The Oldest Religion in the World: The Origin of Belief

how old is the world's oldest religion and who was their God and how did it come to be and where did it go this journey will take us through the origins of various religions from one's alive today to ones that died thousands and tens of thousands of years ago finding out how they came to be how they are connected and the significance of their symbolism and their rituals and so as we venture from Jesus to dragons and from Patricia to animal migrations and it can much of my previous content together make sure you drink plenty of tea because this is reckonful religion is the belief in the Supernatural it involves ritual behavior and communal worship and so our journey will look for evidence that supports these behaviors and these may be easy to spot in current religious practices today but as we go back in time we will find challenges leaving us with some interesting questions on whether evidence of potential ritual behavior is telling us that a religion is being practiced the other thing we should understand is whether a religion needs a God to be cast as religion well we need to consider that animism and Shamanism often do not incorporate an omnipotent or omniscient deity one that could align to a god but instead they recognize Spirits or ancestors or other non-human entities as having agency and intentionality and if we look at Buddhism we see that it too doesn't have a personal God but instead focuses on a moral and philosophical system where achieving Enlightenment is an equivalent of having a God so the premise that a religion necessitates the existence of a God is Not universally accepted and so the lack of a God in any evidence we look at would not necessarily mean that religion was not practiced today much of the world practices religion as we shall see religions that have been created in the last six thousand years or so and whilst many of you will probably already know that these religions are not the oldest religions in our history they're good starting pointers if we go back and find their Origins this will give us a tangible point in time from which to go further back to older and less well-known religious practices rituals and cultures and whilst much of the world today believes in one of the big four religions Christianity Islam Hinduism and Buddhism there are still pockets of belief in the world in traditional religions and folk religions and by this I mean cultural or ethnic religions that fall outside the doctrine of organized religion although this doesn't necessarily mean that they are pagan or Heathen which are Christian terms for non-abahamic religions and this is because there are examples of folk Christianity folk Islam and folk Hinduism who do not claim a religious Doctrine such as baptism or confessional gain to church but who still do align their religious teachings and for those who want to know what my religion is then it is YouTube and you can take part in its button ritual by pressing a like And subscribe or the notification Bell buttons which may make you feel enlightened and with that let's start with the world's most popular set of religions the abrahamic Judaism Christianity and Islam are known as the abrahamic religions because they recognize a figure called Abraham as a foundational figure a figure who according to biblical Scholars would have been born around 1813 BCE in ER in the Middle East suggesting these religions are almost 4 000 years old in their root the other piece of information to note is that the abrahamic religions have been monotheistic for only about 3 000 years maybe less believingly just one God and this monotheistic belief tends to happen in the more modern religions which suggests at first glance that the abrahamic regions aren't linked directly to the earliest beliefs of man Islam is the youngest flavor of abrahamic religion emerging 1300 years ago and who sent this considered by most to be a Mecca which is in present-day Saudi Arabia which is the location where a figure called Muhammad was born in 570 CE and whilst Mohammed is considered an important figure as he said to be the last prophet and last messenger from God he is not worshiped and not considered Divine that position is only for their God it is not by a few biblical Scholars that the origins of Islam started from an early branch of Christianity a religion which had many offshoots when it first started and many of these branches faded into non-existence or merged into more successful denominations and we should note that the Islamic religion has some key aspects that are similar to Christianity such as saying that Jesus was a prophet to believe it in monotheism having reverence for the Bible and Believers have the expectations of a final judgment and an afterlife it is also worth noting that Islam spread quickly although not because of believing this new Faith but because Muhammad was a warmonger in his own words he was a prophet of war and mercy and it was Arabian Muslim armies that conquered the name Byzantine and sassanian Empires within a few decades created a huge Arab Muslim empire Christianity itself started as a sect of Judaism in the first century CE and centers around the life and teachings death and resurrection of Jesus Christ who is regarded by Christians as the Messiah prophesized in the Old Testament and the Son of God and so a Divine figure this is contrary to the Islamic belief who considered Jesus just a prophet and not the Son of God and so Islam does not believe he was resurrected nor do they consider him divine now today there are thousands of denominations of Christianity in the world we should be considered as a clear indication of how Humanity mulled religion to their needs and with this Christianity has spread around the world although much of this is also in part two colonization of lands belonging to others in the last 600 years or so but this idea of a dying and Rising God who is a hero or savior wasn't new before Jesus figures such as the Egyptian horse of the Persian mithras the Greek Dionysus the Roman Romulus and even figures such as Krishna Buddha and zoester all could have acted as templates to anyone who wanted to write about this Messiah but Christianity was preceded by Judaism the oldies of the abrahamic face and so the origin of this set religions and so in terms of finding the oldest religions is of most importance to us it became established in the near East in a region which was known as Canaan although though Wars and conflict meant that the Jews were moved away from there considered the Homeland more than once the Jews Like Christians also believed that a messiah would usher in an era of peace and rebuild their Holy Temple in Jerusalem although the Messiah in Judaism is not Jesus as Jesus did not fulfill the criteria that the Jews expected of them saw at the core of Judaism is the Hebrew Bible which is an encounter of the Israelites relationship with God until the building of the second temple in 535 BCE and why is the second temple called this because it is presumed the temple was built on the site of a previous Temple the first temple which was King Solomon's Temple and it is during the period from the early 6th Century BCE to the building of the second temple that some of the Bible's first books were written including Deuteronomy and exodus and it is during this time that Judaism transitioned from a polytheistic Faith to a Faith with many gods too strictly monotheistic one although why this happened is a mystery but there may have been political reason especially considering the Israelites were exiled from Babylon which had polytheistic religion but how do we know this Faith was originally polytheistic well that was because there were hints left within all the biblical texts that suggest not only that it repurpose myths from other religions but that it had a polytheistic pass and a good example of this is Deuteronomy 32 8-9 which says when the most high assigned the Nations their Heritage when he parceled out the descendants of Adam he set up the boundaries of the peoples after the number of the sons of God while the Lord's own portion was Jacob his hereditary share was Israel and the discovery of this older version of this passage revealed that most high was not referring to the abrahamic god Yahweh but to a god known as Elion and Yahweh was one of his sons although I will concede that there are some out there who believed that this isn't the case and elyon is just another name for Yahweh but if you believed that this was originally a polytheistic religion then this passage suggests that the chief God is giving your way a god amongst many a portion of land which the Believers of this region consider as Israel today unfortunately there is very little information on elyon and his Origins although he is mentioned in ugolytic texts which are texts from a culture that existed before the Jewish religion and so which are used to help understand some of the religious and cultural contexts for the biblical writings and so for us if we want to look at the oldest region then the first of the abrahamic religions as we recognize them today started just over two and a half thousand years ago but with the possibility of a figure that started these religions Abraham being born over 2830 years ago it may well be somewhat older though and although we cannot trace it back past early on we could look more closely at the religions in this area at a