[kregasaurusrex]

How the family found out about satellites is very interesting to me- such an unexplained phenomena wouldn't make sense to some groups (ie, flat-earthers deny their existence altogether), where they would have observed Sputnik zooming across the sky while only being visible at dawn and dusk. With such perfect recurrence the Lykovs would have been able to deduce that the object followed ordinary orbital mechanics against the backdrop of the celestial cosmos rather than being a supernatural object, especially that Sputnik was only in the sky for a couple months in 1957. Later ones would have have likely indicated they were a product of man; I'd personally ascribe it to being supernatural in origin!

[dmitry-vsl]

I think this is a fabrication by the journalist. Overall, it seems to me that there was an ideological agenda behind this story. In the USSR, no topic could cause a stir in major media outlets without an ideological directive.

[HarryHirsch]

The family would have heard about airplanes, they were from Perm Oblast, which isn't exactly remote. It isn't exactly a big leap to think that what they were seeing was the lights of airplanes. Ships carry lights for safe navigation, and if you fly at night you also carry lights for safety.

[croisillon]

i sometimes wonder what it was to live in early human times and make sense of everything: time, phenomena etc. i am not religious but i guess back then i would have ascribed anything to gods

[_def]

You would need to come up with the concept of gods first though

[Cthulhu_]

I'm no anthropologist but religion must've started in parallel with verbal communication, storytelling, various degrees of higher level thinking.

That said, cave paintings, which are arguably the earliest "documentation" we have of human activity and their thoughts, depict pretty tangible things; pictures of animals, hand prints, people hunting animals, plants? that kind of thing. The earliest religious symbols may have been venus statues, but it seems that it cannot be concluded definitively whether they were objects of worship / depictions of deities. That said, there's clear signs of shamanic religion dating from the upper paleolithic, 50.000 years BC and onwards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_religion is a good read.

Anyway, ~52.000 years ago is still fairly recent, given homo sapiens emerged ~300.000 years ago and the earliest stone tools were from ~3.3 million years ago.

Personally, I think religion / the concept of gods or a higher power has been a part of humanity for as long as we've had the ability to think smort thoughts and communicate with one another. Some would be grounded in reality - good weather means good times - but others in myth, like the stars/moon, thunderstorms, etc.

[grecy]

Spending a few months in Iceland it was really easy to see why they have so many gods and mythical beings in their history. The place is MAGICAL.