Bones, Pigments, Art and Symbols:

Archaeological Evidence for the Origins of Religion

Anne Solomon

[Chapter 15 in ‘The Evolution of Religion, Religiosity and Theology: a Multilevel and Multidisciplinary
Approach’ (2019), edited by Jay R. Feierman and Lluis Oviedo.
Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies, pgs. 256-270.]

Abstract
Investigations into the origins of religion involve inferring ancient thought from diverse aspects of
the archaeological record. Attention has focused particularly on a prerequisite ability to use
symbols. Materials that are especially regarded as proxies for this cognitive capacity include burials
and other residues of ritualized behavior, as well as prehistoric art. Attention has moved beyond an
initial focus on European Paleolithic materials dating back to approximately the last c. 50,000 years
and our own species, Homo sapiens, to including older materials, evidence from Africa and Indonesia
and the cognitive modernity of other hominins, particularly Neanderthals. Although this research
field is founded on scientific retrieval and analyzing archaeological residues, exploring the origins
of religion depends heavily on interpretation, from a range of disciplinary perspectives, and
debates over the hypotheses generated are ongoing. Nevertheless, most researchers would concur
with the proposition that religious awareness was at least emergent, or perhaps established, by c.
100,000 years ago.

Introduction

Behavior guided by religious beliefs and imperatives has unquestionably played an enormous role
in shaping the material world and the residues of daily life – the subject of archaeology. The
origins and evolution of religious awareness are, inevitably, difficult to investigate because of the
antiquity of the materials and the nature of the evidence (not only because of issues of
preservation but also because archaeologically recovered evidence is only a tiny sample).

The general consensus among archaeologists and paleoanthropologists is that behaviors indicative
of a religious sense are principally (though not exclusively) related to the emergence of Homo
sapiens, anatomically modern humans, who later also attained cognitive modernity. The materials
from which the development of a religious sense can be inferred include intentional burial, burial
with grave goods (implying ritual acts) and art as an index of symbolic culture – in particular cave
paintings, though sculptures and other artifacts are also relevant. This overview considers some of
the evidence for the emergence of religious consciousness in the deep past, principally as
evidenced by prehistoric art but also other materials that are likely proxies for such awareness. (For
detailed discussions of early burials and art, see Lorblanchet and Bahn 2017; Pettit 2010).

Symbolic capacity

The key notion underpinning many efforts to understand the ancient mind concerns the capacity
to use symbols, as one of the prerequisites for language, religion and art. A minimal definition of a
symbol is that it is a mark, object or word that stands for something else. Symbolic capacity is
inferred from varied archaeological evidence. Until recently, it was generally believed that the
turning point occurred in the European Upper Paleolithic, c. 50,000 years ago (hereafter, “1,000
years ago” will be shortened to kya). Dubbed “the human revolution,” it highlights the emergence
of traits including language, religion, art, certain artifact types and technologies, demographic and
economic indicators and forward planning ability.Striking as the emergence of this suite of modern
human behaviors is, it has also been argued that in Africa the behavioral capacities and traits
involved had been emergent for at least 200 kya (e.g., McBrearty and Brooks 2000), associated with
humans who (on the basis of skeletal features) were anatomically modern but not yet fully
cognitively modern. The evidence from African and Middle Eastern materials suggests that
symbolic capacity emerged around 100 kya. This is a minimum date, since ritual behaviors that
leave no archaeological trace could have existed earlier.

Given the difficulties of inferring mental abilities from artifacts, debates continue. Indeed, until the
1970s, and even since, the possibility of any “archaeology of mind” was widely considered
speculative, overly interpretative and unscientific. In addition, perspectives on “symbolism,” which
has played a prominent role in anthropology generally, keep evolving. See Hoskins (2015) for an
overview.

The Evidence from Burials

The burial of the dead is regarded as a likely index of symbolic capacity and, at least, a nascent
religious sense, described by Lieberman (1991) as a concern for the deceased that transcends the
everyday. Mundane explanations are nevertheless possible – for example, burial prevents the stench
of decay and protects corpses from attracting scavenging animals; however, protecting corpses may
also indicate respect for the dignity of the deceased.

