Okay don’t take mg argument:
Donald E. Brown in Human Universals (1991) identifies religion (in some form) as a human universal—present in all documented cultures.
George P. Murdock’s cross-cultural work (Ethnographic Atlas) found no society lacking religious beliefs or practices among those sufficiently described.
Archeologcal evidence:
Even before written history, material evidence shows symbolic and ritual behavior:
Burials with grave goods (suggesting afterlife beliefs), e.g.
Skhul Cave (~100,000 years ago)
Ritual or symbolic structures like
Göbekli Tepe (~9600 BCE).
Absence of counterexamples:
No clearly documented pre-modern society (hunter-gatherer, tribal, early agrarian, or early state) has been shown to lack:
supernatural beliefs and ritual practices and symbolic meaning systems tied to them.
Even cases once proposed as “non-religious” (e.g., some interpretations of certain groups) were later found to include:
animism - animal spirits / power / speaking animals
ancestor reverence - respecting dead people - believing in afterlife
ritualized cosmology - cave drawings, sun gods, spirit of rain.
These may not look like organized religion (no temples, no priesthood), but it is the same.
Okay don’t take mg argument:
Donald E. Brown in Human Universals (1991) identifies religion (in some form) as a human universal—present in all documented cultures.
George P. Murdock’s cross-cultural work (Ethnographic Atlas) found no society lacking religious beliefs or practices among those sufficiently described.
Archeologcal evidence:
Even before written history, material evidence shows symbolic and ritual behavior:
Burials with grave goods (suggesting afterlife beliefs), e.g.
Skhul Cave (~100,000 years ago) Ritual or symbolic structures like Göbekli Tepe (~9600 BCE).
Absence of counterexamples:
No clearly documented pre-modern society (hunter-gatherer, tribal, early agrarian, or early state) has been shown to lack:
supernatural beliefs and ritual practices and symbolic meaning systems tied to them.
Even cases once proposed as “non-religious” (e.g., some interpretations of certain groups) were later found to include:
animism - animal spirits / power / speaking animals ancestor reverence - respecting dead people - believing in afterlife ritualized cosmology - cave drawings, sun gods, spirit of rain.
These may not look like organized religion (no temples, no priesthood), but it is the same.