A complex, but very important question for understanding the problem of the origin of writing is the following: is each specific social need realized from the very beginning in a special, qualitatively specific type of human activity, or can several fundamentally different social needs be realized initially in one type of activity? When answering this question, it should be borne in mind that in primitive society, differentiation and specialization of types of human activity was just emerging and was only to a very weak extent fixed by the emerging gender and age division of labor. What were the beginnings of differentiation of activities in the tribal society for about 10-20 millennia BC? First of all, the hunting of large animals (mammoth, bison, cave bear, deer, etc. P.), having become the exclusive business of adult men, separated from the gathering and hunting of small animals that women and children were engaged in. So there was a rudimentary division of labor in the production sector. But in addition to the actual labor, productive activity in the tribal society, there was also a sphere of non-productive activity of the primitive community. It included, in addition to consumer activity, the beginnings of spiritual activity, which found their objective, objective expression in rituals. It was ritual actions that were the type of activity in which several qualitatively heterogeneous spiritual needs of the primitive community were simultaneously realized: emotional-expressive, cognitive, aesthetic, magical (religious).
While agreeing that it is necessary to clearly identify the specific social needs that gave rise to writing, at the same time, it should not be assumed that the difference in these needs excludes the possibility of a syncretic integrity of art and religion in the primitive era. The possibility of such an undifferentiated unity is determined, in particular, by the fact that specifically artistic and specifically religious activities have not yet branched off from such a syncretic formation of the primitive epoch as ritual actions were.
In the primitive epoch, when mental labor had not yet separated from physical labor, the consciousness of primitive people was directly connected with their activities, and above all with the activities of labor, production. It is in the sphere of labor, industrial activity of people that the origins of both the rudiments of their artistic activity and their original religious beliefs lie.