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Early evidence for disposing of the dead

Finds in the Atapuerca Mountains in Spain and in South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind fossil sites
have been claimed as the earliest evidence for disposing of the dead. In both instances, it has been
argued that the deceased were intentionally placed in caverns (rather than buried as such). The
former, dating to c. 430 kya, concerns 28 individuals of the archaic human Homo heidelbergensis
(Arsuaga et al. 1997); the latter relates to a possible new hominin species, Homo naledi (Berger et al.
2017). In the South African site, fragments of perhaps 15 individuals are dated to 236–335 kya.
This is primarily based on the absence of any other animal species (bar a single owl), which may
rule out carnivores as the bone accumulators. In both instances, whether the finds indicate a
deliberate disposal of the bodies and, if so, whether that is indicative of ritual, or even respect for
the dead, continues to be debated.

The firmest evidence for intentional burial comes from three Israeli sites: Skhul, Qafzeh and
Tabun, all dating to 100–130 kya (the Middle Paleolithic). The last one mentioned – a single
Neanderthal burial – is of interest because it feeds into long-standing debates about the behavioral
modernity and cognitive capacity of Neanderthals. Inland from the coastal cave of Tabun lies
Skhul, where ten modern-type individuals, but with archaic features, were buried. Further inland,
the cave of Qafzeh contained 15 individuals of modern human anatomical type (Ronen 2012) .
Other sites dating to c. 60 kya (the Middle Paleolithic) include La Chapelle-aux-Saints 1, France
(Dibble et al. 2014), which may be evidence of Neanderthals intentionally burying their dead.

Grave goods and ritual

The inhumation of bodies is itself significant, but the presence of grave goods interred with the
person is additionally notable. These are items deemed to be “exceptional either by their context,
size or their arrangement in the grave” (Vandermeersch 1976, 727, cited by Ronen 2012, 558). One
of the Skhul individuals and an adolescent at Qafzeh were buried with grave goods. A boar
mandible was found among the arm bones of the Skhul individual and deer antlers were placed on
the Qafzeh individual’s chest. It is deemed significant that the bones come from the head of the
animal and that the species involved are large mammals not typical of the food debris found in
contemporaneous living sites. It would seem, therefore, that they had some symbolic significance
and were not buried with the dead as food for the afterlife (Ronen 2012) – though the latter would
in itself imply a sense of a future, arguably also a modern cognitive trait.

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Other artifacts and features

Stones found in or near burials have been reported; some may have been placed on top of the
grave; others were, or may have been, intentionally interred grave goods, such as the stone artifact
placed in the hand of one of the Skhul individuals (Ronen 2012).

Other artifacts regarded as “symbolic” include shell ornaments and pigment pieces, made by both
modern humans and Neanderthals (d’Errico et al. 2005; Zilhão et al 2010). Shells pierced for
stringing and interpreted as personal ornaments are especially regarded as bearing “symbolic”
meaning (including as status indicators). This view has, however, been contested by linguists and
philosophers, on various grounds (e.g., Sterelny 2011) See Obadia and Nowell (2014, 967–969) for
an overview of the “terminological, conceptual and interpretative” problems of these arguments.

Pigments are associated with the earliest burials, with 85 ochre pieces found at Qafzeh and some at
Skhul (though none were directly related to the burials themselves). Not only are they regarded as
probable evidence for “symbolic thought” but mineral pigments are also clearly relevant to the
emergence of art and its relation to early religion.

From Pigments to “Art” and Religion

The use of pigments, particularly red ochre (iron oxide), is considered a key marker of symbolic, or
symbolically mediated, thought (e.g., Knight et al. 2005; Henshilwood et al. 2009). Such allegedly
symbolic objects are seen as “functionally equivalent to language” (d’Errico et al. 2003) and
indicative of cognitive development. Additionally, “The conceptual ability to source, combine, and
store substances that enhance technology or social practices represents a benchmark in the
evolution of complex human cognition” (Henshilwood et al 2011, 219). Evidence from African
sites (in Zambia and Kenya) suggests that this may date back to 300 kya (e.g., Barham 2002).

