Is there Evidence that the Earliest Humans were Religious?

Dr. Craig reviews archaeological evidence that is consistent with the idea that the earliest humans were religious!

INTERVIEWER: I think Ben Witherington might have mentioned in his brief critique of your assessment, I think he said something about how – looking for evidence of religion, how does that play into our identification when humans . . . ?

DR. CRAIG: Well, I hope you saw my reply to Ben on that. I think it would be great if we could detect early evidence of religious activity among primeval man. Ben says that there is an example of a religious temple that goes back 9,000 years, which is great, but I'm interested in whether or not early Homo sapiens or Neanderthals might have exhibited religious behavior. Here I think we can say there's evidence that is consistent with that, but it doesn't show it. It doesn't prove it. For example, I'll mention later, Neanderthal burial of their dead. They had a respect for their dead such that they buried the bodies carefully. They didn't just throw out these carcasses like they were cave cleaning. They were carefully interred and sometimes interred with artifacts. Could this have been indicative of a consciousness of immortality, or belief in the afterlife, or something? We just don't know, but it's consistent with it. And then these constructions that we'll talk about that were found in Bruniquel Cave, France, that go back 176,000 years. Archaeologists have no idea what these could have served as. Could they have been altars? They had places where fires were built on the structures all around the circle inside this cave. It could have been that these were primitive altars that served a religious purpose. So again we're just frustrated; it's kind of like looking for language ability, you know? You can't detect language ability directly until writing is invented, but it undoubtedly long, long preceded writing. And similarly with religious belief, how do you detect that until they can do things like build temples and write text? So I fully share your interest in any sort of glimmerings of religious consciousness in early man, but it's just very uncertain.