/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

We have no way of knowing for sure, but prehistoric humans seemed to have religions centered on the animals they saw in their environments, likely oral histories of their tribes, the major formations of their environment like particular mountains, rivers, etc. the forests they lived near

Of course humans also have always possessed a fear of these things as well, you can get lost and die on a mountain, much of the Pleistocene megafauna could easily kill an adult human, the problem is that these peoples left no writings behind so we can only hypothesize about their beliefs and belief systems

>>669348
They left behind cave art and some old tools like pick axes and blades indicating they had an understanding of mining which means they could crafted shit like swords for inter tribe conflict and major hunting missions which would mean Pleistocene era man still had some understanding of civilization before the sumerians

>>669351
Having pick axes doesn’t mean they had knowledge of metallurgy, pick axes also make stone working easier, they were still just stone pick axes

>>669351
Actually I sort of misread, however simply because they could make swords doesn’t mean there’s any reason to believe they actually did, there is no evidence of armed conflicts or wars prior to the first emergent civilizations of the Indus River Valley, human population was not very dense in the Pleistocene, the world is a big place

>>669356
Potentially but major hunting for operations could theoretically exist

If you don't get good responses try again later in >>>/edu/ lad

Two things stand out for me in regards to your question the earliest cave paintings we find from Europe to Australia are far more realistic sometimes stunningly so than more abstracted later paintings and that if there was an UR language instead of multiple independent inventions of language, as some suggest, etymologically working back from the world's current languages the word for water was likely something like *a'kwa with 'kw being a click consonant close to wetting the back roof of your mouth with your tongue

These aren't direct answers to your question but I suspect they point part of the way towards an answer as I said it seems salient although whether it's significant or not

The planning and training required for the various stone tool technologies construction is also relevant

More speculatively you may want to look into the works Julian James even if he's wrong on some things he's wrong in interesting ways particularly pay attention to how he defines consciousness

>>669358
Not just potentially iirc large scale rock fish and game traps date back quite early

>>669358
To what purpose? Neanderthals likely conducted major hunting operations since there’s evidence they had knowledge of food preservation, but most evidence with our own species points to humans foraging smaller prey, we didn’t need mammoth meat to survive like our Neanderthal cousins (who did not need it per se)
A few things to consider about humans, different tribes can have different cultures, chosen prey, hunting approaches, etc. if Killer Whales can do that so can humans, so not all people went for the same food sources or equivalent sources or amounts of meat etc.
And ironically you’re promoting the old hypotheses about how ancient humans hunted, when scientists first uncovered Pleistocene fossils they believed humans hunted mammoths and things, now over a century later the evidence seems pretty lacking

>>669361
It really is very interesting to imagine how these first peoples must have saw and experience the world, arguably they experienced a world not even future generations of hunter gatherers who knew of civilizations and lived after the megafaunal extinctions could not experience the world as their ancestors did

>>669365
So like a geography vs hability thing?

>>669367
More or less, it basically comes down to where people live, and also that the Neanderthals’ build meant they required a higher calorie higher protein diet than our species did, they need a lot more food and specifically a lot more meat

>>669371
So presumably they’d live in places like Africa, near coastal lines in particularly cool climates where the conditions are dire enough for life to evolve so that most organisms get fucking huge and be filled with plenty of muscle and fat tissue

>>669385
Pretty much, Neadnerthals evolved for such a calorie heavy and meat heavy diet because they evolved in Europe and Asia during the heights of the Ice Age, a period with sparse plants to eat but huge game everywhere
It’s also why they evolved to be so robust, to help take big prey like that down
Honestly pretty interesting to see evolution influencing hunting behaviors in two fully intelligent species like sapiens and neanderthals, imo
I’d imagine Africa when we evolved was much sparser both in game and vegetation since the glaciers advancing would cause drought

>>669387
Cool but onto the religion question
What would be the earliest known religion in the Pleistocene especially if multiple archaic species of man existed during this period and prior

>>669395
We don’t know any religions from the Pleistocene
Think about it like this, if a nuclear war occurred and all records were mostly destroyed do you think a future civilization can infer what Christianity was from excavating a cross thousands of years in the future?

Hey OP fwiw these guys chuck their dead in caves just like homo naledi did

How could we know? We only have kind of examples with tribes that exist today and that's all we have to compare, so the most likely scenario or theory is that human beings had spirit animal religions. I mean the Roman clans as they were getting out of tribalism believed that Rome came about from some beast that breast feeded human beings, this is the turning point you can sort of imagine between the switch from animal gods or spirits to human deities. Human gods is seen to be the religion of "civilization".

>>669439
Why animals an if so why did religion change to be about omnipresent beings that idk how to describe it “made everything”

>>669482
>Why animals
Because humans were akin to just another animal in nature when we evolved
>Why did gods become omnipresent all powerful beings
They always were that, what actually happened is that gods began to take the form of people, men
The reason is because people’s condition of life changed, whereas before people were wholly at the mercy of nature (which was neither good nor bad, mind you, humans were always well adapted for survival and were good for the environments they found themselves in), when class society was created people were suddenly subject to other people who had a godlike power of life and death over them