# The First Beliefs > Archaeology's oldest clues to religion: burials at Qafzeh and Panga ya Saidi, narrative cave art in Sulawesi and the Lion-man figurine, animism and Siberian shamans, Göbekli Tepe, plastered ancestor skulls and Çatalhöyük, Stonehenge's solar alignment, Ban Chiang, the Plain of Jars and Đông Sơn drums, theories of why humans have religion, and folk religions today. Episode 01 of the Origins of Religions series. Interactive film: https://www.planetpast.com/stories/religion-first-beliefs/ Publisher: PlanetPast (https://www.planetpast.com/) · Published 2026-10-13 · Religion, History ## Prologue ### The First Beliefs *Origins of Religions · Episode 01* Religion before history. Our species, Homo sapiens, appeared in Africa around 300,000 years ago. Every human society anthropologists have studied has had some form of religion: beliefs and rituals about powers beyond the everyday world. But beliefs leave no bones. To find the first religion, archaeologists look for its traces: careful burials, symbols, art and places built for gatherings. Prologue · Episode 01 of the Origins of Religions series #### Looking for the first religion There is no single agreed definition of religion. Most scholars include beliefs about spirits, gods or sacred powers, and the rituals, rules and communities built around them. Dates in deep prehistory are given as “years ago”. They come from scientific dating and have error margins. Sources: [Britannica: animism](https://www.britannica.com/topic/animism) ## Chapter I · Deep time ### Caring for the dead *Chapter I · c. 100,000 years ago* The oldest clues. At Qafzeh and Skhul caves in today’s Israel, people were buried around 100,000 years ago. One child was laid with deer antlers on its chest; red ochre was found nearby. In Kenya, at Panga ya Saidi, a small child was buried about 78,000 years ago, curled up, with its head apparently resting on a pillow. Did these people believe in an afterlife? We cannot know. But they treated death as something special, and that is where many scholars begin the story of religion. Chapter I · Step 1 #### Caring for the dead - ~100,000 years ago Qafzeh and Skhul, Levant - ~78,000 years ago Panga ya Saidi, Kenya: oldest known burial in Africa Some Neanderthal burials are also claimed; how intentional they were is still debated. Sources: [Wikipedia: Qafzeh Cave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qafzeh_Cave); [Martinón-Torres et al., “Earliest known human burial in Africa”, Nature 2021](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03457-8) ### Imagination on the walls *Chapter I · c. 51,000–36,000 years ago* Art, stories and beings that do not exist. As modern humans spread out of Africa, symbolic art appears. On the island of Sulawesi, in Indonesia, a cave painting of people and a pig is at least 51,200 years old, one of the oldest known scenes in the world. In Germany, the Lion-man of Hohlenstein-Stadel, carved from mammoth ivory about 40,000 years ago, has a human body and a lion’s head. A creature that exists only in the mind is one of the first signs that people imagined beings beyond the visible world. Chapter I · Step 2 #### Imagination on the walls - ≥51,200 years ago Narrative cave painting, Sulawesi - ~40,000 years ago Lion-man figurine, Germany - ~36,000 years ago Chauvet Cave paintings, France Whether cave art was religious, magical, storytelling or all of these is debated. Sources: [Oktaviana et al., “Narrative cave art in Indonesia by 51,200 years ago”, Nature 2024](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07541-7); [Wikipedia: Löwenmensch figurine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%B6wenmensch_figurine) ## Chapter II · Spirits ### A world full of spirits *Chapter II · the oldest worldview* Animism and shamans. Among hunter-gatherers studied in modern times, from the Arctic to the Amazon to Southeast Asia, a common idea is that animals, plants, rivers and mountains have spirits, and that the dead stay close as ancestors. In 1871 the anthropologist Edward Tylor called this “animism”. Today many scholars prefer to describe it as a world of relationships between people and other beings. In Siberia, ritual specialists who travelled to the spirit world in trance were called shamans, a word from the Evenki language. Similar roles exist on every continent. Chapter II · Step 3 #### A world full of spirits - **“Animism”**: 1871 Edward Tylor, Primitive Culture - **“Shaman”**: from Evenki, Siberia Modern hunter-gatherers are not “living fossils”: they have their own long histories. They give clues, not proof, about prehistoric beliefs. Sources: [Britannica: animism](https://www.britannica.com/topic/animism); [Britannica: shamanism](https://www.britannica.com/topic/shamanism) ## Chapter III · First temples ### Göbekli Tepe *Chapter III · c. 9500 BC* Monuments before farming. On a hilltop in south-eastern Turkey, people raised circles of T-shaped stone pillars up to five metres tall, carved with foxes, snakes, vultures and arms and hands. They did this around 9500 BC, at the very end of the Ice Age, when people in the region were only beginning to farm. Its excavator Klaus Schmidt called it “the first temple”, suggesting that gathering for ritual helped drive the move to farming. Newer research shows people also lived there, and the debate continues. Chapter III · Step 4 #### Göbekli Tepe - **Built**: c. 9500–8000 BC - **Pillars**: up to ~5.5 m - **UNESCO World Heritage**: 2018 Sources: [UNESCO: Göbekli Tepe](https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1572/) ### Ancestors under the floor *Chapter III · c. 7400–6000 