When did religion begin? Archaeology cannot dig up a belief. It finds graves, pigments, carved figures and buildings, and every step from those objects to "religion" is an inference. This post follows the evidence from the first deliberate burials about 100,000 years ago, through Neanderthal sites and Ice Age cave art, to the monumental enclosures of Göbekli Tepe and the houses of Çatalhöyük. It sorts what is secure from what is contested, and then reads the record through scientific and theological lenses.
Part 2 of How did religion develop?. Previous: Why are humans religious?. Next: Gods of the first states.
A ladder of inference
The notes behind this post propose a ladder, their own framing rather than a published standard, running from what archaeology sees most easily to what it sees least:
- symbolic capacity (beads, ochre, engravings);
- care for the dead (deliberate burial);
- imagined beings (part-human, part-animal figures);
- organised communal ritual (monumental shared buildings);
- specific beliefs (an afterlife, ancestors, gods).
The record gets firm at rungs 1 and 2 from roughly 100,000 years ago, and at rung 4 by about 9500 BC. Rung 5 is never directly visible before writing. Keep the ladder in mind: most popular claims about "the first religion" jump from rung 2 or 3 to rung 5.
The first burials
The oldest widely accepted deliberate burials of Homo sapiens are at Skhul and Qafzeh in Israel, dated to about 120,000–90,000 years ago (Vandermeersch & Bar-Yosef 2019; Stringer et al. 1989). At Qafzeh an adolescent of about 12 or 13 was buried with fallow-deer antlers by the chest, commonly read as a grave offering. Ochre from the Qafzeh terrace, about 92,000 years old, appears to have been chosen for its colour and lies near the burials (Hovers et al. 2003).
In Africa the earliest known burial is a child of about two and a half to three years at Panga ya Saidi in Kenya, dated to about 78,000 years ago. The pit was deliberately dug, the body was laid flexed and quickly covered, and the head seems to have rested on something perishable. There were no grave goods (Martinón-Torres et al. 2021).
Neanderthals also buried some of their dead, in the view of most specialists. A 12-year re-excavation at La Chapelle-aux-Saints in France concluded that the pit was dug by people and the body quickly covered (Rendu et al. 2014). Critics replied that the evidence fits other explanations equally well (Dibble et al. 2015). Pettitt (2002) finds the older blanket scepticism largely unconvincing. His summary is that some Neanderthals were buried deliberately, usually without grave goods (Pettitt 2002).
The famous "flower burial" has wilted. At Shanidar in Iraqi Kurdistan, clumps of pollen led Ralph Solecki to propose in 1975 that a Neanderthal had been buried with flowers. Renewed work found a new articulated Neanderthal nearby, about 70,000–60,000 years old, which may have been placed deliberately (Pomeroy et al. 2020). But the same team concluded in 2023 that at least some of the pollen clumps were probably left by nesting solitary bees, whose burrows are visible in the cave (Hunt et al. 2023). Hunt stressed that this "does not negate the possibility" of other Neanderthal symbolic behaviour.
**Did Homo naledi bury its dead?** In 2023 Lee Berger's team claimed that this small-brained hominin, dated to about 335,000–236,000 years ago, buried its dead and engraved cave walls in South Africa. First reviews were strongly negative. One published critique argued that natural processes had not been excluded and objected that the claims were promoted in a Netflix documentary before review (Martinón-Torres et al. 2024). A revised burial paper in 2025 drew a much more favourable review, though one reviewer still asked for independent teams to examine the material (eLife reviews). The engraving claim has had no positive reassessment that the notes found.
Even a secure burial shows care for the dead and deliberate handling of a corpse. It does not show belief in an afterlife. Grave goods such as the Qafzeh antlers are the strongest hint of something more, and even they fit grief, status or memory.
Symbols and images
Clear symbolic behaviour appears in Africa and the Levant by about 100,000–75,000 years ago: pierced shell beads at Taforalt in Morocco about 82,000 years ago (Bouzouggar et al. 2007), and at Blombos Cave in South Africa a cross-hatched pattern drawn with an ochre crayon about 73,000 years ago (Henshilwood et al. 2018).
Figurative art comes later. A cave painting at Leang Karampuang on Sulawesi, Indonesia, showing three human-like figures with a wild pig, is at least 51,200 years old. That is a minimum age from the mineral crust over the paint, and it is described as the oldest securely dated narrative scene (Oktaviana et al. 2024). In Europe the Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel, a mammoth-ivory figure with a lion's head on a human body, comes from a layer dated to about 41,000–39,000 years ago (Kind et al. 2014). Most of the art at Chauvet dates to about 37,000–33,500 years ago (Quiles et al. 2016).
