Paleolithic Religion - Upper Paleolithic

Upper Paleolithic

Religious behaviour is one of the hallmarks of Behavioral modernity, generally assumed to have emerged around 50,000 years ago, marking the transition from the middle to the Upper Paleolithic. Evidence of burial with grave goods and the appearance of anthropomorphic images and cave paintings may suggest that humans in the Upper Paleolithic had begun to believe in supernatural beings. The cave paintings of Chauvet have been dated to 32,000 and those at Lascaux to 17,000 years ago. At Lascaux the anthropomorphic paintings show depictions of strange beasts such as ones that are half-human and half-bird and half-human and half-lion. Consequently some have seen these as indications of shamanistic beliefs.

The earliest known undisputed burial of a shaman dates back to the early Upper Paleolithic era (c. 30,000 BC) in the area of the present-day Czech Republic. However, it was probably more common during the early Upper Paleolithic for religious ceremonies to receive equal and full participation from all members of the band in contrast to the religious traditions of later periods when religious authorities and part-time ritual specialists such as shamans, priests and medicine men were relatively common and integral to religious life. The earliest known Paleolithic shaman (c.30,000 BC) was female. Additionally it is also possible that Upper Paleolithic religions - like contemporary and historical animistic and polytheistic religions - believed in the existence of a single creator deity in addition to other supernatural beings such as animistic spirits.

Vincent W. Fallio writes that ancestor cults first emerged in complex Upper Paleolithic societies. Vincent W. Fallio argues that the elites of complex Upper Paleolithic societies (like the elites of many contemporary complex hunter-gatherers such as the Tlingit) may have used special rituals and ancestor worship to solidify control over their societies by convincing their subjects that they possess a link to the spirit world that gives them control over both the earthly realm and access to the spiritual realm. Secret societies may have served a similar function in these complex quasi-theocratic societies by dividing the religious practices of these cultures into the separate spheres of popular religion and elite religion.

Religion was often apotropaic; specifically, it involved sympathetic magic. The Venus figurines - which occur abundantly in the Upper Paleolithic archeological record - provide an example of Paleolithic sympathetic magic: people may have used them for ensuring success in hunting and to bring about fertility of the land and women. Scholars have sometimes explained the Upper Paleolithic Venus figurines as depictions of an earth goddess similar to Gaia or as representations of a goddess who is the ruler or mother of the animals. James Harrod has described them as representative of female (and male) shamanistic spiritual transformation processes.