Inevitably, that evidence is not straightforward, and debates have centered on whether pigments in
fact served mundane functions: curing hides, as an abrasive to aid drilling or as a component of the
mastic used in hafting stone tools to handles. As Wadley (2005, 3) suggests, “the symbolic nature
of ochre needs to be demonstrated, not assumed, in the deep past.” Finds from Blombos, a South
African coastal site, have been especially important. Here, over 8,000 pieces of ochre from Middle
Stone Age layers date to > 70 kya. Key finds include pierced Nassarius kraussianus shells (some with
ochre traces), apparently used as beads. Ochre chunks with incised marks have been hailed as the
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world’s oldest art, while a 73 kya small stone flake, marked with lines apparently made with an
ochre “crayon,” has been publicized as the world’s oldest “drawing.” Some have argued that these
cannot be regarded as having a utilitarian function, so they indicate symbolic capacity
(Henshilwood et al. 2009, 2011, 2018).

The significance of these finds is not uncontroversial, not least because mark-making and a sense
of pattern do not necessarily imply symbolism. What the “abstract” marks on the ochre pieces
symbolize – if anything – remains mysterious, and it seems overly ambitious to claim that the
marks on the Blombos pieces are “designs” that “are almost certainly the final outcome of the
engravers” intention” (d’Errico et al. 2003, 55). This cannot be deduced from the objects
themselves or their context. Nor does selecting a color imply color symbolism; as Luuk (2013, 260)
suggests, there is a ‘possibility that pigment was used because definitive colors were preferred for
esthetic or cognitive (salience) reasons. Even nonhuman species differentiate between esthetic and
non-esthetic stimuli and utilize definitive colors as behavioural cues . . . and so do children in their
first year. . . . While coloring is probably uniquely human, there is nothing inherently symbolic
about it’.

Even if some claims for early art are overstated, studies certainly suggest that symbolic capacity
and elements of cognitive and behavioral modernity were emergent or in place by 100 kya,
contradicting the view that cognitive and neural modernity resulted from a genetic mutation in
European populations only 50 kya (e.g., Klein and Edgar 2002).

The Evidence of “Art”

The Blombos finds aside, other candidates for the world’s oldest art include cupules (hammered
depressions in horizontal or vertical rock faces), some of which may date back to the Middle
Paleolithic, or even Lower Paleolithic, and stones naturally resembling human figures (Berekhat
Ram, Israel; the “Venus of Tan-Tan,” Morocco) that may have been further modified (see
Lorblanchet and Bahn 2017, 161–64). The oldest known European “art” comes from Spanish sites,
notably the Cave of Maltravieso (Hoffmann et al. 2018); the dating of crusts overlying pigments
indicates a minimum date of 64 kya, meaning that it is attributable to Neanderthals (since current
evidence suggests that modern humans only populated Europe twenty thousand years later).

The earliest materials reveal little about early religion as such; it is figurative art that permits more
extensive hypothesizing about its contents and forms. Unsurprisingly, the evidence is complex and

5
ambiguous. At Maltravieso, the 64 kya date relates to a hand stencil where paint was blown or spat
over a hand placed on the rockface, leaving a negative outline – a recognizable subject, though
arguably not figurative art proper. In Sulawesi, Indonesia, hand stencils dating to c. 40 kya have also
been found and, in Indonesian Borneo, a painting of an animal (species indeterminate), also c. 40
kya, is the oldest known “representational” image (Aubert et al. 2018). In Africa, the oldest known
painted pieces are seven plaques from a Namibian cave, dated to 30 kya (Vogelsang et al. 2010).