time where Abraham was born in Mesopotamia in the Middle East and well Mesopotamia has a rich religious history and so let's look at this the religions of the ancient Middle East had significant influence on many religions that followed it and how do we know that because we know the Mesopotamians were one of the first cultures to write down their religious stories and we then see these stories evolve and migrate across the region and into Europe where they are written down again preserving some of their key motifs and language they had Croatia myths with two primordial beings of Celtic Waters they both get killed and the chief God uses the body of one to create the world they have vladimirs where all bar one family survives a flood they had Gods from Marduk to El who influenced the life of humans and humans were Servants of God and these gods and myth evolved as Society evolved and migrated to different environments and these motifs and types of God influenced so many religions we see today but why they do religion from Mesopotamia spread so much and the key reason is farming and specifically agricultural farming the grain of crops by Mesopotamians became a key part of life and this requires land and land was limited in the region of Mesopotamia which meant that as people migrated looking for more Farmland so the culture spread with these migrations and particularly to the West along the northern Mediterranean this results in the Treasure myths migrating with the culture from Mesopotamia to Greece and we see Babylonian Croatia myth with Absa and Tiamat changing to a Croatia myth from the region of denu where their pamudu bin was hanging and goods such as atmakendu and the Sea are created and their children Lahar and River kill Emma can do and have children of their own who kill Lahar and river and this cycle of divine Legacy is necessary to establish Divine ruler in religion in the hittite region which would have been in modern day Turkey the God allelu have its son Anu and Anu takes everloo's place and then anusan Kumar B then takes anuspace repeating this Divine Legacy and so this myth travels to Greece where the Thor gear gives birth to Uranus and has children with him including Chronos Kronos removes her on us and who has his own children who he disposes of not wishing for them to depose him but one escapes his fate and his name is Zeus and he removes Chronos from the picture and becomes the chief god of the Greek pantheon and so we see a clear migration of the creation myth which is an agricultural myth and if you want to hear more details about these myths than I've made a video on the nearest question myth we see a similar migration in the journey to the underworld myth we see the Mesopotamian goddessinara go to the underworld and she is killed and then brought back to life to allow her to return but we also see a synonym within Persephone's Journey to the underworld although she was abducted and she lost her Womanhood there and so the myth also included the motif of a girl turning into a woman but we also see similar myths with Dionysus and Adonis having contact with the underworld but perhaps the most surprising is the Viking poem called Boulders drama or balder's dream Boulder is taken to the underworld and people are made to weep these are all myths that many scholars would say are agriculturally influenced with journeying into the underworld representing changing seasons and crime was a clear Motif for the want to Reign and I talk about this more in my video on the journey to the underworld and the gods and goddesses migrated to we see the origin of the beautiful goddess of Rome Venus in Mesopotamia written in her sag of the Sumerians transforming into Venus of the Romans via the Phoenicians and the Greeks and I talked more about that in this video on Venus but we also see the Croatian method of Sumerians and Babylonians which had those two primordial beans tier Matt and absu in a Celtic Sea and Tiamat is killed by the chief God Marduk with the help of wind well many biblical Scholars agree that the opening lines of the Bible Genesis 1 1 and 2. our synopsis of this myth showing that the biblical writers leverage this well-known story of creation to start their own Bible which would act as a way to get people to listen to the story thinking that they know it and then they add their own spinite showing the world was not created from the body of tiramat but by willing it into existence but we also see this Mesopotamian creation myth evolve with later versions implying that tiermet was a bovine suggesting inference from Indo-European sources but more about that in a few minutes and so as much as European myths were influenced by these Neolithic farmers coming from the Middle East we also see that the followers of Judaism who were also exiled from Babylon in their early history influenced the first chapters of Genesis but not just the first few lines in effect the cosmogony but throughout its first chapters stories from Mesopotamia such as the flood myths motifs within the story of Adam and Eve and other motifs too all significantly influenced from the Elder mythology and with materials or Mesopotamian mythology and if you want to know more about this I'll talk about that more in this video on Genesis these Mesopotamian religions were polytheistic and the gods were often associated with natural forces and societal roles such as Sky Gods gods of winds and storms and for this of Love and War and God of rain Harvest and the sun worshiping was practicing temples and archaeological evidence shows this form of worship was practiced from as early as the late fourth millennium BCE and these religions continue to evolve over Millennia shaped by the shift in political landscape of the region and the early Sumerian religious Concepts such as Divine decrees and the personal God went on to influence academians Assyrians and Babylonian traditions and elements of this also landed in Judaism as well and so a question for us to ask ourselves is if farming helped the spread of the Mesopotamian influenced religions because the cultures that knew how to farm knew these religions and its and its rituals and stories then would this explain the types of God we see in their religion those that would help crops grow but the other question to ask yourselves is if farming was the predominant food source around eight to ten thousand BCE the more did it take another four thousand years before we see evidence of worshiper deities that support this well whilst temples before 4000 BC are scarce we do see figurines of women with exaggerated features sometimes referred to as Venus figurines in the archaeological record here and we see ritualized burial practices and we do see some ancient temples although they are not common but before we look into these it is best to consider what was going on in Egypt at this time as this culture influenced much of the near East and other Mediterranean regions such as Greece and Cyprus when one thinks of Egypt then pharaohs and pyramids spring to mind icons of the culture that do not seem to appear anywhere else and so why is this what was going on in Egypt Egypt and Mesopotamia are next to each other geographically and indeed over time areas of land in the near East came under the control of both of the Mesopotamian and the Egyptian cultures as well as Persia too and so cultures and beliefs spread and diffuse and so it's no surprise that Egyptian myth influenced some of the biblical stories as well especially in Genesis a particular note is the cosmogony where God spends six days creating the cosmos world and life as this Motif the wishing for things into existence is very much an Egyptian motif they're also two stories about how Adam and Eve were created and one where Adam is made in God's Own image seems to be most influenced from Egyptian mythology as opposed to Adam being made from clay which aligns mostly with the Mesopotamia myths the Egyptian religion was polytheistic but there was a significant emphasis on the afterlife where we have evidence of ritual burial practices going back to around 8 000 BCE although the religious practices we are familiar with didn't start until around the late fourth millennium BC with the nakeda culture a similar time to Mesopotamia and so this may not be coincidental the Egyptians had Sun gods and the mother goddess as well as gods of the dead and here too religious practices we've rolled around Temple rituals festivals and they complex set of funeral practices aimed at enjoying a favorable afterlife and they also had their own Journey to the underworldness which centers around Osiris being killed by his brother and so ends up as ruler of the underworld but what made Egypt so culturally strong with strong cultural icons such as the pyramids and so relatively different to other religions and that is that it was relatively stable partly because of Egypt's geographical isolation and partly because the political structure and whilst there were periods of significant change these didn't have the last and effect such changes heading out of religions and cultures and as an aside the pyramids were not built by Advanced ancient cultures from Atlantis or aliens we'd see a clear path of stonework in evolution from around 8 000 years ago that leads to their construction and I talk about this more in this video but who originally influenced Egyptian culture well the near Eastern Middle East cultures had some influence