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Religion is 70,000 years old?

Was the snake temping a young woman about a piece of fruit?
 
People generally don't make sacrifices to art.

Some of the stone tips seem to have been burned or smashed in what may have been a type of sacrifice. Of 22 tips made from red stone, all of them show cracks and faults consistent with exposure to high heat, Coulson says, and some were burned white. Other spearheads exhibit chips and marks that suggest someone had struck the finished tips dead-on, something that researchers have observed at sites in Siberia, she notes.
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It appears to have been a location of ritualistic activity. I'd want something a little more solid thatn that before calling it religion, but they're not just grasping at straws here.
 
I've been inclined to think for some time that religion (at least in the form of some sort of animism) was a rational response from our primitive ancestors to a world they must have found confusing.
Equipped with reasoning powers similar to ours, they were confronted with all manner of natural phenomena for which they would have had no ready explanation, other than the activities of supernatural beings.
 
Marquis de Carabas said:
People generally don't make sacrifices to art.


It appears to have been a location of ritualistic activity. I'd want something a little more solid thatn that before calling it religion, but they're not just grasping at straws here.
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I agree completely. That's why I included a "?" in the title.

Also, the finding has not been formally published by the researchers. So it will probably undergo much more scrutiny before anyone actually accepts that this is a site of ritual sacrifice.
 
The thing to take away from this, in my mind, is that humans have been working to control their own destinies since about the time there were humans. Sure, making sacrifices to a stone snake isn't the best use of one's time, but it shows they were thinking. It makes me very proud to know that people have been working out the meaning of the universe for over seventy thousand years.
 
Marquis de Carabas said:
People generally don't make sacrifices to art.


It appears to have been a location of ritualistic activity. I'd want something a little more solid thatn that before calling it religion, but they're not just grasping at straws here.
Click to expand...

Marquis,
Just come out and say it. You won't accept anything as a religion until there's a goat involved somehow.
 
How do you define religion? Personally I feel that the origins of religion were meat-eating. For us clawless, toothless bipeds, hunting and meat eating requires planning, cooperation, tools, and rudimentary language. Mix all this ritual with questions about life and death, and you get the essence of religion.

On the other hand, if this doesn't meet your definition of religion, then the date moves.
 
ChristineR said:
How do you define religion? Personally I feel that the origins of religion were meat-eating. For us clawless, toothless bipeds, hunting and meat eating requires planning, cooperation, tools, and rudimentary language. Mix all this ritual with questions about life and death, and you get the essence of religion.

On the other hand, if this doesn't meet your definition of religion, then the date moves.
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I dunno, then chimps would have religion... though I suppose it's possible that they do.
 
ChristineR said:
How do you define religion? Personally I feel that the origins of religion were meat-eating. For us clawless, toothless bipeds, hunting and meat eating requires planning, cooperation, tools, and rudimentary language. Mix all this ritual with questions about life and death, and you get the essence of religion.

On the other hand, if this doesn't meet your definition of religion, then the date moves.
Click to expand...

Add to that the the noble hunter started by scavenging kills after the other animals had had thier way with them, harvesting marrow, sinews and hide. The early tool using homonids cracked open the bones and took the other stuff after the other scevengers. So early humans might have revered death because it gave them things.
 
I read that article and gosh it is brief, there are many other alternatives to religion and sacrifice to a god.

(First off would be micro analysis to study the 'chipping' on the snake)

Were the stone spear points used to make the chips?

Is the date of the exposure of the 'chips' in any way time related to the spear heads? (This is a huge assumption to make, just because things are close to each other does not mean they are realted) Concievably you might be able to use another form of PET (photon emission tomograpgy) to determine the age of the chips off the rock, although I can't recall it's time ranges.

So that is first off, what is the actual provenance of the 'snake' and the spearheads.

Then if they are related it might just imply some sort of group bonding activity.
a. It could be that the rock represented some sort of bad anti-totem and that they were ritualy trying to destroy the rock.
b. It could be that the ritual involved taking an oath that stated your spear head would shatter if you did something angainst the rules.
c. It could be that they were bored and wanted to smash things.(Highly unlikely given the time investment of the making of the spear point).

They didn't state the nature of the spear heads, there is a process of fire hardening flint, so it may be related to that. (At least I think it is flint).


All speculations are equaly valid.
 
Chimps are pretty opportunistic about their meat-eating though. Something small and tasty comes by, and they all jump on it. Hunting requires planning and communication at a level chimps don't reach.

I dunno though, it's not like there's a bright white line here. Chimps don't draw pictures of animals, or bury their dead ritualistically, or pray for success, or ask God permission to eat their kill, but maybe they come close in their own minds.
 
Chimps do indeed plan and coordinate their hunts. I saw a film of a hunting party of five chimps at varying levels of expertise. The newest ones were beaters, they went up trees and made a huge racket to scare the little monkeys into running, two more experienced ones were in trees along the monkeys' flight path to keep them headed toward the last chimp which killed them. The researcher who pointed each monkey out and explained what they were doing indicated that this was a common hunting strategy for chimps.
 
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