In a first attempt at applying ethology to religious history,[1] Burkert confronts the power and effect of tradition in uncovering traces of ancient hunting rituals so motivated in historical animal sacrifice and human sacrifice (by his thesis unified as deriving from the same fundamental principle) in specific historical Greek rituals with relevance to human religious behaviour in general.

The guilt incurred in the violence of the hunt was reflected in sacred crimes, which through rituals of cleansing and expiation served to unify communities.

Burkert supports his thesis by integrating a multitude of examples that elaborate primitive ritual as it is reflected in Greek mythology.

Homo Necans was conceived in the 1960s; it controversially introduced functionalism, along the lines of Jane Ellen Harrison's Themis, to a German audience, and employed a form of structuralism in interpreting complexes of ritual and festival, to apply some findings of ethology for the first time to mythology.

[3] Robert Parker, in reviewing Homo Necans for The Times Literary Supplement, observed of Burkert that "boldness of theory and consummate learning are united in him as in few others".