Were there religions 4,001,200 years ago?

shiizzz man thats a wild question but theres always going to be religion as long as people have independent thoughts. because if you have thoughts you have imagination then if you have that you have fear, hope, and mystery so that pretty much links to more possible ways of this BS theory im making up now

Even the earliest human burials we have found have signs of religion. No burials have been found as old as 4 million years ago though.

It is hard to know if religion has been part of humanity from the beginning or if not when religion began. Very good question though.

Out of curiosity, why that specific date? And no, a religion is a set of beliefs and practices held by a group of people, and there were no people around back then.

Now whether or not there was a God around at that time depends on what you believe…

I don’t believe that anything alive at that time was concerned with their origin.

The pre-human fossils which have been found from the 4 million year mark are very small and ape-like. They are likely to have had ape-like rather than human-like behaviour. Filletof spam is right (of course) that burying your dead is in itself a sign of some sort of respect for the human body and (probably) the human spirit. It may well have been related to religious belief. I’ve found one archaeologist stating that a pre-Neanderthal burial has been found, dating from around 300,000 years ago. Both H. Sapiens (us) and H. Neanderthalis (Neandertal man) certainly buried their dead.

The earliest modern human activity which looks ‘religious’ is rock art. In Europe this began around 24,000 years ago. I think some Australian rock art has been claimed to be older. No-one can tell what was meant by the paintings, but they contain mysterious symbols, took a lot of work to produce, and were often placed in the same locations over thousands of years - maybe evidence of ritual.

I’ve seen some of those cave paintings and I love this link to our distant ancestors!

Silverwings, you give lots of great advice and ask great questions, but we disagree here. I know that you are being faithful to what you believe God wants to believe, and I am doing the same. Our different Christian upbringings have encouraged you to accept one thing and me to accept another. One thing I’m glad for is that God gives us the grace to accept each other, despite our differences..!

My husband is a professional scientist (and a committed Christian) and I was trained in archaeology (hence my interest in this question). When I see the evidence of God’s slow, meticulous and ingenious work over millions of years, I praise Him! I love the opportunity to find out more about what He has been doing, and the incredible tools (like evolution) that He has created to make this wonderful universe. I praise Him for His interest in developing humankind over the millenia, to a point where we can know Him as you and I do, through Jesus.

Some non-Christians here have praised me for being able to hold my faith and my science apart. To be honest I consider than a mis-understanding of what I’m saying. I am totally a Christian, totally a follower of Jesus as my Saviour and Lord. That is not incompatable with my intelligence and education, not something I have to separate from it. God gave me both my education and my faith. I couldn’t put my education ABOVE my faith, but I can use it to help me to praise God and serve Him. The notion that science and faith must be held separate isn’t one that my husband and I are familiar with. They address different questions - the Bible speaks of the WHO and the WHY and science is both helpful and interesting in helping us to understand the HOW. They are not in conflict and should not be treated as if they are.

I’m sure that sounds like total anethema to you. I’m sorry to hurt your feelings. But to me, the alternative is to say that God is a liar, for putting all the evidence of His ancient work (fossils, geology etc) into the earth when in fact He really made it in 6 days, 6000 years ago (I interpret this as true in spirit and allegorical in details). I’m sure you agree that Satan can’t make things, so he’s not the one who put them there. The Satanic work is in causing Christians to waste valuable time arguing over stuff like this when there’s a whole world of pain and trouble out there which we can comfortably ignore while we debate something that is past history. So I’ll stop now…

With love and prayers,

Floss

Freaky! My original answer was banned because I used the full Latin name of H. Sapiens and H. Neanderthalis (you guys work it out). I can see why, but I wonder if there’s any way around this problem with homophones (interesting word in itself, in this case).

Im sorry but who on earth would ban the word!