Prehistoric religion

Prehistoric cultures spanned the globe and existed for over two and a half million years; their religious practices were many and varied, and the study of them is difficult due to the lack of written records describing the details of their faiths.

The limits of the archaeological record stymie extrapolation from burial to funeral rites, though evidence of grave goods and unusual markings on bones suggest funerary practices.

[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 practice cannot be thoroughly ruled out.

Durham University professor of archaeology Paul Pettitt reads the AL 333 fossils, a group of Australopithecus afarensis found together near Hadar, Ethiopia, as perhaps deliberately moved to the area as a mortuary practice.

[37] For the opposite position, Wunn finds the cannibalism hypothesis bereft of factual backing; she interprets the patterns of skull damage as a matter of what skeletal parts are more or less preserved over the course of thousands or millions of years.

One Upper Paleolithic remnant that draws cultural attention are the Venus figurines, carved statues of nude women speculated to represent deities, fertility symbols, or ritual fetish objects.

The Venus of Berekhat Ram is one such highly speculative figure, a scoria dated 300–350 thousand years ago[note 4] with several grooves interpreted as resembling a woman's torso and head.

The emergence of revolutionary technologies such as fire, coupled with the course of human evolution extending development to include a true childhood and improved bonding between mother and infant, perhaps broke new ground in cultural terms.

[52] Though relatively few Neanderthal burials are known, spaced thousands of years apart over broad geographical ranges, Hayden argues them undeniable hallmarks of spiritual recognition and "clear indications of concepts of the afterlife".

Hayden states "it is inconceivable to me that early hunting and gathering groups would have been painting images or decorating their bodies without some kind of symbolic or religious framework for such activities"; he draws comparison to the use of red ochre amongst those modern hunter-gatherers to whom it represents a sacred colour.

To Mark Nielsen, evidence of ritual practice amongst Neanderthals does not represent religion; he interprets their cultural remnants, such as the rare cave art they produced, as insufficiently sophisticated for such comprehension.

Wightman discusses Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa, inhabited 180,000 years ago by early H. s. sapiens and filled with unusual objects such as quartz crystals and inscribed stones.

Rhino Cave presents unusual rock formations that modern hunter-gatherers understand as spiritually significant, and Wightman hypothesises this sense may have been shared by their earliest forebears.

Cave art is also connected, by analogy with modern hunter-gatherers, to initiation rituals; a painting that depicts an animal to most members of a tribe may have a deeper symbolic meaning to those involved in smaller secret societies.

[79] Contra the traditional fertility interpretation, Patricia C. Rice argues nonetheless that the Venuses are symbols of women throughout their lifetime, not just throughout reproduction, and that they represent a veneration of femaleness and femininity as a whole.

Nonetheless, the archaeological findings thought to have been birthing huts are disputed; it is possible their spiritual significance was broader, as a place where people who died young in general would be buried separate from the older dead.

[121] In Macedonia, clay models of human and ram heads represent apparent household ritual and suggest that ordinary houses could be host to religious activity just as much as shrines or temples.

This technically complex construction is thought a herald of their supernatural power to the people who built them; the Preseli Hills, where Stonehenge was sourced, may have held deep significance to the megalith's builders.

In a wide area from the Levant through central Europe, Neolithic burials are frequently found in the houses their denizens lived in; in particular, women and children dominate amongst those buried inside the home.

[112] In the specific case of Çatalhöyük, the primary objects of worship do not seem to have been human deities but animal ones, and the figurines traditionally interpreted as "goddesses" were possibly anthropomorphic bears, leopards, and cattle.

[164] *Dyḗws was the presumed leader of a pantheon of deities including *Dhuĝhatḗr Diwós ("sky daughter"), *Hₐéusōs ("dawn goddess"), *Neptonos ("water grandson"), and *Perkʷunos ("thunder god").

[165] Indo-Europeanists J. P. Mallory and Douglas Q. Adams are skeptical about the Proto-Indo-European war god,[165] though Hayden (writing from a more generalist perspective) supposes its existence, possibly represented as a bull.

[172] Writing was adopted unevenly, across long chronological periods, and the degree to which the Bronze and Iron Ages constitute history, prehistory, or protohistory depends on the individual society.

The richest members of Kerma society were buried in gold-plated beds with feet of carved lions and hippopotami, in many-chambered burial mounds accompanied by hundreds of human sacrifices and paintings of spectacular imagined scenes.

Maghrebinians appear to have venerated weaponry, with intricate depictions of daggers, halberds, and shields dominating their rock art, perhaps as the southernmost practice of a hypothetical pan-European weapon cult.

Though the spiritual significance of these artifacts is unknown, archaeologists Katheryn M. Linduff and Yan Sun argue they must have been deeply important to those societies that forged them to play such funerary roles.

One burial site in Ban Non Wat, Thailand dating around 1000 BC was lavished with "princely" wealth, with ornate jewellery of bronze, marble, and seashells; in some cases, bracelets covered the whole arm from the shoulder to the wrist.

Traits of European Bronze Age religion include a dichotomy between the sun and the underworld, a belief in animals as significant mediators between the physical and spiritual realms, and a focus on "travel, transformation, and fertility" as cornerstones of religious practice.

She also discusses the uses of high places such as mountaintops for similar ritual purposes; geographic extremes broadly seem to have held spiritual significance to Bronze Age peoples.

Christianity emerged in Roman Britain in the fourth century AD,[201][note 14][dubious – discuss] and the religion was adopted disproportionately by the wealthy residents of such peripheral regions of the empire.