In terms of three-dimensional art, the oldest known European works similarly date to this period,
belonging to the Aurignacian (or proto-Aurignacian) culture of the Upper Paleolithic. Perhaps the
oldest, again at c. 40 kya, is the Hohlenstein-Stadel sculpture, an ivory figure with a lion’s head and
human-like body (Kind et al 2014). Also notable, dating to 35–40 kya, is the Venus of Hohle Fels
(Figure 1a), a tiny (6 cm tall) ivory female figure, with the visual emphasis on the figure’s enormous
breasts and genitalia (Conard 2009). In terms of cognitive modernity, less than a meter away,
excavators found the earliest known musical instrument: a flute made from vulture bone.
Elsewhere, a woolly rhinoceros vertebra from Tolbaga, Siberia, carved with a bear’s head, is dated
to c. 35 kya (Abramova 1995). From here on, cave art (both petroglyphs and paintings) is
abundant, with numerous identifiable subjects, if not recoverable “meanings”.

A B
Figure 15. A: The Venus of Hohle Fels. Photo by Hilde Jensen by permission of Nicholas Conard
and the University of Tubingen. B: a therianthropic figure, with animal head and hooves, created
by San hunter-gatherer artists; Game Pass, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Photo by the author.
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Upper Paleolithic Art and Early Religion

Thinking about early religion has long been intertwined with the study of European Ice Age art. In
the 19th century, scholars believed that “primitive humankind” had little or no sense of either art o
religion (Bahn 1998; Palacio-Perez 2013). As Palacio-Perez (2013) recounts, this view changed in
the late 19th century: the cultural evolutionist Tylor refocused attention on “animism” as primitive
religion from the 1860s, and at about the same time, McLennan introduced ideas of “totemism” as
the original animism. Later, Frazer’s notion of sympathetic magic became influential. Over time,
these views coalesced into ideas about ancient art as expressing ancient religious thought (Palacio-
Perez 2010), with cave art (as opposed to art mobilier, or portable art) also included in the
equation.

The rise of anthropology and ethnographies from living hunter-gatherers contributed to the shift.
Via Reinach’s work, especially his 1903 paper entitled “L’art el la magie”, both parietal art (on cave
walls or large stone surfaces) and portable art came to be regarded as “the primary testimony of
the oldest religion” of humankind (Palazio-Perez 2010, 858). Reinach effectively displaced notions
of ancient arts as merely decorative or playful, ushering in “symbolic” interpretations. But what
might the art reveal about the contents of ancient religion?

Iconography and Interpretation: Early Speculations

The predominance of animals in the European sites, and a paucity of human figures, encouraged
interpretations of this body of art as linked to sympathetic hunting magic and/or totemism (e.g.,
Jones 1967). In the former reading, painting animals magically facilitated success in the hunt
and/or increase in the numbers of animals to prey on. Totemism is a phenomenon whereby
groups or subgroups claim a special association with an animal or plant, which is their emblem.
Today the complexity of totemism and its variability is well documented. In the 19th century,
Frazer borrowed from Spencer and Gillen’s (1899) work on indigenous hunter-gatherers in
Australia; however, the result was an erroneous and oversimplified view of totemism in this
indigenous society that failed to appreciate its relation to complex kinship systems and reduced it
to “a simple set of magic practices aimed at ensuring the fecundity of the totem species and
therefore of the ‘clan’ that identified itself with it” (Palacio-Perez 2010, 3).

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One category of European Paleolithic art mobilier attracted special attention: carvings of female
figures, often called “Venus figurines.” Over 140 examples are known, dating from the Aurignacian
(e.g., the Venus of Hohle Fels, see earlier) through the Gravettian and into the Magdalenian (c. 17–
12 kya). The most famous (the Hohle Fels, Willendorf and Lespugue examples) are those with
greatly exaggerated breasts and body fat; the head and feet often are reduced or absent. However,
the category includes diverse renderings, in various materials. (In view of the importance of ochre
in the early record, it is surely significant that some have ochre traces; the materials chosen may
also have carried symbolic significance.) They have variously been interpreted as talismans (objects
thought to have magical or protective powers) relating to motherhood/childbirth or initiation, as
“fertility symbols” or as “mother goddesses,” belonging to a pre-patriarchal religion. Other
Paleolithic art contributing to the notion of early religion as celebrating fertility includes the
supposed depiction of vulvas in the parietal engravings; this was a particular interest of a certain
priest and prehistorian, the abbé Henri Breuil, but as Bahn (1986, 1998) notes, unless associated
with female figures, these triangle-like marks with a median line are ambiguous at best.