evidence around art showed that some influence came from cultures in the Sahara Desert as the Sahara was grassland ten thousand years ago as the earth's climate changed and desired as it turned well into Desert from grassland cultures were forced to migrate towards water sources such as the null influencing the culture here and it is believed that these cultures built artwork that would eventually helped the development of the hieroglyphs the Indian Europeans aesthetic cultures defined by a linguistic grouping based on the fact that all their languages evolved from proto-indo-europeam they followed what are considered traditional religions or what the Christians would call paganism or either me and this refers to the various religious Traditions that were practiced by the Indo-European peoples before converting to Christianity being the Europeans was defined by this linguistic grouping and they migrated all across the landscape of Western Europe to the Indian subcontinent and this picture shows how the word father is related and similar across this landscape the Hindu Europeans were very influential in their early expansion which meant that their beliefs and rituals would have spread with them and their Traditions were still being officially practiced in some places until a thousand years ago and through DNA archaeological and linguistic analysis we can show that the common elements of the Indo-European traditional religions can be traced back to a common source the area of the Black Sea and to a date of around 6 000 years ago and so 4000 BCE these cultures practice polytheism and we see consistent motifs in their mythology in their creation myths and dragon myths General cosmogony their pantheons all had Sky Gods a god known as a skyfather and they had gods associated with the storms and an Earth goddess but most interesting of all is that they all originally considered the bovine a gift from the gods and I do talk more about this in my indoor in religion and cosmogony videos and this map shows all the cattle ready myths for example that were told within these cultures or which were influenced by them their crash myths contain two primordial beans much like the Sumerian creation myth and their names were Mano and demo and much like the Sumerian myth one of these is killed emo and his body is used to create the world but then what happens is different yemo then becomes lord of the underworld and is seen throughout other Indo-European cultures myths as Yamaha in vediculture Yuma in Iranian Emirates go in Germanic and Gamma in Persian and the zoassian religion a religion that developed as a reflex 2D in the European beliefs and could be considered an influence on the vediculture and Hinduism and I talk all about this in my video on the Indo-European Christmas so as the indo-europeans expanded they interacted with and replaced cultures of Neolithic farmers and hunter-gatherers and this displacement was sometimes through battle but other times through the spreading of diseases such as the plague but however it happened the replacement of the early European Farmers did happen and this resulted in all these cultures influencing each other in various amounts creating similar versions of myths with their own nuances shaped by their local societal needs and the environment for example the importance of the cow in Indo-European cultures was maintained to such degree in The Vedic culture that when this went on to evolve to create the Hindu religion the cow became sacred and remained so today and in Persia the introduction to judgment when you died as part of zoroastianism and his Sinbad Bridge migrated into the near East when the Persian either Cyrus the Great conquered the region and so the cultures there adopted some of Persia's religious ideas and that is why hell starts appearing in biblical texts around 550 BCE aligning to Cyrus's conquest and the in the European creation myth became the myth of Romulus and the creation of Rome and that is because the Roman religion predominantly accepted the agricultural version of the crochet myth as their core one for their religion is that migrations didn't happen just once and in One Direction just as early European Farmers replaced other gathers in Europe the early European migrations influenced the early European farmers and then further migrations happen to from both cultures and this creates layers of complexity and diversity in myths and this is particularly true the further away from the Black Sea you look such as Scandinavian Rome and Greece and so we have this interesting interlacing of influence between cultures and religions from around 4 000 years ago which goes back and forth with cultures influencing each other sometimes multiple times and perhaps this is seen most clearly in the Viking culture of Scandinavia where their warrior-like way seem most Indo-European and very patriarchal but their creation myth with a cow that is milked into others run rivers of milk to other worlds and their most beautiful God Boulder who is taken to the underworld they are both from the world of agricultural farming that predates the Indo-European culture now whilst the indo-europeans have roots that predate the abrahamic religions and are equal in aged to the more recognizable Temple worshiping practices of the Mesopotamian religions there is an interesting observation to be had and that is because the Neolithic Farmers traveled with their beliefs into Europe from the near East they're right there before the religion was in its more recognizable form we know today from around 4000 BCE and so we should ask ourselves what did this earlier form of religion look like as whilst we recognized some of the motifs as agricultural this Gap may allow us to understand the earlier agricultural religious mythology through differences we see between the earliest Indo-European settlers such as the area of Scandinavia and this may allow us to identify these earlier agricultural religious gods or myths and then this may allow us to understand the cultural and religious influence on the agricultural farmers and their earliest inferences which will allow us to go back further in time to find the origin of their religion but one custom we see that existed in both the cultures of the Indo-European and Middle Eastern people is poetry and this is best explained by saying that whilst some of you may be familiar with the idea of seeing hymns in church the idea having poetic verse to remember stories is as old as both these cultures at least 6 000 years old and almost certainly much much older than that although we have no tangible proof of this because writing did not exist although we do have evidence of music and instruments from tens of thousands of years ago and so to evidence that this was widespread well we can look at the Rick Vader in India and Scandinavia with the proticator in Greek we have the author Kim's in environment cultures too there are many works of poetry and in Mesopotamia stories such as the Epic of Gilgamesh the oldest written story was a poem and so poems allowed important alt editions such as the organism cosmogenes and other mythologies to continue without the need to write anything down as it was easy to remember them as poems which suggests that these stories are of older than the versions that were written down and so if we could collect stories from many regions and cultural groups and perfectly for more remote locations then these stories May well be very old indeed and we can measure the likelihood of this using a method called phylogenetics which I'll talk about more later as it is a useful tool to understand the probable source of myths and stories that have been orally transmitted but what this implies is that many myths many poems but we got ritual and as they were only maintained orally then we have to accept it as a whole Humanity has lost much of its cultural heritage as beliefs challenged migrated or were wiped out by competing belief systems and for completeness we will end the background of the count religions of the World by saying that Buddha who was born halfway through the first millennium BCE and there are usually three dates given for this 623 BC 563 BCE or 480 PC but for our purposes Buddhism arose from the edge of the Hindu culture in Nepal and as such the influence on this religion would have included Hinduism Associated Tax alongside traditional religious practices from folklore and so considering this it plays no further role in US tracking religion back to its roots and so for us having traced abrahamic Middle East and Egyptian and Indo-European religions back to their Source you may now be able to understand how and why these religions were influenced by shallah they are after all in close Geographic proximity and these cultures would have interacted with each other some through trade but others to war expansion through migrations and we can evidence this because these religions all show similarities to deities and mythology and certain mythologies are similar across these cultures and certain specific mythologies are very similar across these cultures and a clear example of the similarities the Battle of The Vedic Indra and the serpent vitra a battle described in Rick Vader that when Indra won allowed rain to fall in rivers to run and so help crops and this has many significant similarities to marduks Tiamat of the Sumerian treasurement the gods have similar attributes use the same weapons