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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books The Birth of Science [History of Science] Between 250,000 and 30,000 years ago a subspecies of Homo sapiens, commonly known as neanderthals, inhabited a territory from England across southern Europe into Asia. They built hut-like structures, hunted big game, and developed ceremonial rituals. The remains of this relatively short-lived group reflect a consciousness akin to our own. They clearly had a sense of the passage of time and physical mortality.

Ceremonial burials show a concern with life after death. We find in the neanderthals the signs of a greater consciousness of the subtleties of the world and, in this greater consciousness, the roots of our own religious and scientific thinking. The subspecies to which all living humans belong, Homo sapiens sapiens, probably emerged somewhere around 100,000 years ago, and forms a cultural, and probably intellectual, continuum with the neanderthals.

We really don't know much concerning the specific world-views of early humans. We have only some burial sites, figurines, and cave paintings to provide tantalizing hints. These suggest that their thinking was of a type that would now be called magical or superstitious. It seems clear that these stone-age people sought to employ magical rituals to influence the external world, hoping to positively affect hunting, fertility, and other survival-related aspects of their lives.

Though such thinking may seem primitive to us, it clearly reflects a mind attempting to bring order into the universe. Many scholars believe that the magical, animistic approach to understanding the world led directly to the mythical approach. Repeated attempts at magic would probably give birth to ritual. Even when such a ritual outlived its original purpose or when its true meaning had become obscured over time, it might still remain a psychologically essential part of the culture.

An appropriate myth could provide justification for its continuance. In any case, with the coming of civilization some 10,000 years ago, it is clear that the magical thinking of the earliest peoples had already evolved into mythology. Myths, though differing in their local details, have some common threads running through them. Often powerful non-human, but anthropomorphic, figures create and control the world and its inhabitants.