Whatever the shortcomings of early iconographical readings, the notion of Paleolithic art as linked
to religion persists: “In this initial discourse were born ideas such as ‘Paleolithic sanctuary,’
initiation art,’ ‘totemic images’ and ‘shamanic symbols’ that have conditioned, in modified forms,
the interpretation of Paleolithic art until the present time” (Palacio-Perez 2010, 11).

New Directions

The 20th century saw various attempts to create a more theoretically and scientifically sound basis
for understanding both religion and early art. Among the most innovative was work by Leroi-
Gourhan and Laming-Emperaire, drawing on Levi-Straussian structuralism. Both eschewed the
traditional analysis of content alone, focusing instead on the syntax and placement of images (e.g.,
at the entrances to or in the depths of caves). Both concluded that images were placed according
to a male/female binary distinction (though they came to opposite conclusions about which animal
motifs were thus gendered). The evidence has been questioned, and the value of the approach has
diminished, but it remains notable for introducing ideas about art and paleo-religion as expressing
deep mental structures.

In the 1980s, social sciences research (e.g., Guthrie 1980) laid the foundations for the cognitive
study of religion (CSR). According to Näreaho, ‘Some see it as an heir of structural anthropology,

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. . . but the core feature of the cognitive approach to religion is the strong emphasis it lays on the
empirical research that is being performed in cognitive and evolutionary psychology and cognitive
science in general. . . . it is not uncommon to see the cognitive scientists of religion call their
approach “the scientific study of religion’ ( Näreaho 2008, 83).

Similarly, one of the most influential approaches to ancient art and religion focuses on shamanism.
Also emerging in the 1980s, with an emphasis on adding scientific rigor to anthropological
interpretation (e.g., Lewis-Williams 1983), it claimed to provide a neuropsychological bridge to the
Paleolithic (e.g., Lewis-Williams and Dowson 1988; Lewis-Williams 2006).

Shamanism and Art

“Shamanism,” broadly defined, is characterized by the use of altered states of consciousness for
religious revelation, and unlike in organized religion, power and wisdom is not embodied in a
priestly figure, within a hierarchical structure governed by established dogma and formalized rules
and practices. In hunter-gatherer societies, religious prescriptions and power invested in religious
functionaries are typically absent. Recent interest in shamanism owes much to the armchair
anthropology of Eliade (1964), who was not primarily concerned with religion’s origins and who
cautioned against overgeneralizing the term to apply to all “spiritual healers.” However, particularly
through the work of Lewis-Williams, many now see shamanism as an urreligion (i.e., the earliest or
original religion) synonymous with – though not restricted to – hunter-gatherer religions, and
hence the earliest art, which predates agriculture. Many writers (see Francfort and Hamayon 2001)
have criticized such anti-historical overgeneralizations, and extension of the term “shaman” to
describe religious practitioners other than those of the Siberian Tungus people, from whom the
term originates.

The Lewis-Williamsian hypothesis, locating the origins of art in shamanic visions, grew from his
initial efforts to explain San rock art in South Africa (Lewis-Williams 1980) and drew heavily on
19th-century and 20th-century ethnographies of southern African hunter-gatherers (for further
detail, and issues of terminology and naming of peoples, see Hitchcock, this volume). The healing
“trance dance” of the Ju’/hoansi (Namibia and Botswana) was described by earlier anthropologists
(Marshall 1969) and in detail by Katz (1982). Those who mastered trance believed that they
encountered supernatural beings that caused disease and misfortune; in trance, they were able to

9
repel or overcome them. San rock art, Lewis-Williams proposed, depicted such vision experiences
and functioned to reveal shamanic wisdom to the larger group.

The initial hypothesis became a “neuropsychological” model for interpreting rock arts of other
times (Ice Age and Neolithic rock arts) and places (north and south America), addressing the
origins of making images (Lewis-Williams and Dowson 1988) and even (tentatively) the 70 kya
Blombos engraved ochres (Lewis-Williams and Pearce 2004). A supposed strength of the model
was that it offered an account of “geometric” or “abstract” marks and of image forms, as well as
their contents. Visual forms, supposedly generated by the brains of all modern humans in ritually
induced or psychoactive drug-induced altered states, were allegedly culturally “construed” in
images. Shamanic consciousness was itself posited as a driving force in the evolution of cognitive
modernity.