the monsters have similar descriptions and I'll talk more about this in a specific video looking at these and comparing the two myths and we can see many other similarities if we look at all creation myths flood myths and myths about dragons these myths don't just have similar motifs they often contain similar names similar figures and similar mythogens these myths were not made up independently in each culture they spread between them but what is also is interesting is how a dragon fight in myth in India evolved from a creation myth in Mesopotamia and if we look at the creation myths that travel to Europe from the near East we see that they are a different shape to the original Creation with consumer the ones that traveled have a Divine backstory to give meaning to any current deity and whilst there are elements to this in this Samaria myth it is not a significant the Sumerian myth is about the primordial beans being used to create the world there is no magical sickles used to castrate other gods and to me the question if that went from the Phoenicians to the hitters to Greece is very agricultural about the Sumerian myth probably contains remnants of an older pre-agricultural farming myth and this isn't without precedent as I have previously mentioned that the Nordic creation myth contains both Indo-European and agricultural motifs and indeed the myth of Emir in the Old Norse manuscripts has him killed to build the world and no struggle to define a Define legacy it could be that the original myth from Suma traveled to Scandinavia and the later miss traveled to Greece and these two would match with what we know about migrations through archeology linguistic Evolution and DNA and so this myth of Celtic Waters with primordial beings in it is older than the Primal double to personify to make Gods such as the figure okeanos who is represented in Greek versions of decree Smith and we know this by looking at analysis on the world's oldest creation myth and these are about Celtic Waters and creation of land and not worried about gods and divine Legacy but more about that in a little while now I'm aware that I haven't touched on Africa Australian Asian or American cultures and these will come as they will reinforce certain evidence later but we must also acknowledge that many religions in these areas these regions came to be through responses to colonization and so many of these religions will be younger than those we're looking at now but if you do want me to look at any any specific religion or culture and their mythology and history then just please let me know in the comments below and so when we look at this map and the proximity of the sources of the major religions of the world and alongside the data they appear then we can start to appreciate that something must have happened in this region to create these religions and are touched on the fact earlier that the birth of civilization happened here and this means that permanent settlements first appeared in this region and then farming became a significant food source but what was the characterist for these events that happened over ten thousand years ago well we need to turn the clocks back a little further than this and we see from archaeological records and DNA evidence that around 16 000 years ago humans in the region are eating grasses to supplement their diet but only about five percent of these are domesticated and so deliberately grown by the cultures eating them then as the Millennia pass the grass is eaten show more and more domestication meaning a high percentage work being deliberately farmed such that by 10 000 years ago agricultural farming was starting to make up a hugely significant proportion of the primary source of food for the cultures in the near East but why here and the reason is that the earth's climate was going through a lot of change between twenty thousand and ten thousand years ago about twenty thousand years ago the earth was recovering from an Ice Age Peak it wound for a period of time and then it suffered an event called the younger driest period which pushed the population of Europe further south due to expanding ice cups and Glaciers are almost like a mini ice age and then the Earth came out of this very quickly the result is that the cold environment pushed more people to warmer's climbs and so there was more mixing together of cultures and around the region of Anatolia which is our modern day Turkey the landscape became perfect for growing crops and so grasses such as barley and wheat and with time our ancestors became better farmers and the populations that were here became more and more reliant on these crops we know this region today as the Fertile Crescent and it stretches up the Nile and down the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers and this is why we see these cultures close together people were in large communities building the first cities and being able to create Farmland around these communities and this influenced religion as the faith requires for hunting and Gathering and for a nomadic lifestyle changed into a very different one that was required to allow you to find your place in a city and needing specific things to make your crops grow such as rain and rivers and sunshine and so New Gods came into being gods were created for the weather gods for love and fertility of animals and crops and perhaps as significantly the gods started to become personified they took a human form and this was significantly influenced by humans living in permanent settlements and with many more people than they were used to and so to imagine something to help us our inherent cognitive bias would call for something in human form that and how politics and Hawk he became even more significant in day-to-day life and that started to move towards human-shaped gods and so it is the hunter-gatherers of this region who settled and then who became the Neolithic Farmers over thousands of years for us if we can find evidence of religions and beliefs of the hunter-gatherers elsewhere especially over this transition period of 10 to 20 000 years show it gives us another point from which we can go even further back in time searching for the origins of religion there are a number of sites that represent early settlement of Neolithic people and so those who lived over 12 000 years ago and which continued being inhabited into the early period of farming a period that covers the pre-pottery Neolithic periods A and B which is also known as ppla and ppmb suggesting that the transition from hunter-gathering to being Farmers enabled the creation of settlements but on close analysis it does seem that hunter-gatherers were settling before farming became a significant source of food and just to ensure we understand the periods of time we are now talking about as we go from the Bronze Age to Wellington Stone ages and the Ice Age so the copper age which was earlier than the Bronze Age happened about four and a half to 3300 BCE then came to Pottery Neolithic ages where Ceramics or two started to be developed and we have ppla and ppmp and PM periods which go from 20 000 BCE to four and a half thousand BC and then before 20 000 years ago we are in the Paleolithic period proper and here the first 30 000 years are known as the upper Paleolithic period some of our oldest settlements are in the regions where the main world religions of today look to have started we have Jericho which is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world today originally built around 9600 BCE and there is catahoyuk one of the earliest and best preserved Neolithic sites we have found and in which many Venus type figures have also been found so let's look at some of these findings in these locations within Joko which is the furthest south of these settlements we find figures that we call ancestor statues and may have represented nail deceased members of one's family in cattle royak we have found Venus figurines one particular statue of a woman stands out known as the seated woman she may well have gone on to evolve into colloidally an equivalent of the Earth's mother even representative of Mother Nature although there is much speculation in this connection in the nevali Corey we find artwork representing a hunting team and in AIM gazelle we find famous statues of gods one that particularly stands out is the two-headed Idol these artifacts discovered during archaeological digs at various early settlements show how gods were becoming more personified by a 6000 BCE and how hunting was still important around 8000 BCE but one of the most interesting sites for us the largest of these settlements in in terms of religious history is Gobekli Tepe this could arguably provide us with the most Clues on religious history of this period And since its Discovery several similar sites have been also discovered and uncovered each with similar architecture and art but some are several thousand years older however there remains one key issue with these tepes sites no one really understands how they were used we have confidence saying that quebecue Tepe was not permanently settled it was not near a water source although very near the sources of the tiger sends you fade his rivers less than a day's walk and we no longer feel it was deliberately buried which is a recent finding following many years of believing it was deliberately buried because it was on top of a hill and so unlikely to have been covered naturally and in