Abstract
Religion is the creation of spiritual beliefs, ceremonies that ties a culture together. Spiritual beliefs are designed to explain phenomena that cannot at the time be explained in any rational way. It is a behavioral mechanism to make one feel good about any event they find themselves in.
The middle paleolithic epoch stretches back to around 300,000 to 50,000 thousand BC. It is during this era we have the earliest evidence of religious practices mainly in the way they buried their dead and the material objects found buried with the deceased.
The distribution of grave goods is an indicator of the social stratification of a society. In the early Neolithic era graves tend to show an equal distribution of material goods buried with the dead indicating more or less a classless society. Homo-sapiens were concentrated into family units of hunter gathers and did not gather into cities for thousands of years till the late stone age.
The earliest undisputed grave sites come from two sites dating back to around 100 thousand years ago. Skeletal remains were found stained with red ochre, stone tools and at one site the mandible of a wild boar. The average age of these skeletons has been dated to about 30 years old.
The staining of the body with red ochre can be found in grave sites in Africa. What symbolism they may pose remains only in speculation it might have been for spiritual reasons.
The first site is the Skhul cave located on slopes of Mt. Carmel in the northern part of Israel.
The second site is the Qafzeh cave located in a rock shelter near modern day Nazareth in Lower Galilee.
These are considered the first automatically correct hominids with no kinship to Neanderthals.
The simple outlay of grave goods would suggest either the wealth of the person that died or that it was to help the deceased in the afterlife to survive the harshness of life or both.
In the Chalcolithic and Bronze age this is where we start to see rich grave goods concentrated in chieftain graves indicating a shift in social stratification from the commoner to the elite.
We also start seeing more and more emphases placed on deities and their role in society. They were portrayed and believed to be living amongst the people. The first priests 3500 BC fostered the belief that god put man here so we could serve him and his family clan.
The practice of placing grave goods with the dead body has an uninterrupted history beginning in the Middle Paleolithic era and has been upheld comparatively in recent times, in many parts of the world ceasing only with Christianization. When it was mandated in the early 3rd century that all wealth went to the church.
So, the simple burial by what would seem coming from an unsophisticated being’s reflects a cognitive thought on how to deal with death a ceremony perhaps religious in nature. They looked at creation surrounding them and through trial and error had to learn how to survive. In that regards they were sophisticated people for their time.
The concept of the Son inheriting the Fathers nation came from this time just a thought. A nation is a family unit in its singularity.