What the Amazon Tells Us About How Early Humans Saw the World

The previous posts argued that religion is what made early humans human. Cave paintings 40,000 years old, the world's first temples, the transition to farming — all of it was driven by a religious impulse, not an economic one.

ExpandAmazon rainforest — some of the last communities on Earth still practicing the religion of our earliest ancestors live inside these forests

But what did this religion actually look like from the inside? What did people believe, in concrete terms?

We cannot go back in time. But anthropology gives us the next best thing: people who still practice versions of this religion today.

What the Archaeological Evidence Tells Us

Before going to the living evidence, a summary of what we know.

For most of human history — from 300,000 years ago when our species appeared, through the long era of hunter-gatherer life — humans were:

Peaceful. There is evidence of violence within groups, but no evidence of organised warfare between large groups. That comes much later.

Egalitarian. Men and women had roughly equal status. No wealth hierarchy. Almost no archaeological evidence of it: no larger houses, no groups buried with significantly more. The exception is shamans, who received more elaborate burials, reflecting their role as religious leaders.

Artistic. Cave paintings, figurines, flutes — going back 40,000 years or more. At the very beginning of our migration out of Africa, we were already making art and music to celebrate our religion.

What changed all of this was a group called the Yamnaya — people with a completely different religion that celebrated warfare, patriarchy, and wealth. That story comes later.

What Their Religion Looked Like

We believe early humans practiced two related belief systems.

Animism: every living thing — a tree, a mosquito, a river, a human — has a soul. All souls come from one source, the mother goddess. We are all equal and all connected. The soul is permanent: the body dies but the soul moves on. This is why death was not feared the way we fear it today.

There is also a spirit world — a reality more fundamental than the physical one we can see. Our world is a physical expression of the spirit world. What matters most is what is happening there.

Shamanism: certain people can cross between the physical world and the spirit world. They access the other reality through deep meditation, fasting, or psychedelic plants. What they bring back — visions, knowledge, symbols — guides the community.

A small figurine from 40,000 years ago found in a German cave shows a figure that is part human, part animal. This is a shaman. The evidence for this practice is ancient and worldwide.

Proof That This Religion Still Exists

If this theory is correct, we should find living cultures today that still practice versions of it. We can.

ExpandA Yanomami mother and child in the Amazon — the Yanomami are one of the largest indigenous groups in the Amazon still practicing ancestral beliefs

In remote parts of the Amazon, in parts of Africa and Australia, indigenous peoples who have lived in relative isolation for thousands of years still hold these beliefs. Studying them gives us our clearest picture of what early human religion actually felt like from the inside.

The anthropologist Wade Davis, in his book The Wayfinders, records the creation myth of an Amazon tribe:

In the beginning, before the creation of seasons, before the ancestral mother, Romi Kumu, woman shaman, opened her womb, before her blood and breast milk gave rise to rivers and her ribs to the mountain ridges of the world, there was only chaos in the universe. Spirits and demons preyed on their own kindred, bred without thought, committed incest without consequence, devoured their own young. Romi Kumu responded by destroying the world with fire and floods. Then, just as a mother turns over a warm slab of bread on the griddle, she turned the world upside down, creating a flat and empty template from which life could emerge once again. As woman shaman, she then gave birth to a new world: land, water, forest, and animals.

Every civilisation has a creation myth. Why?

What a Creation Myth Is Really Doing

A creation myth is not just a story about how the world began. It is doing several things at once.

It explains who we are and where we come from. Without a shared answer to that question, a society has no foundation.

It establishes the rules. What does the Amazon myth say evil beings do? They commit incest. They devour their young. By defining the chaos before creation, the myth defines what holds creation together. It is a legal system disguised as a story. This is how law worked before anyone wrote anything down.

It needs to be convincing. For a religion to hold a society together, it needs three things:

Grandness. The scale must feel vast. A small story will not inspire awe or loyalty.
Completeness. Everything in the world must be explainable within the framework. If the religion cannot account for something, doubt creeps in.
Unity. There must be a beginning and an end. One coherent narrative. Disconnected stories do not hold societies together.

These same three requirements show up in every major religion that followed — Judaism, Christianity, Islam.

Inside the Amazon: What They Actually Experience

Davis writes further:

The entire natural world is saturated with meaning and cosmological significance. Every rock and waterfall embodies a story. Plants and animals are but distinct physical manifestations of the same essential spiritual essence. Behind every tangible form is a shadow dimension, invisible to ordinary people, but visible to the shaman — a realm of deified ancestors, where rocks and rivers are alive, where hidden behind the veil of waterfalls are the great houses of the spirits, where everything is beautiful.

This is not a simple or primitive belief. It is extraordinarily imaginative and internally consistent. The fact that these people do not use phones or cars says nothing about their intelligence. The sophistication of their cosmology speaks for itself.

The shaman's role is clear: to see and move through the shadow dimension that ordinary people cannot access. And everything in the physical world — every plant, every rock, every animal — is a physical expression of something deeper. Nothing is just what it appears to be on the surface.

Ritual: Religion Made into Daily Life

Look at Amazon shamans dressed for ceremony. The clothing is elaborate and full of meaning. Every element of how they stand in relation to each other is deliberate. There is symmetry. There is order. The elder stands at the centre.

This is ritual. Ritual is religion expressed in action. Every movement and word has a specific meaning within the belief system.

For these people, religion comes first. Everything else — hunting, eating, raising children — is organized around it. Life is not interrupted by ritual. Life is ritual.

Your own life is full of ritual too. School starts at a fixed time. The teacher takes attendance. The bell rings. Behind every ritual is a belief system. Theirs carry different beliefs but the same logic.

The Shaman's Role: Entering the Spirit World

The shaman's job is to enter the spirit world, communicate with it, and restore balance when things go wrong.

Davis describes it:

The shaman's duty and sacred task is to move in the timeless realm, embrace the primordial powers and harness and restore the energy of all creation. He is like a modern engineer who enters the depths of a nuclear reactor to renew the entire cosmic order.

If animals are dying or disease is spreading, the spirit world is disturbed. The shaman goes in, identifies the problem, and restores balance. Our world is a reflection of the spirit world. Fix the spirit world and the physical world follows.

Hunting: A Contract with the Spirit World

If all living things share the same soul and come from the same source, what gives anyone the right to kill another creature?

Permission must be obtained.

Before any hunt, the shaman enters a trance and travels to the spirit world to negotiate with the guardian spirits of the animals. Davis describes it as courtship:

Meat is not the right of a hunter, but a gift from the spirit world. To kill without permission is to risk death by a spirit guardian, be it in the form of a jaguar, anaconda, tapir, or harpy eagle.

The ritual before a hunt involves music, chanting, and dance. The shaman moves through forms — fish, animal, human — communicating across every dimension. The purpose: celebrate the unity of all life, ask permission, and ask forgiveness for what is about to happen.

This is exactly what cave paintings were doing 40,000 years ago. The animals on the walls were not trophies. They were tributes. The ceremony in the cave was the request: we are about to take your meat. We respect you. We are sorry. Please forgive us.

The bull paintings in Çatalhöyük. The animal carvings at Göbekli Tepe. The shaman figures dressed as animals. All of it is the same ritual, the same belief, expressed across tens of thousands of years.

The next post looks at another living example — the Pygmies of Africa — and asks what happens when someone refuses to believe.