Sapiens: a brief History of Humankind

particular tree, a particular stream, a particular ghost.
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 speci c religion. It is a generic name for thousands of very
di erent 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

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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 fteenth-century Mexico, Su mystics from twelfth-century
Iran, tenth-century Viking warriors, second-century Roman legionnaires, and rst-
century Chinese bureaucrats. Each of these viewed the others’ beliefs and practices
as weird and heretical. The di erences 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 di erent bands had di erent 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.

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