Just as there is no barrier between humans and other beings, neither is there a strict hierarchy. Non-human entities do not exist merely to provide for the needs of man. Nor are they all-powerful gods who run the world as they wish. The world does not revolve around humans or around any other particular group of beings.
Animism is not a specific religion. It is a generic name for thousands of very different religions, cults and beliefs. What makes all of them ‘animist’ is this common approach to the world and to man’s place in it. Saying that ancient foragers were probably animists is like saying that premodern agriculturists were mostly theists. Theism (from ‘theos’, ‘god’ in Greek) is the view that the universal order is based on a hierarchical relationship between humans and a small group of ethereal entities called gods. It is certainly true to say that premodern agriculturists tended to be theists, but it does not teach us much about the particulars. The generic rubric ‘theists’ covers Jewish rabbis from eighteenth-century Poland, witch-burning Puritans from seventeenth-century Massachusetts, Aztec priests from fifteenth-century Mexico, Sufi mystics from twelfth-century Iran, tenth-century Viking warriors, second-century Roman legionnaires, and first-century Chinese bureaucrats. Each of these viewed the others’ beliefs and practices as weird and heretical. The differences between the beliefs and practices of groups of ‘animistic’ foragers were probably just as big. Their religious experience may have been turbulent and filled with controversies, reforms and revolutions.
But these cautious generalisations are about as far as we can go. Any attempt to describe the specifics of archaic spirituality is highly speculative, as there is next to no evidence to go by and the little evidence we have – a handful of artefacts and cave paintings – can be interpreted in myriad ways. The theories of scholars who claim to know what the foragers felt shed much more light on the prejudices of their authors than on Stone Age religions.
Instead of erecting mountains of theory over a molehill of tomb relics, cave paintings and bone statuettes, it is better to be frank and admit that we have only the haziest notions about the religions of ancient foragers. We assume that they were animists, but that’s not very informative. We don’t know which spirits they prayed to, which festivals they celebrated, or which taboos they observed. Most importantly, we don’t know what stories they told. It’s one of the biggest holes in our understanding of human history.
The sociopolitical world of the foragers is another area about which we know next to nothing. As explained above, scholars cannot even agree on the basics, such as the existence of private property, nuclear families and monogamous relationships. It’s likely that different bands had different structures. Some may have been as hierarchical, tense and violent as the nastiest chimpanzee group, while others were as laid-back, peaceful and lascivious as a bunch of bonobos.
8. A painting from Lascaux Cave, c.15,000–20,000 years ago. What exactly do we see, and what is the painting’s meaning? Some argue that we see a man with the head of a bird and an erect penis, being killed by a bison. Beneath the man is another bird which might symbolise the soul, released from the body at the moment of death. If so, the picture depicts not a prosaic hunting accident, but rather the passage from this world to the next. But we have no way of knowing whether any of these speculations are true. It’s a Rorschach test that reveals much about the preconceptions of modern scholars, and little about the beliefs of ancient foragers.
In Sungir, Russia, archaeologists discovered in 1955 a 30,000-year-old burial site belonging to a mammoth-hunting culture. In one grave they found the skeleton of a fifty-year-old man, covered with strings of mammoth ivory beads, containing about 3,000 beads in total. On the dead man’s head was a hat decorated with fox teeth, and on his wrists twenty-five ivory bracelets. Other graves from the same site contained far fewer goods. Scholars deduced that the Sungir mammoth-hunters lived in a hierarchical society, and that the dead man was perhaps the leader of a band or of an entire tribe comprising several bands. It is unlikely that a few dozen members of a single band could have produced so many grave goods by themselves.
9. Hunter-gatherers made these handprints about 9,000 years ago in the ‘Hands Cave’, in Argentina. It looks as if these long-dead hands are reaching towards us from within the rock. This is one of the most moving relics of the ancient forager world – but nobody knows what it means.
Archaeologists then discovered an even more interesting tomb. It contained two skeletons, buried head to head. One belonged to a boy aged about twelve or thirteen, and the other to a girl of about nine or ten. The boy was covered with 5,000 ivory beads. He wore a fox-tooth hat and a belt with 250 fox teeth (at least sixty foxes had to have their teeth pulled to get that many). The girl was adorned with 5,250 ivory beads. Both children were surrounded by statuettes and various ivory objects. A skilled craftsman (or craftswoman) probably needed about forty-five minutes to prepare a single ivory bead. In other words, fashioning the 10,000 ivory beads that covered the two children, not to mention the other objects, required some 7,500 hours of delicate work, well over three years of labour by an experienced artisan!
It is highly unlikely that at such a young age the Sungir children had proved themselves as leaders or mammoth-hunters. Only cultural beliefs can explain why they received such an extravagant burial. One theory is that they owed their rank to their parents. Perhaps they were the children of the leader, in a culture that believed in either family charisma or strict rules of succession. According to a second theory, the children had been identified at birth as the incarnations of some long-dead spirits. A third theory argues that the children’s burial reflects the way they died rather than their status in life. They were ritually sacrificed – perhaps as part of the burial rites of the leader – and then entombed with pomp and circumstance.9
Whatever the correct answer, the Sungir children are among the best pieces of evidence that 30,000 years ago Sapiens could invent sociopolitical codes that went far beyond the dictates of our DNA and the behaviour patterns of other human and animal species.
Finally, there’s the thorny question of the role of war in forager societies. Some scholars imagine ancient hunter-gatherer societies as peaceful paradises, and argue that war and violence began only with the Agricultural Revolution, when people started to accumulate private property. Other scholars maintain that the world of the ancient foragers was exceptionally cruel and violent. Both schools of thought are castles in the air, connected to the ground by the thin strings of meagre archaeological remains and anthropological observations of present-day foragers.
The anthropological evidence is intriguing but very problematic. Foragers today live mainly in isolated and inhospitable areas such as the Arctic or the Kalahari, where population density is very low and opportunities to fight other people are limited. Moreover, in recent generations, foragers have been increasingly subject to the authority of modern states, which prevent the eruption of large-scale conflicts. European scholars have had only two opportunities to observe large and relatively dense populations of independent foragers: in north-western North America in the nineteenth century, and in northern Australia during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both Amerindian and Aboriginal Australian cultures witnessed frequent armed conflicts. It is debatable, however, whether this represents a ‘timeless’ condition or the impact of European imperialism.