Composite human-animal figures are the strongest Ice Age hint of beings beyond the ordinary. They also fit myth, story or clan identity, none of which requires worship. The best-known interpretation, that cave art records shamans' trance visions (Lewis-Williams & Dowson 1988), is influential and sharply disputed. Critics call it reductionist, and defenders say the critics attack a stricter model than was ever proposed (Rock Art Research debate). The Sulawesi dates also retire the old picture of a "creative explosion" unique to Ice Age Europe.
Did Neanderthals have religion?
The most intriguing Neanderthal site is Bruniquel Cave in France. About 330 metres into the dark, people built rings from some 400 broken stalagmites, with traces of fire, about 176,500 years ago. The excavators say plainly that the function of the structures remains conjectural (Jaubert et al. 2016). A 2018 claim that Neanderthals painted Iberian caves more than 64,000 years ago was challenged by 44 co-authors, who argued the dating method can inflate ages (White et al. 2020). The fair answer is that Neanderthals plausibly had the capacities religion needs, and no Neanderthal artefact demands a religious explanation. The record is too thin to answer either way.
Göbekli Tepe: first the temple?
Göbekli Tepe in south-eastern Turkey has large enclosures of carved T-shaped pillars, begun in the mid-tenth millennium BC by people who did not yet farm domesticated crops. Plaster from one enclosure dates to about 9745–9314 BC (DAI dating summary). Its excavator Klaus Schmidt read it as a ritual centre without houses, where hunter-gatherers gathered to carve pillars and feast (Dietrich et al. 2012). In popular coverage this became the slogan that the temple came first and the city followed. If that was right, religion drove people to settle, and settling led to farming.
That picture has been revised by the excavators themselves. The German Archaeological Institute's team now challenges all three pillars of Schmidt's case, including the claim that the site had no water (Clare 2020; the notes could read only the abstract). Rock-cut features are now interpreted as rainwater cisterns, though the notes have that only from a secondary source. In 2025–26, press reports described rectangular buildings that could have been dwellings. Necmi Karul said Göbekli Tepe was a settlement with different kinds of buildings in use at the same time, not simply a ritual centre (Hürriyet Daily News). Those finds are not yet in a peer-reviewed publication. At nearby Karahan Tepe, Karul reports public buildings surrounded by houses from the earliest phases (Archaeology magazine).
What survives: pre-agricultural or barely agricultural communities built large, labour-intensive, richly carved communal buildings, and their ritual dimension is not in doubt. What does not survive: standalone pilgrimage temples for mobile foragers. Ritual, settlement and cultivation look more like developments that grew together than a one-way chain.
Çatalhöyük and the plastered skulls
At Çatalhöyük in central Anatolia, Ian Hodder's team argued that religion was woven into household life rather than set apart in temples, with elaborated "history houses" and burials under the floors. This work appeared in two edited volumes that grew out of seminars funded by the John Templeton Foundation and included theologians (Hodder 2010; Hodder 2014). Some readers will see the theologians' involvement as a strength and others as a bias. One chapter argues that religious routinisation was a major driver of social complexity.
At Jericho and other Levantine Neolithic sites, skulls were removed, modelled in plaster and kept. Kathleen Kenyon read them in the 1950s as portraits of venerated male elders (UT Austin). Later study found women and children treated the same way, which complicates the "elder ancestor" reading (Bonogofsky 2005). Here, for the first time, a relationship with the dead becomes a durable, repeated practice of a whole community. Whether it was ancestor worship or memorial is still argued.
What did the first religion look like? A phylogenetic guess
Peoples, Duda and Marlowe (2016) took a different route. They mapped religious traits in 33 recent hunter-gatherer societies onto a family tree and reconstructed the likely traits of their common ancestor. Animism came out as the oldest trait, followed by belief in an afterlife, then shamanism, then ancestor worship. Ancestor spirits or high gods active in human affairs were absent in the reconstructed ancestor, and "high gods" stood apart from the other traits (Peoples et al. 2016).
Two limits matter. The method reaches back only to the common ancestor of the living societies sampled, not to the Palaeolithic, and those societies had long contact with farmers and missionaries. And the notes for Part 7 caution that the abstract establishes only that active high gods were absent at the root. Whether the reconstruction excludes remote, inactive high gods there was not confirmed from the full text. Part 7 returns to this, because it bears on the old Catholic thesis of a primordial monotheism.
Through the lenses
Archaeology
Archaeology's strength is chronology: it tells us when and how religious behaviour became visible. Its recent history is also a lesson in humility. Bees made the Shanidar "flowers", the Bruniquel date moved from about 47,000 to 176,000 years, the Iberian art dates are contested, and the excavators of Göbekli Tepe revised their own site's story. Function is often left open, and honestly so.
Cognitive and evolutionary science
Beads and engraved ochre show the social and symbolic machinery that religion presupposes: shared conventions, signalling and imagined categories. The CSR expectation of agents and spirits (Part 1) fits the phylogenetic reconstruction of animism at the root. But that reconstruction is built from living foragers, not excavated ones.