The shamanistic hypothesis has been popular and controversial in equal measure. The debates
arising during its four decades defy summarization. Some matters pertinent to the character of
early religion can be considered here, via one key category of images, “therianthropes”: figures
with both human and animal features.

Therianthropic Figures

Therianthropes (Figure 1b) are suggestive evidence for belief in the existence of supernatural
beings, but their imaging still requires further explanation. Shamanists claim that they relate to a
third stage of trance, in which “people feel themselves to be blended with their imagery” and
“often. . . feel themselves to be blended with animals, partially or completely” (Lewis-Williams and
Clottes 1998, 19). Images function to communicate in ways that words supposedly cannot.

This reading is open to multiple challenges. From a neuropsychology perspective, it seems that
hallucinatory imagery of this kind is restricted to certain kinds of altered states of consciousness
and is not characteristic of ritual trance (Helvenston and Bahn 2002). It also fails to accommodate
the inherent ambiguity of images. Plainly, other interpretations of therianthropic figures are
possible; although it seems intuitively unlikely, some animal-headed figures may even be “literal”
representations of people in animal masks. In terms of art theory, the notion of painting as the
mere copying of vision contents is contrary to the notion of art (or craft) as inventive use of the
(graphic) medium itself; the process of making always involves the thoughtful, considered
replication of the subject (Davis 1996).

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Even if it is accepted that therianthropic figures are supernatural beings of some kind, their
features may have had different connotations: Was a figure with leonine features a brave hero, a
dangerous spirit or something else entirely? The shamanistic hypothesis, with its homogenizing of
hunter-gatherer religions, occludes the possibility that ancient religion was a more diverse and
contingent phenomenon, arising from the specifics of experience, neither determined nor shaped
by neurophysiological universals.

Similarly, even if the concept of the first ever animal-human figure came to its maker in trance,
once in the domain of awareness, no altered state is required; the source of later therianthropic
images might equally be preexisting paintings of therianthropes, with which the artists were
familiar, or the presence of such beings in myths and oral lore (shamanists argue that certain myth
motifs are also, wholly or partly, derived from trance (e.g., Lewis-Williams 2010)). It may also be
that the contents of trance experience are themselves shaped by preexisting beliefs (e.g., Solomon
1997). The general ahistoricity of the model – here, the failure to accommodate both visual and
religious traditions and their independent evolution – has been much criticized. It therefore seems
that, as with many grand theories, the shamanistic model’s claimed explanatory potential has
ultimately proven illusory in its failure to accommodate complexity.

Sex and/or Gender and Religion

The second persistent theme in interpreting early religion via art is that of sex and/or gender.
Some early religions celebrated fertility, embodied in female figures. More recently, various claims
for mother goddess worship and early matriarchal religion have been made (e.g., Gimbutas 1974).
Although, as always, the evidence is ambiguous, such work has at least directed attention to male
bias in interpretation. Such a rethinking of the evidence has dovetailed with a different approach to
understanding early religion, away from seeing it as a cognitive and spiritual phenomenon and
toward understanding it in terms of power relations within supposedly egalitarian hunter-gatherer
societies (for an elaborate Marxist-cum-Darwinian account, see Knight 1991).

Problems in Ethnographic Analogy

Ethnographies have long been key to thinking about early religion, from initial speculations about
Ice Age art as informed by totemism through to recent shamanistic readings. That ethnographies

11
of recent peoples can provide food for thought about religiosity, and its relation to art, is not in
doubt. The implication that peoples of the last few centuries somehow retain elements of early
religion is nevertheless problematic, carrying with it (although not necessarily intentionally) the idea
that recent groups are somehow living fossils or Stone Age survivals. This is particularly evident in
shamanistic accounts, where 19th-century and 20th-century testimonies are used as analogies for
much older, and even early human, religious thought and practice.

