I saw a story in the news yes­ter­day that played on one of my long­stand­ing obses­sions. I am fas­ci­nated by the inter­sec­tions between sci­ence, his­tory, reli­gion, and pol­i­tics. These things join in a way that offers a sense of per­spec­tive and a host of ques­tions about what truly mat­ters. I’ve writ­ten about this before. I’m likely to again.

This par­tic­u­lar news story is the kind of thing that passes as niche trivia, the sort of story of inter­est only to peo­ple in a nar­row field, or to hob­by­ists who dab­ble in that field. That’s a shame, because it truly is some­thing of cos­mic impor­tance to how we think about our­selves and the things we value. Our sense of val­ues, in turn, deter­mines what we spend our money on, what we spend effort wor­ry­ing about, how we vote, what we wor­ship, and where we are going as a cul­ture, a nation, and as a world.

Here is the arti­cle. If you don’t want to click the link, the short ver­sion is that new test­ing tech­niques have shown some cave art to be much older than had pre­vi­ously been thought. Some is more than forty thou­sand years old.

Okay, that’s very obscure. Let me tell you why it matters.

The dom­i­nant reli­gions of the world are all between fif­teen hun­dred and three thou­sand years old. Listed in order of decreas­ing age, they are: Hin­dusim, Judaism, Bud­dhism, Chris­tian­ity, and Islam. These faiths each claim to have pri­vate lines on Eter­nal Truth, and have, at var­i­ous times, exer­cised enor­mous influ­ence over vast areas of the globe and enor­mous num­bers of people.

Sumer­ian writing

All these are new­com­ers as far as recorded his­tory is con­cerned. Writ­ing was first invented in the Mid­dle East, in a land its inhab­i­tants called Sumer, some­where between five and six thou­sand years ago. That land occu­pied the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. It was later called Mesopotamia, from the Greek meso– (between) and -potamia (rivers), and is now called Iraq. The most ancient writ­ings in the world are from there. Some are legal doc­u­ments, and some are record­ings of kings and their doings. Some are reli­gious in nature, reveal­ing the sacred tales that many cen­turies later evolved into the sto­ries we can still read in the Bible.

Sume­ri­ans recorded their writ­ings on clay tablets, which they baked in ovens to make them hard as rocks. These arti­facts are the old­est writ­ten doc­u­ments in the world, and the muse­ums in Iraq were once full of them. Thou­sands of them have recently gone miss­ing, after the loot­ing and law­less chaos that fol­lowed America’s inva­sion of Iraq in 2003. The world has lost price­less doc­u­men­ta­tion of its history.

The clas­si­cal civ­i­liza­tions of Egypt, Greece, and Rome, of the Indus val­ley, of China and Japan and cen­tral Amer­ica, all are newer. All the cul­tures of Europe and the Mid­dle East and North­ern Africa and West­ern Asia were pro­foundly influ­enced by Sumer, and it is in Sumer that the writ­ten doc­u­men­ta­tion begins — and that doc­u­men­ta­tion is con­tin­u­ous since. In a very real sense, his­tory begins at Sumer.

In another arti­cle for another day, I plan to dis­cuss some of the Sumer­ian tales that found their way into the Jew­ish and Chris­t­ian Bibles. The dif­fer­ences, and the sim­i­lar­i­ties, fas­ci­nate me, and speak much about the nature of cul­tural changes over the last few mil­len­nia. For now, I note merely that reli­gious tales were impor­tant enough to the peo­ple who invented writ­ing, that these sto­ries make up a sig­nif­i­cant per­cent­age of the writ­ing they did. Reli­gion has mat­tered to us cer­tainly as long as we’ve been able to record the things that mat­ter to us.

How old is the idea of reli­gion? How long have humans cared about their gods? Has this con­cern always influ­enced our pol­i­tics, our cul­ture, our per­sonal interactions?

Anthro­pol­o­gists tell us that anatom­i­cally mod­ern humans — the sub­species Homo sapi­ens sapi­ens — has existed for some­where between forty thou­sand and one hun­dred thou­sand years. Archaic forms of Homo sapi­ens (includ­ing the most well known, Homo sapi­ens nean­derthalen­sis or Nead­erthals) date to per­haps three hun­dred thou­sand years ago. All forms other than Homo sapi­ens sapi­ens became extinct more than thirty thou­sand years ago. At what point did humans gain the abil­ity and need to think about super­nat­ural and spir­i­tual matters?

With­out writ­ten doc­u­men­ta­tion, we can’t be cer­tain. We do know that sophis­ti­cated the­ol­ogy appears in the very first writ­ings that exist, so it must be far older than that. We also have doc­u­men­ta­tion of other sorts — art­works that date from long before our ances­tors learned to write.

Think of a work of reli­gious art — the ceil­ing of the Sis­tine Chapel or a Mayan freize. These works express images and ideas and episodes from sto­ries with spir­i­tual sig­nif­i­cance. They also rep­re­sent sub­stan­tial cul­tural mean­ing and invest­ment. Think now of places of wor­ship — a cathe­dral or a pyra­mid, Stone­henge or the Parthenon. These are places that inspire awe and a sense of some­thing beyond every­day life. By design and intent, there is some­thing mys­ti­cal and over­whelm­ing about these places, some­thing that informed and struc­tured the cul­tures that built them.

