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Paleolithic religions are a set of spiritual beliefs and practices that are theorized to have appeared during the Paleolithic time period. Paleoanthropologists Andre Leroi-Gourhan and Annette Michelson believe unmistakably religious behavior emerged by the Upper Paleolithic, before 30,000 years ago at the latest, [1] but behavioral patterns such as burial rites [2] that one might characterize ...
Religion prior to the Upper Paleolithic is speculative, [13] and the Lower Paleolithic in particular has no clear evidence of religious practice. [27] Not even the loosest evidence for ritual exists prior to 500,000 years before the present, though archaeologist Gregory J. Wightman notes the limits of the archaeological record means their ...
either that religion evolved due to natural selection and has selective advantage; or that religion is an evolutionary byproduct of other mental adaptations. Stephen Jay Gould, for example, saw religion as an exaptation or a spandrel, in other words: religion evolved as byproduct of psychological mechanisms that evolved for other reasons.
Religion has been a factor of the human experience throughout history, from pre-historic to modern times. The bulk of the human religious experience pre-dates written history , which is roughly 7,000 years old. [ 1 ]
The ancient historian Sima Qian (c. 145 – 86 BCE) credited the Yellow Emperor with worship of spirits, mountains, rivers, as well as heaven and earth. [164] Also traditionally placed during the third millennium BCE, the Emperor Zhuanxu was described as listening to the spirits in regulating human thoughts and actions. He also educated people ...
The earliest archeological evidence interpreted by some as suggestive of the emergence of religious ideas dates back several hundred thousand years, to the Middle and Lower Paleolithic periods: some archaeologists conclude that the apparently intentional burial of archaic humans, Neanderthals and even Homo naledi as early as 300,000 years ago ...
Copper knife, spearpoints, awls, and spud, from the Late Archaic period, Wisconsin, 3000–1000 BC. In the classification of the archaeological cultures of North America, the Archaic period in North America, taken to last from around 8000 to 1000 BC [1] in the sequence of North American pre-Columbian cultural stages, is a period defined by the archaic stage of cultural development.
James defined the basics of all religion, including natural religion, when he wrote: Were one to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it exists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves hereto. [12]