Spearthrower wrote:

Agrippina wrote:Do you think the Neanderthals had priests and gods.

I would hazard a guess that they had elders - living beyond 40 was probably something of a novelty, and would have held superstitious meaning. I would guess that the elders explained the meaning of life to the tribe and made decisions concerning morality.

I would imagine that they had some sort of reverence for animals. I also would think that they were as stupid as our desert-dwelling ancestors about how to explain stuff with some sort of great mother-goddess/father-god figure. Ignorant people are superstitious for instance the crazy person who used to clean my house used to get hysterical about the fact that I eat fruit for breakfast, it was just wrong according to her particular superstition. When I asked why she said that fruit had "worms" that invaded your body and that you should eat meat because then the worms in the fruit eat the meat and not "your insides." And she said that I would die from the worms because I don't eat meat. Of course being me, I said "of course the world according to doctor Eunice." She was not impressed. She also believed that my collection of Egyptian god figurines was bad luck and that I should get rid of them because they were not God who was punishing me for worshipping the little man Bes, a household god, but who for me was just cute, so he has a special place on the shelf. When she asked me if I go to church and I said 'no' she said that I was going to burn in hell and then asked what about Jesus, I eventually shut her up with "I'm a Jew." She said she didn't understand that, so I said "the people of the Bible." Then she was happy, and the conversation ended.

Which is why I can't imagine that people who knew nothing about anything except how to get food, make babies and keep warm, would have some sort of superstition about how to go about doing that. THe Bible itself is evidence for the ignorance of early humans. They believed that women were "dirty" because of the blood thing -- how can something that bleeds for 7 days and doesn't die, be anything but something to fear. I imagine those very primitive had similar ideas about women and child-bearing, and if any women lived long enough to reach menopause, that would really have scared them.

I was so disappointed when I saw the series Terra Nova. It's just a sort of Jurassic Park thing, I thought it was going to be a fun imagination of what life for human millions of years ago would have been like. It would be so interesting to be able to go back in time and see exactly what it was like for early humans (which is why I like those Jean Auel books).