Early humans build symbolic thought into the fabric of life

Story: 70,000 B.C.E. ???  |  Last updated: January 1, 0001

Somewhere around 70,000 B.C.E., a human being paused at the edge of what was strictly necessary and made something that didn’t need to exist. A geometric pattern pressed into red ochre. A shell with a hole drilled through it. A handful of pigment placed in a grave. These acts were small, and they changed everything.

What the evidence shows

• Early human spirituality: The oldest known symbolic objects are geometric ochre engravings at Blombos Cave in South Africa, dated to approximately 75,000 B.C.E. — predating Europe’s famous cave paintings by roughly 35,000 years and placing the roots of symbolic thought firmly in Africa.
• Ritual burial: Intentional burials with grave goods — ochre pigment, shell ornaments, animal bones — appear across Africa, the Middle East, and Europe from at least 100,000 B.C.E. onward, suggesting that humans were grappling with questions about death and meaning long before written language existed.
• Symbolic art: The Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel, carved from mammoth ivory approximately 40,000 years ago in what is now Germany, depicts a human figure with a lion’s head — an image that cannot exist in the physical world, only in imagination. It is among the oldest known figurative art on Earth.

The archaeology of the inner life

The material record of early human spirituality spans six continents and hundreds of thousands of years. It includes burial sites, carved figurines, painted caves, and ceremonial structures — created by people with no shared language, no contact with one another, and no common cultural ancestry. Yet the impulse was the same everywhere.

Scholars who study the Middle Stone Age in Africa have documented a pattern of behaviors — ochre processing, engraved geometry, perforated shells — that points toward minds capable of symbolic thought. Research published in Nature confirmed that Blombos Cave’s engraved ochre pieces were deliberate and systematic, not accidental marks. That evidence shifted the known timeline of human symbolic behavior by tens of thousands of years and placed Africa — already understood as the cradle of Homo sapiens — at the origin of humanity’s inner life as well.

The Venus figurines, found across a vast arc from Siberia to western France and dated between roughly 35,000 and 25,000 years ago, suggest that people who had never met shared frameworks for representing the human body — and perhaps for understanding forces larger than any individual. Whether these figures carried spiritual, social, or practical meaning, or some combination, remains debated. That they carried meaning at all is not.

Göbekli Tepe in what is now southeastern Turkey adds a striking dimension. Built around 9,500 B.C.E., it is the world’s oldest known monumental ceremonial structure — and it predates permanent agricultural settlements. For decades, scholars assumed that civilization produced religion. Göbekli Tepe suggests the relationship may have run the other way: that the drive to gather, mark sacred space, and make meaning may have helped produce civilization.

A human universal

No human culture ever documented — across all eras and all geographies — has been found without some form of spiritual or ritual practice. Shamanism, animism, ancestor veneration, cosmological myth, sacred landscape: the forms vary enormously, but the underlying orientation does not. Something in the architecture of the human mind reaches beyond immediate experience and asks what it means.

This universality has led researchers in cognitive science and evolutionary anthropology to investigate whether spiritual thought is not a cultural add-on but a byproduct of the cognitive capacities that define our species. Work in the field of cognitive science of religion suggests that the same mental tools that allow humans to attribute intention to others — a capacity called theory of mind — also predispose us to experience the world as inhabited by meaning, agency, and purpose. On this account, spirituality didn’t arrive from outside. It grew from inside the same brain that learned to cooperate, to plan ahead, and to imagine things that don’t yet exist.

Indigenous knowledge systems across the Americas, Australia, Africa, and Asia have long encoded sophisticated understandings of place, relationship, and cosmos — frameworks developed across thousands of generations of close observation and oral transmission. These traditions are not primitive precursors to formal religion. They are mature, complex systems of meaning in their own right, and they represent the longest continuous record of human spiritual life on Earth.

Lasting impact

The emergence of symbolic thought set in motion nearly everything that followed. Language, art, music, mathematics, philosophy, law, governance — all rest on the same foundational capacity: the ability to represent the world, to imagine it otherwise, and to act on that imagining.

Research on the behavioral modernity of early Homo sapiens suggests that this cognitive leap may have been a significant factor in our species’ ability to expand out of Africa, adapt to radically different environments, and eventually reach every habitable corner of the planet. Where other hominin species — Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo erectus — had developed tools and fire, Homo sapiens developed something additional: the capacity to bind communities together through shared narrative and shared meaning. That capacity may have given us a decisive social edge.

Ritual creates trust across larger groups than kinship alone can sustain. Shared symbol creates identity. Shared cosmology creates cooperation. The communities that could coordinate around invisible, shared ideas could act at scales and over timelines that purely practical cooperation could not reach.

The world’s great religious and wisdom traditions — from the Vedic texts of South Asia to the Dreamtime narratives of Aboriginal Australians to the philosophical schools of ancient Greece and China — are downstream of this original emergence. So is the scientific method, which is also a system for moving from observation to meaning. Psychological research consistently finds that humans who report a sense of meaning and connection — whether through religious practice, philosophy, nature, community, or creative work — show measurable benefits in resilience, wellbeing, and prosocial behavior. The search for meaning that began at Blombos Cave has never stopped.

Blindspots and limits

The archaeological record is incomplete and geographically uneven — we know most about the regions where organic materials preserved well and where excavation has been intensive. Much of what early humans believed is simply gone, carried in spoken language and perishable objects that left no trace. The spiritual lives of the vast majority of people who have ever lived are invisible to us.

It is also worth holding lightly the line between “symbolic behavior” and “spirituality.” Scholars use both terms, but they do not mean the same thing, and inferring inner experience from material objects is inherently uncertain. What the archaeology shows is that humans were making meaning. The precise texture of that meaning-making — what they felt, what they believed, what they hoped — we cannot fully recover.

Read more

For more on this story, see: Wikipedia — Human

For more from Good News for Humankind, see:

• Indigenous communities secure 160 million hectares of land rights ahead of COP30
• Global suicide rate has fallen by 40% since 1995
• The Good News for Humankind archive on prehistory

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