this site the carvings primarily consistent creatures that these people would have been wary of such as lions snakes and spiders and not those you would hunt and eat the archaeological finders here give us confidence that communal rituals took place and so a form of recognizable religion would have been practiced but to understand what exactly took place would be pure subposition however no Idols of gods are here and so we can feel confident feeling that the gods of the hunter-gatherers or at least these ones were not personified by this point in history but all we have our assumptions although we have more than a little confidence in some of them and one of these is that good black tea would have been a culturally transitionary site a site where hunter-gatherers stayed for short periods of time at the very beginning of the culture shift between Hunter Gathering and settling down in communities and then farming but I have to stress there was no significant farming at this point and so the religion practice was more likely to be hunter-gatherer in its makeup hence why it wasn't permanently settled as these people were nomadic but also must have had plenty of time on their hands to build such a structure so perhaps the ever-changing climate also persuaded them to build these structures as a place to hide when things were particularly bad one of the sites uncovered after quebecue Tepe was Nevada Cory where the hunting scene was cast from but here they've also been carvings covered that also appear in better and one could argue more skilled form suggesting the quebeckley Tepe was a site that was used after Nepali Cori but by the same culture here the sculpture looks like a bird on top of two people joined together now could this represent some form of creationists not just because of the two people but could the bird represent the Earth diver obviously that is complete supposition without any foundation but who knows what research we'll come up with in the future that will help us understand this imagery but then Caravan Tepe was uncovered and this site at 11 400 years old he's much older than quebeci Tepe and it was built before farming was a significant source of food suggesting hunter-gatherers were looking to settle in an area not because they wanted to farm farming came after this and so it is assumed they've settled here because the area was so fertile and that there was no need to travel far to find glasses or animals and this would reinforce the assumption that the artwork found here is from hunter gatherer mindset and not a transitional or agricultural farming one and so if we look at the artwork in these Tepe especially quebeckley Tepe then they do offers Clues as to what they could be there has been speculation that the carvings of animals could represent constellations but if so for what purpose they were representative of animals they were afraid of but again for what purpose could they represent a story mythology maybe there is an answer that will reveal itself with time but one thing is for sure religion was practiced here and the gathers were here and showing us hints of their belief and their rituals and so to find earlier beliefs we need to understand where these hunter-gatherers came from so we can try and understand what we know about their beliefs before I continue I wanted to give a shout out to our patrons who continue to support me ask me fantastic questions and give me great video ideas which is while making this video but my question is where did they come from and no I'm not talking about my patrons but where did these hunter gatherers come from and if we can work out bear origin then perhaps we can find Clues there about what they believed and their rituals in May 2022 a paper titled the genomic origins of the world's first farmers was released and this gave us a good idea of where these hunter-gatherers came from in this region that slowly transitioned to agricultural farming and the best way to explore this is to go back in time 27 000 years where the whole region of Europe and the near East consisted of Hunter Gathers in no specific cultural groupings although we do know there were groups within this that interacting with each other more regularly than others and so shared more culture and more DNA but this study showed us where the first farmers came from and we see that around 25 000 years ago there were two distinct groups of hunger gatherers an East and a West group and by twenty thousand years ago we see that there were groups split into two distinct groups and it is probably Geographic issues and potential environmental conditions as the last ice age peat that helped create this split it is also at this time that ancient North eurasians or anes started to migrate over the land which have been created by lowered sea levels and into North America but this study seems to indicate that there seems to be little interaction from more Northern hunter-gatherers or the ancient North deviations during this time period then fifteen thousand years ago the Eastern groups looked to a split into two groups separated by the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers the area that would become Mesopotamia then a fourteen thousand two hundred years ago we see the eastern most western under gathers mixed with the Western most eastern hunter-gatherers created a new genetic poor and with this probably a mixing of cultures and at thirteen thousand eight hundred years ago this new pool splits into two around a Caucasus mountain range and then 12 900 years ago just before the younger drafts period a period of time which acted like a mini Ice Age covering much of Europe in our Glacier we see the newer admix groups growing and maintaining their own groupings with the northmost group heading towards the Black Sea and it is possibly the their ancestors will become part of the Indo-European groupings in six thousand years time the Eastern 2 group is expanding somewhat and this behavior of the remaining groups May well be reflective of all cultural settlements creating this concentration and this also means that farming was starting by this point and so 9 000 years ago and after some of the Tepe Temple structures were made and agricultural farming was starting in the near East we see the population of Neolithic Farmers start to head into Europe to become the early European farmers with the Eastern hunter-gatherers forming three distinct DNA groups the initial home of farming there's a close in East Anatolia and the Caucasus on the east of the Black Sea as you can see this later group is looking like it is going to influence the indo-europeans as several thousand years later and at seven thousand years ago the yemenaya culture has emerged in the European culture that really spread although there was an earlier dispersal and I'll talk about that in my video on the European culture and here we see Pharma groups in Egypt de Levant Anatolia all farming with the caucuses group still focusing on hunter-gathering and it is shortly after this that I am Naya culture then expands across Europe Persia and into India this information the dates and locations tells us that if we know of any archaeological finds showing ritual Behavior around the Balkans and Anatolia as well as in the near East before 15 000 years ago then these may have direct influence on the religions of the hunter-gatherers that built the tepes sites and what we see here and if we go back to our various figurines of artwork and carvings to suggest there were Stories being told and these stories May well have included myth which informs ritual but from this time in our history there were no buildings or obvious religious sites where worshiping took place and the reason for this is that hunter-gatherer cultures were nomadic they were on the Move regularly to find food that grew with the seasons and so they would not have a religion that relied on a temple type culture but were either shamanistic or more commonly Believers of animism farming shaped the need for a particular set of gods with much focus on the weather the environment and fertility along with settlements the gods became because on vacations of people but before this time Shamanism and animism offered a religious experience suited for the nomadic hunter-gatherers Shamanism is a religious tradition characterized by the figure of the shaman a spiritual practitioner who is able to meditate between the human and spirit world this belief is a worldwide phenomenon found in various forms amongst many indigenous societies from Siberia and Central America to the Americas Africa and Oceana and whilst practicism beliefs differ amongst these cultures there is a ways to come a theme that the shaman is a spiritual mediator and this means that such a belief is either a natural human consideration or it is a very old idea indeed from before humans left Africa animism was also widespread amongst human societies across the world and is assumed due to this spread that it was likely a key belief of many prehistoric human societies and the most primitive form of religion animism itself is a religious belief system that attributes souls or spirits to a wide range of entities in the natural world and this means humans animals plants geographical features and sometimes even inanimate objects and Abstract Concepts for example with a if a rock looked like an ancestor then our animism believe in ancestors probably thought it continued the