the end of the Vedic age in India. This was celebrated in terms of the famous myth of Vishnu s...

One of the central claims of Norenzayan et al.'s article is that supernatural monitoring and intergroup competition have facilitated the rise of large-scale prosocial religions. Although the authors outline in detail how social instincts that govern supernatural monitoring are honed by cultural evolution and have given rise to Big Gods, they do not provide a clear explanation for the success of...