If you’re looking for a simple date and a single name to answer what was the 1st religion, I have some bad news. It isn’t that easy. History isn't a spreadsheet. It’s a messy, overlapping pile of bones, cave paintings, and broken pottery. If we are talking about organized, "official" religion with written scripts and temples, people usually point toward Hinduism or Sumerian myths. But if we’re talking about when humans first started acting "religious"—meaning they believed in something they couldn't see—we have to go back way further. Like, 100,000 years further.
The truth is, religion didn't just "start" one Tuesday. It evolved. It's a spectrum that moves from burials to spirits to gods to organized church systems. Honestly, trying to pin down the "first" is like trying to find the first drop of water that started a river.
The difference between "Oldest" and "First"
When people Google this, they’re usually looking for Hinduism. And for good reason. Hinduism is widely considered the world’s oldest living religion. It’s been around for about 4,000 years in some form, though its roots in the Vedic traditions go deeper. But "oldest living" isn't the same as "the first."
Think about the Sumerians in Mesopotamia. By 3500 BCE, they were already building massive ziggurats and writing down hymns to Enlil and Ishtar. That's a religion. It’s just a dead one. Then you have the Egyptian pantheon, which was thriving while the pyramids were being stacked. But even those civilizations were "new" compared to what was happening in the shadows of the Ice Age.
We have to look at Animism.
Most anthropologists believe Animism—the belief that everything, from trees to rivers to rocks, has a spirit—is the true "first" religion. It wasn't written down in a book. There was no "Pope of the Forest." It was just a way of existing. It’s the foundational software that almost every later religion was built on.
The 70,000-year-old python in Botswana
You've probably never heard of the Tsodilo Hills. In 2006, Sheila Coulson from the University of Oslo found something in a cave there that changed the timeline. It was a massive rock, carved to look like a python. When the sun hit it, the scales seemed to move.
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Archaeologists found thousands of spearheads there, but they weren't used for hunting. They were ritualistically burned. This was 70,000 years ago. This discovery suggests that what was the 1st religion might have been a form of snake worship or shamanism practiced by the San people’s ancestors. It’s a staggering thought. While the rest of the world was just trying to find enough berries to survive, these people were already creating complex symbolic rituals.
Why burial matters
Burial is the "smoking gun" of religious thought. If you just leave a body to rot, you’re a pragmatist. If you dig a hole, put the body in it, and toss in some red ochre and a necklace made of shells? You’re a believer. You believe that the person is going somewhere, or that their "essence" still matters.
The Qafzeh burials in Israel date back about 100,000 years. We see graves where humans were buried with deer antlers or tools. This is a massive cognitive leap. It shows that humans had developed "transcendental" thinking. They weren't just thinking about lunch; they were thinking about the Great Beyond.
The contenders for the "Official" title
If we ignore the prehistoric stuff and look at organized systems, the list gets a bit more crowded.
Hinduism
It’s often called Sanatana Dharma, or the "Eternal Way." It doesn't have a single founder. Instead, it’s a fusion of various Indian cultures and traditions. The Rigveda, one of its core texts, was composed between 1500 and 1200 BCE, but the oral traditions are much older.
Zoroastrianism
This is the one that surprises people. Founded by the prophet Zoroaster (or Zarathustra) in ancient Iran, it’s one of the first religions to introduce the idea of a single God and a binary battle between good and evil. Some scholars argue it’s the oldest monotheistic religion, predating Judaism by a significant margin. It influenced almost everything that came after it—Heaven, Hell, and the concept of a "Messiah" likely started here.
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Judaism
While not as old as the early Vedic traditions, Judaism is the "grandfather" of the Abrahamic faiths (Christianity and Islam). It moved religion away from local idols and toward a portable, ethical monotheism.
The Göbekli Tepe problem
For a long time, historians thought that humans settled down, started farming, and then invented religion to keep everyone in line. Basically, "Civilization first, God second."
Then came Göbekli Tepe in modern-day Turkey.
It’s about 11,000 to 12,000 years old. It consists of massive stone pillars carved with lions, scorpions, and vultures. Here’s the kicker: it was built before agriculture. There are no houses there. No kitchens. No trash heaps. It was a temple built by hunter-gatherers.
This flipped the script. It suggests that the urge to worship is actually what drove humans to settle down and build cities. We didn't build temples because we had cities; we built cities because we needed to be near the temples. If you want to know what was the 1st religion in terms of organized architecture, this site is the definitive answer.
It wasn't just about "God"
Early religion was basically a survival manual. If you didn't know why the rain stopped or why the buffalo moved, you died. Religion provided a framework. It was the first "Science."
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By projecting human-like personalities onto the sun or the storm, humans felt they could bargain with the universe. You give the mountain a goat; the mountain doesn't explode. It’s a logic that seems weird to us now, but it was incredibly effective for social cohesion. It kept the tribe together. It gave them a shared "story."
How to actually trace the origins yourself
If this stuff fascinates you, don't just take one historian's word for it. The field is constantly shifting because of new DNA evidence and ground-penetrating radar.
- Look into the "Axial Age": This was a period around 800 to 200 BCE when a huge chunk of the world's major religions (Buddhism, Confucianism, Platonism) all popped up at the same time. It’s a wild coincidence that historians still debate.
- Study the "Lascaux Cave": These aren't just pretty pictures of horses. They are likely records of shamanistic journeys.
- Research the Sumerian King List: It’s a fascinating mix of real history and mythology that shows how kings used religion to justify their power.
Practical Insights
If you're trying to settle a debate or research the history of belief, keep these three points in mind:
- Define your terms. Are you asking about the first written religion (Sumerian/Egyptian), the first living religion (Hinduism), or the first spiritual behavior (Animism)?
- Avoid the "Eurocentric" trap. History books often overlook the spiritual systems of Indigenous Australians or Africans, which have oral traditions dating back tens of thousands of years.
- Check the archaeology. New sites like Karahan Tepe are currently being excavated and might be even older than Göbekli Tepe. The "first" title is always temporary.
The search for the first religion isn't really about finding a date on a calendar. It’s about finding the moment we became human. The moment we looked at the stars and asked, "Why?"
To dig deeper into the actual texts, your next step should be to look up the "Vedas" and the "Epic of Gilgamesh." These are the earliest written records we have of humanity trying to explain the divine. Reading them directly gives you a much better "vibe" for ancient belief than any textbook ever could. You'll find that 4,000 years ago, people were asking the exact same questions about life and death that we are today.