Before 20,000 BCE: (Henotheism Emerging Among Early Afrasian Speakers — The Shamanistic Art Findings Raising Important Questions About the Emergence in Subse…

Before 20,000 BCE: (Henotheism Emerging Among Early Afrasian Speakers — The Shamanistic Art Findings Raising Important Questions About the Emergence in Subsequent Ages of Other Religious Systems That Either Evolved Out of or Replaced Shamanism, Major New Developments in Religious Thought Not Limited to the Holocene Epoch, Comparative Ethnographic Evidence Indicating That Henotheism Had Already Emerged Among the Earliest Speakers of Afrasian Languages as Long as Twenty Thousand or More Years Ago): The global distribution of shamanistic art raises important further questions for historians about the emergence in subsequent ages of other religious systems — systems that either evolved out of, or replaced, shamanism. Major new developments in religious thought and practice were not limited to the great cultural and economic shifts of the Holocene epoch. As the comparative ethnographic evidence discussed earlier indicates, a different belief system — henotheism — had already emerged among the earliest speakers of the Afrasian languages, as long as twenty thousand or more years ago. The transition from shamanism to henotheism was not a sudden rupture but an evolution — a deepening and restructuring of spiritual understanding that took place over millennia, well before the agricultural revolution, well before the first cities, well before the written word. The fact that henotheism had already crystallized among proto-Afrasian speakers twenty thousand years ago means that the religious innovation so often attributed to the urban civilizations of the Holocene was, in fact, preceded by equally significant innovations in the African deep past. The people of the Horn of Africa were theological innovators tens of thousands of years before anyone wrote a hymn in Sumerian or carved a prayer in hieroglyphs. The history of religious thought does not begin with literacy. It begins with Africans thinking their way beyond shamanism into new conceptions of the divine — conceptions that would echo, twenty millennia later, in the temples of Egypt and the synagogues of Israel.