Ethnographic analogy
Every step from object to meaning borrows from recent societies, such as San rock-art ethnography for the trance model and Melanesian skull practices for the plastered skulls. Such analogies help, but the trance model shows how contested they become when carried across tens of thousands of years.
Catholic theology
Catholic teaching makes no chronological claim that this record could confirm or refute. Pius XII allowed research into the evolution of the human body while holding that "souls are immediately created by God" (Humani Generis §36), and John Paul II spoke of "an ontological leap" with the human being (1996). Nostra Aetate §2 speaks of "a certain perception of that hidden power" found "from ancient times down to the present". The lens fits the record well in one respect. Care for the dead, symbols and communal sacred buildings appear early and persist, which is what a universal religious capacity would predict. It strains in another. An ontological leap is a theological claim, and the record shows gradual, scattered, patchy emergence over tens of thousands of years, with no datable moment of the kind the doctrine describes. Theologians who hold both usually say the leap is not the kind of thing a spade could find. That is coherent, but it means archaeology can neither support nor test it.
Orthodox theology
Schmemann's homo adorans, the human being as the creature who worships (bibliographic), would read Göbekli Tepe's pillars and Çatalhöyük's sacred houses as the expected signature of a worshipping animal. The revision at Göbekli Tepe, from temple-first to sacred buildings within settlements, arguably fits that reading better than the original. Worship looks integral to ordinary life from the start, not a separate institution that came first. That is an interpretation, and the excavators do not make it.
What we can say with confidence
- Deliberate burial by Homo sapiens is attested from about 120,000–90,000 years ago in the Levant and about 78,000 years ago in Africa. Most specialists accept some Neanderthal burials.
- Symbolic objects appear by about 100,000–75,000 years ago, and figurative art by at least 51,200 years ago.
- Large, carved communal buildings existed by about 9500 BC, before full farming.
- The Shanidar flower burial lacks good evidential support.
What remains open
- Whether any Palaeolithic burial reflects belief in an afterlife.
- Whether Homo naledi buried its dead.
- What Bruniquel's stalagmite rings were for.
- How Göbekli Tepe's buildings were used; the domestic finds await publication.
- What the first religions believed. Before writing, the record is silent on content.
Sources
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- Bouzouggar, A. et al. (2007). PNAS 104(24). PMC1891266
- Clare, L. (2020). e-Forschungsberichte des DAI 2020/2. DAI
- Dibble, H. et al. (2015). Journal of Archaeological Science 53. Repository
- Dietrich, O. et al. (2012). Antiquity 86:674–695; DAI blog
- Henshilwood, C. S. et al. (2018). Nature 562:115–118. CNRS
- Hodder, I. (ed.) (2010). Religion in the Emergence of Civilization. Cambridge UP. Listing
- Hodder, I. (ed.) (2014). Religion at Work in a Neolithic Society. Cambridge UP. Cambridge Core
- Hovers, E. et al. (2003). Current Anthropology 44(4). Journal
- Hunt, C. et al. (2023). Shanidar et ses fleurs? LJMU; press release
- Hürriyet Daily News (2025–26). New excavations at Göbeklitepe. Link
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- Karahan Tepe reporting. Archaeology magazine 2021
- Kenyon's plastered skulls. UT Austin
- Kind, C.-J. et al. (2014). Quartär 61. PDF
- Lewis-Williams, J. D. & Dowson, T. (1988). Current Anthropology 29(2); debate in Rock Art Research
- Martinón-Torres, M. et al. (2021). Nature 593:95–100. ANU
- Martinón-Torres, M. et al. (2024). Journal of Human Evolution 195. Griffith
- Berger, L. et al. (2025). eLife 89106, revised reviews. eLife
- Oktaviana, A. A. et al. (2024). Nature 631:814–818. Griffith news
- Peoples, H. C., Duda, P. & Marlowe, F. W. (2016). Human Nature 27(3). PMC4958132
- Pettitt, P. (2002). The Neanderthal dead. World Archaeology. PDF
- Pius XII (1950). Humani Generis. vatican.va
- Pomeroy, E. et al. (2020). Antiquity 94(373). LJMU
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- Rendu, W. et al. (2014). PNAS 111(1). CARTA
- Schmemann, A. For the Life of the World (bibliographic).
- Second Vatican Council (1965). Nostra Aetate. vatican.va
- Stringer, C. et al. (1989). Nature 338:756–758. Nature
- Vandermeersch, B. & Bar-Yosef, O. (2019). Paléo 30. OpenEdition
- White, R. et al. (2020). Journal of Human Evolution. Repository
The notes behind this post: 02_prehistory_archaeology.md.
Part 2 of How did religion develop?. Previous: Why are humans religious?. Next: Gods of the first states: temples, divine kings and human sacrifice.
Produced with AI assistance (Claude) from the cited notes in the religion-origins project.