Traces of animistic thought stretch back to the Upper Paleolithic era, some 40,000 years ago, when early Homo sapiens began decorating cave walls with vivid paintings and carefully burying their dead alongside tools and animal offerings. Those rituals suggest a belief that rocks, rivers and beasts possessed a life force—an idea still palpable in today’s Indigenous Australian Dreamtime stories and the Shinto shrines of Japan, where kami inhabit forests, waterfalls and even household objects.

As hunter-gatherer bands settled into the first farming villages around 10,000 BCE, animism wove itself into burgeoning social structures. Crops were tended not just for food but as living partners in survival; seasonal festivals honored the spirits of soil and sky. In West Africa, vodun priests communed with ancestral forces; in the Amazon Basin, shamans used ayahuasca to navigate a world teeming with plant and animal intelligences. These strands of belief developed independently yet mirrored each other, as if human hearts all over the globe were tuned to the same frequency.

By the turn of the 19th century, anthropologists like Edward Tylor labeled this spiritual outlook “animism,” framing it as humankind’s earliest religion. That academic term never dulled the rich diversity of practice: from Siberian reindeer herders who saw sky spirits in the Northern Lights, to Native American water protectors invoking river guardians today at Standing Rock—animism remains fiercely alive.

In an era of wildfires, melting ice caps and species loss, animistic sensibilities are enjoying a revival. Eco-activists often draw inspiration from ancestral worldviews, treating landscapes not as commodities but as kin. When pipelines snake across treaty lands, protests echo an age-old belief: nature is not a backdrop, but a community member worthy of respect and reciprocity.