spirit of the Dead ancestor it looked like and so it is fair to say that understanding Shamanism and animism are probably key to understanding Humanity's earliest spiritual expressions and religious belief but because these belief systems didn't have temples or personified Gods finding archaeological evidence for these is difficult by evidence of belief and ritual does exist in a number of flavors such as carvings and figurines or artwork and so let's look at these we see many types of rock and Bone carvings from the late Paleolithic period but perhaps the significant one is that of Venus figures these are figurines although sometimes carvings and of the female form and often with exaggerated features and so a comedy heard hypothesis is that the hunter-gatherers in the regions where these are found worshiped a female deity what I have here from tell her laugh in Syria or far from catahoyuk and it is dated to around 4000 BCE I also have a piece from the same location that is a sttf biogas fertility Idol very similar to around 5000 BCE and I say this is also seated but where these Venus figures are found across Eurasia with ages primarily ranging from the beginning of the Agricultural Pharma period And so around 10 000 years old and going back to around 30 000 years ago then we cannot be sure of their purpose and this Gap in our understanding is highlighted because there is a noticeable lack of these figures in Africa America or Oceana and so the problem with the hypothesis is that other hunter-gather tribes in other regions or in more modern times do not have these figurines and so it feels that the purpose of these figurines was something else other than worship or this belief would have continued and expanded perhaps the most plausible explanation I've heard so far is from Richard Johnson MD suggested they might be an idealized body types during a period when they climate meant food was scarce and so a way of thinking yourself healthy but for now there is no way to be sure there is one fine that is rather unique though and that is the liar man of low and Minch and I have a copy of the figure here it just feels rather magical to hold this even though it is a copy and that is because it represents a figure that does not exist and by that I mean it is a carving of an imaginary figure a figure that does not exist in the real world after all why human lion hybrid isn't something you'll see wandering around The Valleys of Europe where this was carved 40 000 years ago not only that it is also the oldest human carving we know that represents a living creature that is a figment of our imagination and not only that it is also the oldest humanoid figure we have ever found or at least the oldest one in which academics have confidence in what it is and its authenticity to me and I'll talk more about this in my lineman video this represents a maturing of human understanding humans no longer consider themselves just another animal at this point in time but they're different and this type of thinking almost certainly means the capacity for religious thought also existed we also see from evidence on the body of this lion man figurine that it was passed around possibly as part of an act of Storytelling and we see storytelling as much as ritual as opposed to the entertainment review it as today it was a well it was a necessary way to spread information and so for me this represents the oldest tangible form of religion the ACT but the rituals and belief around it are just just unknown but our journey also doesn't stop here art also gives us an understanding of the stories and beliefs of our ancestors the problem is that much of it was painted outside and has faded and disappeared over the time due to environmental conditions and only in some caves Hazard survived for over ten thousand years and a few examples show that cave art was being practiced for over 45 000 years and amongst the undecipable patterns there are figurative shapes primarily animals and there was a paper published at the start of 2023 which suggests that some of these were actually used as a proto-writing system based on a lunar calendar and numeric information and whilst this is a fascinating piece of information showing an understanding of the lunar calendar these pieces of art therefore probably not religious in their meaning now we do see figurative art in the Balkans around 35 000 years ago and so a bit later than we would hope in order to draw a strong line of continuous belief between these hunter-gatherers and to the agricultural Farmers just after quebecue Tepe for example yeah and within Anatolia there are carvings going back to around 11 000 years and so slightly earlier than we would want to draw connections from here but we do sometimes see Venus figurines that I've just spoken about being painted red with ocher and this suggests that perhaps there was some ritual or belief in them they weren't just an aesthetic object as we see evidence of orca using archaeological finds of ritual Behavior and particularly in the painting of bodies burials and it is with burials that's how Journey will take a more interesting turn the final piece of the archaeological jigsaw that may provide us with evidence of religious belief our burials you see to deliberately bury someone means that you were purposefully doing something to the body after death and this may have meant that there was an emotional concern about what happened to the body after that someone had died and this connection is more convincing if the person was buried with grave Goods meaning that they were buried with concern over how they may live in the world of the Dead the other world the underworld however our ancestors thought about it and at some point in our past humans would have considered the body to have a spirit or life force and would not be able to distinguish between the two sensitive a person died it would have been thought that their Spirit had left their body and that was some of the premise in animism and why our ancestors perceived their ancestors in patterns in the ground or rocks or clouds in the sky certainly death was seen by some cultures as an emotional moment and burials by these people those that thought this were ritualized with bodies being deliberately positioned in their graves you know in a specifically Doug pit and there is a very good example of this with three different child bills that seem linked as all the children are buried with objects but not only that there is DNA evidence linking them has been part of the same culture here we see that a very wet Malta in Siberia is behavioral and ritual alignment with two burials by Clovis people in North America and these people have a strong DNA connection suggesting the beliefs of the Siberian peoples took their rituals along with their beliefs over to North America when there was a land bridge between the two continents around 20 000 years ago but there are many older burials that are also interesting and exhibit the potential ritual Behavior the oldest known human burial in Africa is at panga yesetti cave in Kenya dating back to around 75 to 80 000 years ago there a partial skeleton of a child was intentionally buried in a small pit dug in the Earth and although No Grave goods were left with her fact that people stopped probably the parents spent time burying the body so it wasn't consumed by animals meant there was a respect for the body there was no other ritual evidence found here and this isn't the oldest known human burial for this we have school and Cafe site in Israel where 10 humans have been found buried and the age of these is between 80 000 and a hundred thousand years old however these barrels aren't completely without question it is possible that some may not have been homo sapiens some may not have been purposefully buried but there are signs of ritual Behavior with others here such as one person was buried with their mandible of a world ball placed on their chest and another holding the antlers of a deer and was deliberately positioned but even these fought fossil to the earliest evidence we have of burials of any hominin just a month or so before I made this video a people was released about an excavation in 2018 in South Africa where burials of the extinct hominin species homo neladi seem to have taken place finding suggested I'm only lady deliberately dug a hole and placed their deceased in it and in one whole five individuals were found in the age of this burial three hundred thousand years old and so from this we see deliberate burial by species of homonym before the time of homo sapiens but this still isn't the eldest deliberate Act of dealing with the Dead or something we would call multi Behavior because in Spain at Sima de la Jose or pit of Bones Neanderthal Bones have been found that clearly showed military behavior and through taphenomic analysis we can see that an unusually high percentage of Bones within a pit show a trauma inflicted before the death of the individual and not just that that many of these traumas were very similar suggesting recurrent acts of violence and that the dead was then placed together in the same pit although it should be noted that the pit seems to be a natural pit and so not deliberately dug but by placing the bodies in it they were being deliberately placed out of the way now now this may not be considered as ritualistic as the other burials or religious Behavior but there is recurrent and perhaps even a