The First Beliefs

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.