m 



Let us now consider for a while some early ideas re- 

 garding Nature and Man. No doubt even the most primitive 

 men occasionally thought about some of the problems which 

 they recognized during their short lives, although they did 

 not achieve a satisfactory solution to these problems in most 

 cases. But we have certain knowledge only of the thoughts 

 of men back to the beginning of writing, some 5,000 years 

 ago. However, the wall paintings, and practices of Neo- 

 lithic man as revealed by buried remains, which have been 

 studied so far by archaeologists, indicate the nature of 

 human thought back to perhaps 20,000 years into the past. 

 A more complete knowledge of Man's early mental activi- 

 ties must await further discoveries of archaeological re- 

 mains. 



Starting, then, with the finding of human skeletons 

 evidently buried by Man, burial being a practice common 

 with early men, we can conclude that these men believed 

 that in some manner a person might continue to exist even 

 after death had occurred. For presumably they would not 

 have taken care to protect the bodies of the dead unless 

 they had thought that these would be able to function again 

 — unless burial was intended simply to honour the former 

 living, which appears unlikely. Alternatively men may have 

 considered that if dead humans were eaten by animals (or 

 perhaps by other humans!), the eaters would gain addi- 

 tional powers which would make them worse enemies 



35 



