The land before time

     Have you ever wondered what life was like before anything we know today existed?  It is hard to imagine the prehistoric, and the further back you go the harder it gets.  I recently have been listening to some lectures on ancient Mediterranean religions and was fascinated by what religion/ spirituality looked like as far back as the Stone Age.  Essentially as soon as man became man he perceived spirituality and began setting things aside as sacred.  These ideas were basic and related to life processes that they couldn't understand, such as birth and death.  

     Rituals to express their awe and respect for humans entering and exiting this world developed and are interpreted by modern day archeologists as the first evidence of the sacred.  The ancients would bury the dead in a fetal position to replicate birth and bury their dead close by the community so they would have easy access for communal meals that were held to carry on relationships with their dead loved ones.  They seemed to believe that the dead went on living in some fashion and would provide them with tools and other gifts to facilitate their existence in that other world.  As time progressed these rituals became more elaborate such as the embalming and burial process in Egypt.  

     I can't help, but wonder at this rudimentary stage of human development, about 20,000 years ago, what exactly did they believe in?  What did they hope for?  Did they have faith in something or someone?  Why would they take the time to create pomp and circumstance for things that were beyond them.  How did they think they would profit from setting these things aside?

    Perhaps they were merely afraid of everything they couldn't understand, and to a certain extant this is true.  The polytheistic mythologies were often woven around natural events, the sun, stars, night-time and seasons each were eventually came to be represented by at least one God.  Again as time went on these myths became more elaborate and attempted to explain the how and why for the way life was.  However, I often wonder how all of humanity, seemingly independent of each other all arrived at very similar conclusions.  In a broad, overarching way the ancient religions of the world all reflected similar values and similar methodology for worshiping the sacred reality they all perceived.  

     Case in point, human cultures the world over set up temple cultic systems regardless of whether it was Hebrew or Hindu.  These often if not always involved animal sacrifices as well as yearly festivals.  Celebrations of fertility are rampant, the idea that there are such things as deities is standard and connections between death, life and sexual reproduction are commonplace.  

     How did everyone get the same general idea about what religion should look like?  What I would like to think is that somewhere deep in the human psyche there is the ability to perceive the divine and the patterns we see is mankind universally coming to this understanding.  Call me crazy, but certainly looks like they arrived at this understanding on their own.  I think humanity began to glimpse what God had built into the very fabric of Creation. 

     I find the concept of humanity as a whole perceiving a spiritual dimension to be truly awe inspiring.  Now I'm fully aware that it was by no means "pure and undefiled religion" and was convoluted and twisted along the way devolving into worship of everything under the sun, but it was religion.  

So my ultimate question is can we derive any meaning from the ancients religious longings.  Is there some fundamental religious truths that we as human being were/are automatically able to sense in the world around us.  Some food for thought at any rate.