Paleolithic

← Encyclopedia

The Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age, is the long opening stretch of human prehistory — the era of chipped stone tools that begins with the earliest toolmaking, more than two million years ago, and closes with the end of the last Ice Age and the turn to farming. Across most of that span the evidence is practical: hand-axes, hearths, the bones of hunted animals. Late in it, something else appears that has drawn the attention of anyone asking when religion begins.

Three kinds of find carry that question. The first is the painted caves of Ice Age Europe — Lascaux, Altamira, Chauvet and others — where, deep underground and far from any living space, people drew bison, horses, lions and the occasional human-animal hybrid. The second is deliberate burial: bodies laid out with care, sometimes dusted with red ochre, sometimes accompanied by beads, ornaments, or tools. The third is the small carved female figures, conventionally called “Venus” figurines, found across Eurasia.

What these objects meant cannot be recovered. There are no texts; the people who made them left no account of themselves, and the words “religion” and “the sacred” are later categories pressed onto a silence. Scholarship is careful here. The ochre and the grave goods are real and datable; whether they imply belief in an afterlife is inference, not record. The cave images may be hunting magic, totemic markers, initiation settings, the residue of trance, or art with no use the modern eye would recognize as religious — each reading has been argued, none is settled. The figurines have been called goddesses, fertility charms, self-portraits, and toys with equal confidence and equal uncertainty.

For later esoteric and comparative thought, the Paleolithic became something more than a chapter of archaeology: a supposed first dawn of spiritual life, a point from which the history of the sacred could be told as continuous descent. That framing is itself an interpretation, and a contested one — the gap between a pigment stain in a cave and a doctrine about the soul is exactly what the evidence will not close.

What can be said plainly is narrow and strange enough on its own. Long before writing, before cities, before any name we have for a god, human beings were carrying their dead into the ground with apparent intention, and crawling into the dark to make images by firelight, for motives now wholly lost. The gestures remain.

→ Related: Indus Valley Civilization · Mesopotamia