Why is it difficult to determine whether animism was humanity's earliest religion?

Determining whether animism was humanity's earliest religion is difficult because it is not known—and perhaps not knowable—what a prehuman or panhuman religion would have been like. This challenge is comparable to the difficulty of reconstructing protohuman speech.1

While 19th-century scholars, such as Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, often viewed animism as the "primitive" or original stage of cultural evolution, modern anthropologists reject this premise. Contemporary scholarship regards all cultures and religions as reflecting a fully evolved human intelligence.23

Furthermore, archaeological evidence from the Paleolithic Period is insufficient to confirm the existence of specific religious concepts like animism. While ancient burial customs and the deposition of remains imply a relationship between the living and the dead, they do not provide definitive proof of a belief in separate souls or a specific animistic worldview. Because religion is deeply embedded in the vital center of culture, it remains a complex phenomenon that cannot be easily traced back to a single, definitive origin.41