ritualized setting taking place here and the date for this 430 000 years ago every place the burials and temples aside along with the figurines and carvings then there is one site which when I first saw it about five years ago absolutely took my breath away a site that was created by neanderthals in southern France it was discovered within a cave whose entrance had been blocked since the Paleolithic period and if you were to travel over 300 meters into the cave deep deep towards its rear a place you would only go if you were deliberately knowing you were going there because it was devoid of any daylight at all you would have stumbled upon a number of structures on the floor these were arranged in circulish patterns each built of pieces of stalagmite and in each structure the stalact mites were approximately the same size or close enough as to be considered the same size small fires had been lit on the structure using animal fat to help keep the Flames burning and over to one corner a pile of bones had been burnt leaving a pile of charcoal this is brunico cave in France and looking at the site you would wonder what was the function of these structures especially considering their distance from the cave entrance to bring a fire Source animal fat and Bones so far into the cave it must have been a deliberate act now and why were fires built on the structure and not the cave floor based on most upper Paleolithic cave findings this can be assumed to represent symbolic or ritual Behavior but this doesn't mean it could not have served another purpose such as find domestic functional just the Refuge but there was pre-planned activity here there was ritual Behavior here and all this was a hundred and seventy six thousand years ago and so we should ask ourselves was their religion here a God here and looking at this place to me it feels unlikely and this is one of the issues with archeology it is that you get to see a scene of a crime a p a picture of a moment in time and if you're lucky you would capture an encounter of the event that occurred however we can't be sure if these events were religious or imitualized we assumed that if there is deliberate Behavior evidenced then it probably was a ritual but this isn't an absolute given and so we come to the final piece of evidence we can use to chase religion back through time and it is what happens to be my specialist subject mythology I've discussed in previous videos that through the use of phylogenetics a process where we look at the DNA archaeological records known migration routes and the language used in stories and key motifs of myths in there mythologyms we can attained the probability of a myth traveling from one place to another and then can also place an approximation on the date of that myth and its age and using this process across all the known places where amith is told we can then copper ballistically locate its source and his age this is a process I've discussed for specific myths on this channel and so if you want to learn more of them my flood myth early question myth or origin of the Dragon Miss they all do discuss this in far more detail but if we look at the evidence we have for some Mists we see that there are particular myths and motifs which have traveled across much of the world and can be traced back to before the time the time when the last significant human dispersal Out of Africa happened which was over 70 000 years ago and this is important if you understand that myths do inform ritual and so religion we see the flood myth start in Southeast Asia around 30 000 years ago it was actually a response to the creation myth and takes some of the treasure myths key motifs and repurposes them this Blood myth was then taken by cultures across into North America about twenty thousand years ago whilst another branch of it spread back into the near Eastern being the European landscape and this also explains why such myths are well next to non-existence in sub-Saharan Africa but do exist in the Middle East and in the European cultures alongside the creation myths the motif of the fair men of the Dead is very interesting but this is about the journey your dead body takes to the other world when you die and the journey often involves traveling over a river a Crossing which is often controlled by a very old man with a gray beard although eventually we see this transform into a dog that eventually becomes servers this myth can be traced back to Siberian culture around 25 000 years ago and so the story migrated over into North America and towards the Indo-European cultures and the more diluted version ended up in the near East and to evidence this we see the story of Oedipus told almost identically by First Nation Americans as it is by the Greeks then we have the Aldi story in the world which is not a myth per se although it hints at being one now it is often very difficult to find a Whole Story from beginning to end that we can date back to pre-writing source with confidence we do know the Epic of Gilgamesh at around 4 000 years old is the oldest written story but research has shown that a story called The Cosmic hunt is nearer forty thousand years old and tells of a hunting ritual to release the Sun from an animal's horns this suggests an understanding of the solar year something that we acknowledge through cave paintings of animals and so may have been performed as part of a ritual and thus could be considered part of animist culture it also shows that myths and stories can be passed orally across great distances in time and space and that we can trace them with well with an acceptable level of confidence and then we have dragons which have been popular mythology for the last seventy Thousand Years and the dragon myth originated in South Africa and then migrated Out of Africa and to China where it then went down to Australia and South America and also as it traveled back from Asia into across Eurasia and into Europe it arrives in a different form in Indo-European and near Eastern midst for example and this is due to there being different issues that the enemy is inflicting on society and so the dragon myth the initially was about creating the world and life but it changed with the Advent of farming became the creature that withheld Life by withholding water and rain before becoming the Beast that stole cattle in Indo-European mythology before becoming the monster they captured princesses and then perhaps the most popular Myth today is that which is considered the oldest creation myth there were a few flavors of creche myths which are all related to each other in some way and these myths are the seed for motifs we call the Earth diver the Tree of Life as well as the flood myth we see that many of the oldest creationists begin with no God and chaotix Waters with no land and this is interesting as I'll explain in a minute but perhaps for us and just as interesting as a creche myth are the myths of death or myths about how humans lost their immortality a myth again with its roots in Africa over 70 000 years ago and which eventually influenced the story of Adam and Eve in the Bible when they met the snake in the Garden of Eden and Eve then eats the Apple and this myth alongside the dragon myths showed the fear and wonder humans head of snakes but the premise of these stories is that humans should be immortal and so why aren't we and often we see a snake still that immortality finding our earliest religion means delving in prehistory and trying to translate archaeological finds as traces of ritualistic and symbolic behavior and doing this makes firm conclusions hard to come by chew to the scarcity and ambiguous nature of archaeological evidence but there are several key sites and artifacts that suggest an early manifestation of religion certainly understanding religion from the time of agricultural farming to now is relatively straightforward especially where texts exists as in the last few thousand years or so although I'm picking the source of individual beliefs can be tricky due to the continual migration the overlapping of cultures and their ideas especially in places like Greece but we can show culture traveled and took religion and beliefs with it which gives us confidence that this happened before this time it is a continual process and then we have sites such as quebecue tap which are also often suggested as the world's first temples demonstrating Advanced ceremonial practices indicative of complex religious beliefs however we should remain cautious of sensationalist interpretations and keep in mind that our understanding of this site and this purpose is still evolving and will continue to do so in coming years but we no because of its age that there is a reasonably clear case that this is an intermediary step of the evolution of human culture as hunter-gatherers started to settle which then seems to lead to an opportunity to farm and with these types of locations containing many carvings aren't working figurines alongside these Monumental structures that they are and then to me this is a clear sign of a belief in something about we mustn't forget other cultures I haven't spoken about I have approached this talk with an assumption that we're comfortable that everyone in the human race you is outside of sub-Saharan Africa is related in some way to the people that migrated Out of Africa around 70 000 years ago and as such this means that religion didn't start in the Americas as these were not