BC* Religion moves into the village. In the first farming villages, the dead stayed at home. At Çatalhöyük, in Turkey, people were buried beneath the floors of houses whose walls were painted and decorated with bulls’ horns. At Jericho and other sites in the Levant, skulls of ancestors were removed, plastered and given new faces with shells for eyes. Many archaeologists link these practices with ancestor veneration: the dead as protectors of the family and of its land. Chapter III · Step 5 #### Ancestors under the floor - c. 8000–7000 BC Plastered skulls, Jericho - c. 7400–6000 BC Çatalhöyük Sources: [UNESCO: Neolithic Site of Çatalhöyük](https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1405/) ### Stones and the sun *Chapter III · c. 3000–2000 BC* Monuments to the turning year. Across Atlantic Europe, farmers built tombs and circles of huge stones. Stonehenge, in England, was built and rebuilt between about 3000 and 2000 BC. It is aligned with the sunrise at midsummer and the sunset at midwinter. Farmers depended on the seasons. Many early religions watched the sky, the sun and the moon, and marked the turning points of the year with festivals. Chapter III · Step 6 #### Stones and the sun - **Stonehenge**: c. 3000–2000 BC - **Alignment**: midsummer sunrise, midwinter sunset Sources: [UNESCO: Stonehenge, Avebury and associated sites](https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/373/) ## Chapter IV · Why and where ### Spirits of Southeast Asia *Chapter IV · 2nd millennium BC – AD 500* Before Indian gods arrived. In mainland Southeast Asia, people buried their dead with pottery, bronze and beads, as at Ban Chiang in north-east Thailand, a UNESCO World Heritage site. In the hills of Laos, hundreds of huge stone jars on the Plain of Jars were used in funeral rites. In northern Vietnam, great bronze drums of the Đông Sơn culture were used in ceremonies. Belief in spirits of places, rice, water and ancestors, called phi in Thai and Lao, is far older than Buddhism or Brahmanism in the region, and still lives on. Episode 12 tells that story. Chapter IV · Step 7 #### Spirits of Southeast Asia - Ban Chiang Burials from at least the 2nd millennium BC; UNESCO 1992 - Plain of Jars Stone jars, c. 500 BC – AD 500; UNESCO 2019 - Đông Sơn Bronze drums, from c. 500 BC Sources: [UNESCO: Ban Chiang Archaeological Site](https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/575/); [UNESCO: Megalithic Jar Sites in Xiengkhuang – Plain of Jars](https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1587/) ### Why do humans have religion? *Chapter IV · the big question* Answers from science, and from faith. Scholars have proposed many answers. The sociologist Émile Durkheim argued in 1912 that shared rituals bind a society together. Cognitive scientists suggest that human minds are quick to see intention and agency everywhere, a useful instinct that also makes spirits and gods feel natural. Others argue that belief in moral, watching gods helped strangers trust each other as societies grew larger. Each theory has critics. For believers, these explanations do not settle the question of whether religious claims are true: that is a matter of faith and philosophy, not archaeology. Chapter IV · Step 8 #### Why do humans have religion? - Social glue Durkheim, 1912 - Mind Cognitive science of religion - Trust “Big gods” in large societies (debated) Sources: [Wikipedia: Cognitive science of religion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_science_of_religion) ### Still alive *Chapter IV · today* Folk and indigenous religions today. Hundreds of millions of people still follow folk and indigenous traditions, from African traditional religions to Chinese folk religion to the spirit traditions of the Americas and Siberia. And many followers of the world religions also keep older practices: offerings to spirits of the land, ancestor rites, and festivals of the harvest and the year. Chapter IV · Step 9 #### Still alive - **Folk religionists**: ~400 million Pew estimate, 2010 Sources: [Pew Research Center: folk religionists (2012)](https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2012/12/18/global-religious-landscape-folk/) ## Epilogue ### The deepest layer *Epilogue* Under every religion, older ones. Every later religion grew on top of these first beliefs: care for the dead, respect for spirits and ancestors, and sacred places and times. Next: the gods of the first cities and empires, in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome, whose religions have vanished. Epilogue #### The deepest layer - ~100,000 years ago First careful burials - ~51,000 years ago Narrative cave art - ~9500 BC Göbekli Tepe - ~7000 BC Ancestors in the home - ~3000 BC Stonehenge #### The series - **00**The Origins of Religions (overview) - **01** The First Beliefs (this film) - **02**The Ancient Gods - **03**Hinduism - **04**Zoroastrianism - **05**Judaism - **06**Buddhism and Jainism - **07**Confucianism and Daoism - **08**Shinto - **09**Christianity - **10** Islam (coming soon) - **11** Sikhism (coming soon) - **12** Spirits, Brahmins and the Buddha: Southeast Asia (coming soon) The still images on the chapter cards are AI-generated illustrations. Outlines are approximate. Sources: [Martinón-Torres et al., “Earliest known human burial in Africa”, Nature 2021](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03457-8); [Oktaviana et al., “Narrative cave art in Indonesia by 51,200 years ago”, Nature 2024](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07541-7); [UNESCO: Göbekli Tepe](https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1572/)