The formation and development of human consciousness, as is known, took place in unity with the development of such a material means of human communication as language. And this applies equally to artistic and religious consciousness. The beginnings of both found their material, objective embodiment not only in sound speech, but also in images, dances and songs, which initially, apparently, acted as elements of an integral ritual complex.
Religion is not eternal, it is a historical phenomenon, and arose only at a certain stage in the development of human society. The emergence of religion was preceded by a pre-religious period of human development.
Meanwhile, the question of what the pre—religious epoch was, how to interpret it, is far from an idle question and is very important for explaining the conditions and causes of the emergence of not only religion, but also other elements of primitive culture.
For example, the skulls of cave bears were used by Neanderthals in the process of some kind of hunting witchcraft rituals. Apparently, the Neanderthal did not have any formalized and clear system of religious beliefs, but he had the rudiments of religiosity in the form of elementary magical beliefs and witchcraft actions.
As for the rudiments of artistic activity among Neanderthals, the facts indicating its presence have long been known. In the Mousterian layers of the La Ferracy cave (France), pieces of red and yellow mineral paint (ochre) were found, and some of them show traces of scraping with a flint tool or erasing their edges. In the same cave, a stone slab was found with the remains of transverse stripes and spots applied to it with red ochre. In the same place and in the cave of Le Moustier, fragments of animal bones with carved transverse lines were found, forming, as it were, the rudiment of an ornament. Similar or similar finds were made in Europe: Italy, Hungary, the Czech Republic.
All these findings indicate that Neanderthals made the first attempts to use the substances of nature surrounding them for pictorial activity. These were the beginnings of artistic imagination and artistic activity, which subsequently led to the formation of writing. The inhabitant of the La Ferrasi cave, A. P. Okladnikov writes: "He did something unprecedented and unthinkable before: he deliberately smeared paint on a tile of wild stone… Not even just "smeared" the paint, but painted the tile with it, held a number of transverse stripes on it symmetrically and proportionally… Millennia of labor activity of primitive man, in the process of which his thinking also developed, his psyche was enriched, finally led to the fact that it became possible to go beyond the practically useful, necessary. A man-made object appeared, which was not intended either for digging the earth, or for killing an animal or butchering hunting prey. The only real need that he satisfied was the need for a materialized expression of a person's inner experiences, his feelings and ideas, his creative imagination—images that arose in his brain" (Okladnikov A. P. Morning of Art, Leningrad, 1967, pp. 27-28).