Prehistoric human thought

Prehistory covers human intellectual history before the invention of writing. The first identified cultures are from the Upper Paleolithic era, evidenced by regional patterns in artefacts such as cave art, Venus figurines, and stone tools. The Aterian culture was engaged in symbolically constituted material culture, creating what are amongst the earliest African examples of personal ornamentation.


Origins of religion

The Natufian culture of ancient Middle East produced zoomorphic art. The Khiamian culture which followed moved into depicting human beings, which was called by Jacques Cauvin a "revolution in symbols", becoming increasingly realistic. According to him, this led to the development of religion, with the Woman and the Bull as the first sacred figures. He claims that this led to a revolution in human thinking, with humans for the first time moving from animal or spirit worship to the worship of a supreme being, with humans clearly in hierarchical relation to it. Another early form of religion has been identified by Marija Gimbutas as the worship of the Great Goddess, the Bird or Snake Goddess, the Vegetation Goddess, and the Male God in Old Europe.

An important innovation in religious thought was the belief in the sky god. The Aryans had a common god of the sky called Dyeus, and the Indian Dyaus, the Greek Zeus, and the Roman Jupiter were all further developments, with the Latin word for God being Deus. Any masculine sky god is often also king of the gods, taking the position of patriarch within a pantheon. Such king gods are collectively categorized as "sky father" deities, with a polarity between sky and earth often being expressed by pairing a "sky father" god with an "earth mother" goddess (pairings of a sky mother with an earth father are less frequent). A main sky goddess is often the queen of the gods. In antiquity, several sky goddesses in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Near East were called Queen of Heaven.

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