Human Sacrifice Occured Worldwide - Independently?

The practice of human sacrifice is recorded in China's earliest writings, dating back as far as the Shang dynasty 4,000 years ago, experts say.

Warrior-kings at the time relied on diviners to communicate with ancestors and presented animal or human offerings to plead for victories in battle or for rains to end drought.

...But around the time the Jiangxi tomb was being built, the philosopher Confucius began denouncing human sacrifice and called for the practice to be banned, Xu said.

...Adrienne Mayor, a scholar on mythology and history at Stanford University, said human sacrifice has been praticed widely by various civilizations but became less common in many cultures at around the same time.

"Many cultures around the world practiced human sacrifice for many different purposes in antiquity, including txhe Chinese, Aztecs, Romans, Egyptians, Mongols, and Mayans," she said.

Following history's "axial age," when sages including Confucius in China, Buddha in India, and Socrates in Greece "spoke out against the practice, human sacrifice became rare," she said.

"Most cultures eventually replaced living sacrificial victims with symbolic rituals."

Such a practise must have been taught, leading me to believe that either the mysterious elders that introduced lots of good things around the globe were not as perfect as I may have thought, or there are/were different groups of elders with different teachings and ideals.