Paleolithic religion
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Religious behaviour is thought to have emerged by the Upper Paleolithic, before 30,000 years ago at the latest, but behavioral patterns such as burial rites that one might characterize as religious - or as ancestral to religious behaviour - reach back into the Middle Paleolithic, as early as 300,000 years ago, coinciding with the first appearance of Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens. Religious behaviour combines ritual, spirituality, mythology and magical thinking or animism - aspects that may have separate histories of development during the Middle Paleolithic before combining into "religion proper" of behavioral modernity.
There are suggestions for the first appearance of religious or spiritual experience in the Lower Paleolithic (significantly earlier than 300,000 years ago, pre-Homo sapiens), but these remain controversial and have limited support.
See also
- Anthropology of religion
- Behavioral modernity
- Evolutionary psychology of religion
- Grave field
- Mother Goddess
- Prehistoric religion