Other problems are similar to those encountered in interpreting the art. The /Xam testimonies
that are invoked in support of a shamanist reading of San rock art are themselves open to more
than one interpretation. For example, I contend that the beings described in San oral accounts are
not shamans, as Lewis-Williams claims, but instead deceased kin to whom the living would appeal
for rain and help in hunting. I also contend that, though the art does not “illustrate” myth, San
stories of part human, part animal ancestors indirectly inform San images of therianthropes
(Solomon 1997, 2011, 2013). Indeed, ethnographies also alert us to the possibility of more
diversity in early religion than grand theories can accommodate. Known hunter-gatherers are not as
uniform as has sometimes been assumed – in multiple domains of life, including religion (cf.
Finlayson and Warren 2017).

Conclusions

Leroi-Gourhan (1986,9) wrote three decades ago that “The establishment of the religious character
of paleolithic art and the contribution of even incomplete proof constitute a glorious record for
the prehistorical scholarship of preceding generations” but conceded that there was a long way to
go. This remains true. Prehistoric art provides a glimpse of ancient thought, but our understanding
is overwhelmingly hypothetical, and this will surely always be so. Research into the origins and
development of religion and art alike consists of modeling new possibilities as much as
establishing new facts.

Such modeling is nevertheless productive, and necessary, but it is seldom conclusive. The
shamanistic hypothesis is a case in point: hailed by many as a leap forward, only to wane as its
deficiencies have become increasingly apparent. Initially, it appeared to be not only a bridge to the
Paleolithic mind but also a way to bridge art and science, adding scientific rigor to interpretation
(Lewis-Williams 1983). In general, the application of scientific methods has certainly enhanced our
knowledge of ancient art and religion, most obviously in the application of new analytical
techniques and dating methods, which provide a chronological framework for interpretation.
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However, adding science is clearly not a solution to ever-present issues of interpretation. Also, how
much CSR, for example – which draws heavily on the social rather than the hard sciences – has
really added to our understanding of religion is unclear, despite contributing interesting and
creative mental modular explanations. Evolutionary approaches sometimes seem to worship what
Cherry (1985) has called the idol of origins, risking reducing complex phenomena to their
supposed origins and conflating antecedents and beginnings with beginnings and causes.

It has been argued that CSR also sometimes risks “monochromatic theorizing about polychromatic
phenomena” (Saler 2010, 337). In the quest to understand the prehistory of religion, this perhaps
applies doubly. Art, like religion, may also be seen as a highly complex, polychromatic
phenomenon, and some discussions of it would be much enhanced by engaging with more
sophisticated approaches to visuality. One of the more controversial issues within CSR concerns
whether religion is an evolutionary cognitive by-product. A parallel problem is the way art is treated
as an epiphenomenon of ritual (in the shamanistic hypothesis, merely as a medium for
communicating the contents of religious experience). The reverse process – the ways images may
influence religious consciousness – receives little attention. Similarly, the ways art and other
elements of culture may shape cognition are often neglected (Jensen 2009).

In other ways too, the relationship of early art and religion is not clear-cut. Excavations at
Diepkloof Rock Shelter, South Africa, uncovered 270 fragments of ostrich eggshell engraved with
linear marks, dating to c. 60 kya (Texier et al. 2010). They are most likely the remnants of ostrich
eggshell water containers, functional everyday items that are not – or at least not obviously –
implicated in religious thought or practice. The blurred boundaries between symbolism, art and
religion are among various issues ripe for revisitation.

Archaeology and ancient arts provide clues to the time frame of the emergence of religious
consciousness and something of the timeless concerns with the larger themes of life and death,
and survival and prosperity, which preoccupy all humans. Although clinching evidence is absent, it
seems more than probable that red pigments, at least sometimes, “stood for” blood, a multivalent
symbol of both life and death, which – along with sex and/or gender and accompanying power
relations – are apparently perennial existential problems for us and probably other human species.
Although some pessimism about uncovering truths about the origins and evolution of religion is
appropriate, new finds, new ideas and further interdisciplinary (that is, more than multidisciplinary)
engagements will surely continue to provide scholars and general readers with intriguing food for
thought.

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