populated early but what about Australia and whilst well it would be a valid assumption that the first settlers of Australia had a similar belief system to the First Nation Australians of today we can't actually prove that although we have carried out research on the age of some of the myths but many including some of the dream time all no more than around 20 000 years old or less as old as we can prove them to be which coincides with the last ice age maximum and so a lowering and then immediately after aim rising of sea levels which had a huge impact on the coast of Australia and the environment of the people living there and I've discussed this in this video but we do know that these people too descended from the migration Out of Africa and so any Australian Source we could prove is coming from this African dispersal would probably be amongst the oldest religious beliefs we know but we just can't prove this outside of the Dragon myth what is most important about all the information we've discussed is that I have shown with a high level of confidence I believe that beliefs traveled with human migrations are cost contents through burials through mythological beliefs now we see a definite change in cognitive behavior around 40 000 years ago with cave paintings and carvings of figures but we can also Trace myths of creation and death back to Africa before the dispersal that populated the rest of this planet with Homo sapiens and this means that there were some beliefs that originated before we left Africa the oldest myths we see and so which have traveled with the Out of Africa migrations are the myths of creation and that of the Dragon and these are known by most cultures around the world and this makes sense because it is only natural for people to wonder where they are from why they're here and if there is anything they need to be scared of when they die having these stories shows a belief in something and we know these stories were performed as poetry and poetry was often ritualized and although the Aldi secretionists had no gods they state that in the beginning there was nothing no land no sea no gods this should not worry us is that the beginning of this video we showed that a religion especially the more primitive ones such as animism and Shamanism well they do not need gods and judge him from what we see of tribal Behavior animism and Shamanism are still the religions of the remote tribes about perhaps the most interesting myth is of the loss of immortality and the myth of death and this is because of the evidence we have been left with today there are rituals around death today if we travel back in time we see myths of the underworld and the other world through the history of writing and back to Mesopotamia and if we go back to Egypt before the time they had a religion that we recognize there is archaeological evidence that they had death rituals and then we see burial rituals persist in earlier times a ritual so important that it traveled between continents people were being buried with Goods people being buried in particular positions and these rituals seem to have even influenced the Neanderthals and possibly the human ancestral cousin of hormonal lady I buried they did deliberately too and this would make sense because burying people does show care for the Dead that you cared for them in life and so you'll care for them and think of them when they're gone and if we consider this then perhaps burial is a sign that we became of an emotional maturity a another cognitive Evolution at some point to acquire the appropriate level of emotional intelligence that meant we cared about our friends or families and so mourned their loss which then allowed us to perform ritual even knowing myths about creation dragons were around and almost certainly the myth of the loss of immortality then ritual burial is probably enough additional evidence that homo sapiens were pets in a recognizable religious form over seventy thousand years ago a religion that was probably focused on animism but how far back can we go considering the other evidence we can't be sure the various burials found of the oldest non-humans are contentious often with a lack of consensus about evidence and so more comparative fines are needed to establish a clearer picture of Neanderthal religious beliefs and for the record perhaps the most compelling evidence we have for Neanderthal religious practices in burial form comes from the intentional burials we see at Le Chapel also in France and Shenandoah caves although here the lack of confirmed grave Goods could still be considered an issue but to me the site of brunacol cave is a fascinating confirmation that ritual Behavior was being practiced over 170 000 years ago and so considering all of this we can still say that the archaeological and mythological record offers tantalizing hints at the birth of religious Behavior over a hundred thousand years ago showing that ancestors had capacity for symbolic thought and ritual and this includes our ancestors like Dali around 335 000 years ago and home all Heidelberg dentists around 500 000 years ago and perhaps even earlier still however there is doubt to these findings but we do see more pronounced ritual behaviors in neanderthals and ourselves Homo sapiens and we have far more confidence that some of our cave structures and burials that show ritual and symbolic Behavior especially those buried with grave Goods with deliberate positioning of the body and in the Liberty duck pits and particularly where they're in caves and at the back it caves it suggests to pass they want bodies to be close to another world the underworld but perhaps without art without lighting to go alongside these burials well it's impossible to get into the mind of the people burying the dead person and so the issue remains that while material evidence can hint at ritual and symbolic practices understanding the beliefs of the individuals that are performing these acts they're accompanied burial well that is next to Impossible yeah he's he's far more difficult to ascertain this so we need to be cognizant of the fact that archeology often gets a bad rap labeling discoveries as ritual just because we don't understand what it is that is going on in a site or discovery well that is also why we should use and can use other information such as mythology to help add additional value to what we are seeing any additional information and using this and knowing we can trace the myth of immortality for example back at least 70 000 years and possibly up to a hundred and forty Thousand Years in this to me marks the birth of religious thought and that is due to the emotional connections you must have had with your family that made you feel compelled to act in a particular way a repeatable way and these rituals around death persisted and and they left us evidence to find far more so than anything else that has happened from this time and because these rituals are hinted at in other hominins and for much longer ago even before Homo sapiens were recognized as a species then it suggested having this emotional capacity to mourn over the death of a close companion to have the emotions of loss and death of someone that helped Inspire those rituals inspired the mythology that inspired religion and religious thought but we also must remember the back of this time there was no Gods we were still trying to make sense to the world we have stories about creation stories about deaths about dragons and and probably many many other stories that are now lost in time literally buried with those bodies and so I will end this video with an important note we need to be clear that there is speculation wherever we look this far back as the further back in history we look well then the more tenuous the understanding of what we're seeing becomes the archaeological and anthropological evidence can often be interpreted in multiple ways and even the definition of words like religion can become contentious when looking at it in a prehistoric view when looking at prehistoric evidence of ritual behavior and prehistoric cultures what we can say is though that when we started to practice religion there was no God we were just trying to find our place in the cosmos and only later on did someone feel it necessary to invent a God or two which evolved from the spirits of animism and became personified as we settled into communities and that was probably more of a cognated bias of how we wanted to picture things God is my maid as is religion so thank you for watching until the end if you have any questions then please ask them in the comments and I will answer as many as I can please check out the other videos in my channel as they will probably go into more detail on specific points I've made in this video and so I may answer some of your questions and please support my Patron if you like my research and you want to help me do more and help support the creation and continue maintenance of the mythology database I will leave you I think with the most appropriate video at this point which is worth watching which is is on the loss of immortality and so please stay safe and well and this was krakenfold

Channel: Crecganford

Views: 537,835

Keywords: mythololgy, phylogenetics, anthropology, religious history, religious study, oldest religion, origin of religion, first religion

Id: eYn-YY8hz94

Length: 102min 38sec (6158 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 01 2023