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The bulk of the human religious experience pre-dates written history, which is roughly 7,000 years old. [1] A lack of written records results in most of the knowledge of pre-historic religion being derived from archaeological records and other indirect sources, and from suppositions. Much pre-historic religion is subject to continued debate.
Surviving early copies of religious texts include: The Upanishads, some of which date to the mid-first millennium BCE. The Dead Sea Scrolls, representing fragmentary texts of the Hebrew Tanakh. [15] Complete Hebrew texts, also of the Tanakh, but translated into the Greek language (Septuagint 300–200 BCE), were in wide use by the early 1st ...
either that religion evolved due to natural selection and has selective advantage; or that religion is an evolutionary byproduct of other mental adaptations. Stephen Jay Gould, for example, saw religion as an exaptation or a spandrel, in other words: religion evolved as byproduct of psychological mechanisms that evolved for other reasons.
A popular myth about prehistoric religion is bear worship. Early scholars of prehistory, finding skeletons of the extinct cave bear around Paleolithic habitats, drew the conclusion humans of the era worshipped or otherwise venerated the bears. The concept was pioneered by excavations in the late 1910s in Switzerland, where apparent deposits of ...
The origins of another distinctive religious group, the Latter Day Saint movement—also widely known as Latter Day Saints or Mormons—arose in the early 19th century. It appeared in an intensely religious area of western New York called the burned-over district , because it had been "scorched" by so many revivals.
Early Hittite religion bore traits descended from Proto-Indo-European religion, but the later Hittite religions became more and more assimilated to Mesopotamian religion. Persian Zoroastrianism is a reformed form of the hypothesized ancient Iranian religion , which shares a common Proto-Aryan root with the Indian Vedic religion .
Early Christianity, otherwise called the Early Church or Paleo-Christianity, describes the historical era of the Christian religion up to the First Council of Nicaea in 325. Christianity spread from the Levant , across the Roman Empire , and beyond.
Paleolithic religions are a set of spiritual beliefs and practices that are theorized to have appeared during the Paleolithic time period. Paleoanthropologists Andre Leroi-Gourhan and Annette Michelson believe unmistakably religious behavior emerged by the Upper Paleolithic, before 30,000 years ago at the latest, [1] but behavioral patterns such as burial rites [2] that one might characterize ...