[burgerbrain]

Fascinating stuff. Is anybody familiar with the amount of ritual usually needed by archaeologists to suggest that some sort of religious tendancies might be present in a particular group of ancient hominids? The possibility that elephants could have some sort of rudimentary religious thoughts would be a great breakthrough I think.

Burial itself is mentioned here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic_religion

[Bockit]

I did a semester of 'Religious Studies' focusing primarily on non-monotheistic religions as an undergrad and when we studied the origins of religion the absolute earliest things to be considered religious was when some kind of ritual was put into the treatment of the dead.

The example of the earliest known burial on the wiki page you linked sounds like one of the specific events we studied.

"The earliest undisputed human burial dates back 90,000 years. Human skeletal remains stained with red ochre were discovered[by whom?] in the Skhul cave at Qafzeh, Israel. A variety of grave goods were present at the site, including the mandible of a wild boar in the arms of one of the skeletons."

[gujk]

According to Sid Meier's Civilization, civilization starts at ceremonial burial (and mining and road building, but I think that is just to help with game mechanics)