The Neanderthals, it seems, had also come to believe that their world is not chaotic, but was instead governed by powerful, orderly forces that they could come to know. They believed they could appeal to these forces through proper practices and, to some extent, control them. We know this because Neanderthal shines have been found in high mountain caves where bear skulls had been ritualistically stacked in pyramids and small crude altars still show the charred evidence of animal sacrifices carried out as long ago as two hundred thousand years.

The graves and shrines of Neanderthals are the earliest known evidence of protoreligious behavior. The fact that thy occur coincidentally with earliest evidences of human culture -- pottery, complex tools, rudimentary housewares -- suggests something important. As soon as hominids began to behave like human beings, they began to wonder and worry about the deepest mysteries of existence -- and found resolution to those mysteries in the stories we call myths.

"Mythology is apparently coeval with mankind," says renowned scholar of myth Joseph Campbell," "As far back, that is to say, as we have been able to follow the broken, scattered, earliest evidence of the emergence of our species, signs hae been found which indicate that mythological aim and concerns were already shaping the arts and world of Homo sapiens.

Myths are apparently as old as human culture, but it would be a mistake to write off mythical think as a vestige of the archaic past. Myths are alive today in the foundational stories that empower all modern religions ..... Pages 54 / 55