The first evi­dence we have of paint­ing comes from Europe’s last ice age, more than twenty thou­sand years ago. Peo­ple trav­eled deep into the dark­ness of hun­dreds of caves through­out much of Europe, bring­ing torches and stone-​​age oil lamps, and they painted murals and freizes, mostly of  ani­mals, but some­times of peo­ple. Anthro­pol­o­gists rec­og­nize these as mag­i­cal or reli­gious (magic and reli­gion being two ways of say­ing nearly the same thing…“magic” is from old Per­sian for “sor­cery”; “reli­gion” from Latin for “super­sti­tion”), and under­lin­ing par­al­lels with mod­ern native cul­tures of the Amer­i­cas or of Africa, Asia, or Australia.

Until recently, some of the old­est of these had been dated (based on a vari­ety of tech­niques which need not con­cern us now) to some­where around thirty thou­sand years ago. (There are a few carv­ings and stat­uettes which may be older.) This means a reli­gious impulse is at least that old. But most of these meth­ods of dat­ing sup­plied min­i­mum ages. It was rec­og­nized the art­works could be sig­nif­i­cantly older. Sci­en­tists, being a gen­er­ally cau­tious lot, tended not to spec­u­late on how much older.

The news story I read yes­ter­day, the story I men­tioned at the top of this arti­cle, describes a recently-​​developed dat­ing tech­nique which pushes back the date of at least some of this art — and pushes it back by as much as ten or fif­teen thou­sand years. Some of the cave-​​cathedrals of Europe were first painted over forty thou­sand years ago.

That is the new min­i­mum age of the old­est of these paint­ings. Some of the paint­ings in these caves are much newer. Some of the caves have paint­ings that span twenty thou­sand years. Imag­ine that — a reli­gious tra­di­tion, its adher­ents using sub­stan­tially the same sym­bol­ism and iconog­ra­phy, com­ing into the same chapel and con­tin­u­ing to add dec­o­ra­tions and art­works, for a length of twenty thou­sand years.

And all long before the inven­tion of writing.

Why does this mat­ter? Why should we care?

We are locked today in cul­tural issues involv­ing reli­gion and pol­i­tics, the rela­tion­ship of “tra­di­tional” ideas of mar­riage, of sex, of moral­ity, and how (even whether) these things should influ­ence our poli­cies and pri­or­i­ties. Words such as “tra­di­tional” seem to lose their mean­ing when jux­ta­posed to reli­gious ideas that date back to the Stone Age. “Eter­nal truths” that date back two thou­sand years or so seem less daunt­ing when com­pared to the crush­ing his­tory of forty mil­len­nia that pre­ceded them.

Believe it or not, I’ve only scratched the sur­face here; there is evi­dence of reli­gious thought much older than I’ve alluded to. Not only is there vague impli­ca­tion of misty mag­i­cal notions; there is good rea­son to think we can piece together some ele­ments of the val­ues and myths of these truly ancient peoples.

That, too, is a story for another day. My point on this par­tic­u­lar Sun­day is to sug­gest a med­i­ta­tion on the imme­di­acy of our cur­rent body politic, and on whether the earth-​​shaking issues that now divide us truly are vital when seen from the per­spec­tive of actual human his­tory. They may well be — if we hold the capac­ity to end that his­tory, then we need to under­stand the enor­mity of doing so. But if it’s a mat­ter of decid­ing who is allowed to wed, do we really need to interfere?

More: If we don’t prop­erly fund pure sci­en­tific research — if we do noth­ing that doesn’t have a guar­an­teed eco­nomic pay­off — if we skimp on edu­cat­ing our chil­dren about such mat­ters — then this knowl­edge, this under­stand­ing, this sense of per­spec­tive, will be lost. We can only ask such ques­tions if we know enough to ask them.

Is that good or bad? Are these ideas valu­able, or are they a dis­trac­tion from putting food on the table, or from teach­ing proper moral­ity to the next gen­er­a­tion? Are they, per­haps, sub­ver­sive denials of the truths of the Bible, which tell us that Adam and Eve lived some six thou­sand years ago — thus, these thoughts are sim­ple fan­tasy? Was all I said above inspired by a Satanic con­spir­acy to plant doubts about the Bible?

One thing a long view of his­tory teaches us is that reli­gion informs all cul­tures. Egyp­tians wor­shiped Isis and Osiris — that con­trolled their art, their cal­en­dar, and their archi­tec­ture. Greece and Rome had their gods. China and Japan had theirs. Mod­ern Europe devel­oped under Chris­tian­ity.  As much as we want to build a sec­u­lar cul­ture (read the First Amend­ment), it is hard in today’s Amer­ica to imag­ine a world with­out bib­li­cal values.

Give it a try any­way. Let’s tale a long view of really old time religion.

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