What needs to change is 21st century people believing in cave man mythology
Cave men didn't believe in God. It was God that brought them out of the caves.
false !
Prehistoric religion is a general term for the
religious beliefs and practices of
prehistoric peoples. More specifically it encompasses
Paleolithic religion,
Mesolithic religion,
Neolithic religion and
Bronze Age religion.
Contents
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Paleolithic[edit]
Main article:
Paleolithic religion
Intentional
burial, particularly with
grave goods, may be one of the earliest detectable forms of religious practice (the onset of burial itself being a canonical indicator of
behavioral modernity) since, as
Philip Lieberman suggests, it may signify a "concern for the dead that transcends daily life".
[1]

Picture of a half-animal half-human being in a Paleolithic
cave painting in
Dordogne,
France which archeologists believe may provide evidence for early shamanic practices
A number of archeologists propose that Middle Paleolithic societies such as
Neanderthal societies may also have practiced early forms of
totemism or of
animal worship. Emil Bächler in particular suggests (based on archeological evidence from Middle Paleolithic caves) that a widespread
Middle Paleolithic Neanderthal bear-cult existed (
Wunn, 2000, p. 434-435). A claim that evidence was found for
Middle Paleolithic animal worship
c 70,000 BCE (originating from the
Tsodilo Hills in the African Kalahari desert) has been denied by the original investigators of the site.
[2][3] Animal cults in the following Upper Paleolithic period, such as the bear cult, may have had their origins in these hypothetical Middle Paleolithic animal cults.
[4]
Animal worship during the Upper Paleolithic intertwined with hunting rites.
[4] For instance, archeological evidence from
Paleolithic art and from bear remains reveals that the bear cult apparently had a type of sacrificial bear ceremonialism in which a bear was shot with
arrows, then finished off with a shot in the lungs and ritualistically buried near a clay bear-statue covered by a bear fur, with the skull and the body of the bear buried separately.
[4]
Neolithic[edit]
There are no extant textual sources from the
Neolithic era, the most recent available dating from the
Bronze Age, and therefore all statements about any
belief systems Neolithic societies may have possessed are glimpsed from archaeology.
Jacques Cauvin suggested that the
Neolithic Revolution was influenced by an important theme he termed the "
Revolution of the Symbols", suggesting the birth of "religion" in the Neolithic. He argued that Neolithic humans were influenced by a change in thinking as much as changes in the environment and noted a series of stages in this process.
[5] His work suggested important concepts in the evolution of human thinking, by examining figurines and early art depicting first women as goddesses and bulls as gods, he suggested several important ideas about the evolution of perception and duality.
[6]
The structures known as
Circular Enclosures built in Central Europe during the 5th millennium BCE have been interpreted as serving a cultic function. In the case of the
Goseck circle, remains of
human sacrifice were found. Many of these structures had openings aligned with sunset and/or sunrise at the
solstices, suggesting that they served as a means of maintaining a
lunisolar calendar. The construction of
Megalithic monuments in Europe also began to in the 5th millennium, and continued throughout the Neolithic and in some areas well into the early Bronze Age.
Marija Gimbutas, pioneer of
feminist archaeology, put forward a notion of a "woman-centered" society surrounding "goddess worship" in
Neolithic Europe. The Neolithic "matristic" cultures would have been replaced by
patriarchy only with the arrival of the
Bronze Age. Gimbutas' views do not have widespread support today.
[7]
Prehistoric religion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia