Religion is a human universal. For thousands of years, humans have held religious beliefs and participated in religious rituals. Throughout history, every human society has featured some kind of supernatural or religious belief.
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The claim of possessing supernatural abilities is a commonly reported phenomenon across human societies. To bolster the credibility of such claims, performers may make use of illusions and sleight of hand to give the appearance of impressive powers. One common trick found among culturally independent hunter–gatherers on every continent they inhabit involves a healer ostensibly extracting from a sick person an object, such as a pebble or insect, that is supposedly causing the patient’s illness. The use and functions of the ‘extraction trick’ are here explored across a global sample of hunter–gatherer societies (N = 74), with attention given to the possible costs and benefits accrued by performers and their patients or audiences. This and similar tricks can be highly deceptive, but they can also be undertaken for entertainment, symbolic reasons, their placebo-like utility to sick patients, or some mixture of each. The recurrent invention