This Cave Contains the Oldest Story Ever Recorded

[bitterross]

4. Why must we interpret it as "religion?"

We so often make the fallacy of interpreting other cultures from other times through the lens of our current culture. We even do this with peoples who are living in this age but are different from us. How the heck can you assume people who lived 40,000+ years ago were religious just because we have religions in our current societies?

They painted pictures of animals on the walls. Maybe the pictures are just pictures. Maybe the pictures of the people with possible animal masks are just hunters trying to disguise themselves like the animals they're hunting so they can get closer for the kill.

Maybe they're just making paintings of everyday life. We are so certain these early humans were far less intelligent than us and then we go and assume they must have had some sort of mythology and spiritual practices. A higher level of thinking. There is absolutely no evidence for this. Those paintings, in and of themselves, are not evidence. We are simply interpreting their paintings and their need to paint them through our own biases. That's dumb.