The First Believers:
The Evolution of Religion

March 5, 2007

To my surprise it is possible to know something about the first people who believed. The first question to ask is: what are the cognitive demands of belief in gods? The answer must be the presence of symbolic thinking. Steven Mithen in The Singing Neanderthals summarizes the necessary mental components:

...the Homo Sapiens mind is also based on multiple intelligences, but has one additional feature: cognitive fluidity. This term describes the capacity to integrate ways of thinking and stores of knowledge from separate intelligences so as to create types of thoughts that could never have existed within a domain-specific mind. For instance, a Neanderthal or pre-sapiens Homo in Africa could not have taken their knowledge of a lion (from natural history intelligence) and combined it with knowledge about human minds (from social intelligence) to create the idea of a lion-like being that had human-type thoughts... [264]

This same cognitive ability will be necessary if a person is to think about gods. A Neanderthal man (skull above) might have buried a family member.. and felt sadness at death.. but he could not have mentally constructed a version of an afterlife.. nor imagined gods. This symbolic thinking was the domain of Homo Sapiens.

The last dispersion of Homo Sapiens into the world from Africa took place about 50,000 years ago. Human beings everywhere go back to this dispersal. And what do we see immediately in the record as Homo Sapiens starts to spread? The evidence of complex symbolic thought:

...the indicators of modern, linguistically mediated behaviour appear suddenly and as a single package: visual symbols, bone tools, body decoration, ritualized burial, intensified hunting practices, long-distance exchange, and structures at camping sites. [260-1]

Since belief in a gods is a human universal, the presumption must be that such belief came along with the same package of human characteristics described above. These beliefs were now possible on account of symbolic thinking.. which Mithen speculates may have itself been the direct result of language processing, in which different mental domains could mix and become blended. If we are looking for the first believers, they must be these Homo Sapiens who could process the world in new ways on account of their linguistic ability.

I realize that I will never be a specialist in human evolution.. which is the domain of anthropologists and scientists—not textualists like myself. But recent work on human origins can be used to construct a theoretical framework through which later religious phenomena (and texts) can be viewed. What would this framework look like?

• human beings are a part of the natural world
• religion is a result (byproduct?) of cognitive development
• behind particular religious traditions will be a set of broader human concerns. The identification of patterns will be of particular importance.
• though religious traditions will try to convince us of their uniqueness, we should not believe them.
• ethics should be rooted in what it means to be human.
• texts should be examined not for objective teaching, but for what they have to tell us about the human drive to create meaning and to harmonize contradictory claims.

Which is all another way of saying that we should have this picture hung up in our offices. This is a small piece of stone, dating to about 70,000 years ago, carved with some sort of cross-hatching.. likely for a symbolic purpose. When we study religions that is what we are studying.. the human ability to manipulate symbols. And if you are in a religion department then it is best you enjoy such things. Richard Dawkins obviously doesn't.. so that is not a human universal!