Humans domesticated fire around 3,00,000 years ago. We started using tools around that time. But, the human brain evolved to its current size roughly 2,00,000 years ago. We migrated out of Africa into India, 50,000 years ago. So, when do we find the earliest signs of religion in India?

It depends on how we define religion. In archaeological terms, religion means belief in something unseen, apart from the current, lived experience. As humans, thanks to our imagination, our experience expanded beyond the natural world of elements, plants, animals and humans, to the supernatural world of dreams, delusions, projections and visions: an alternate reality of spirits, ghosts, deities and demons, into which we could travel and return, in a state of drug-induced trance. Today, we refer to these worlds as heaven, hell, spirit world, dream time-it doesn`t matter. It is an alternate reality that exists for the believer. It is from this alternate reality words like spiritual, occult and mystical emerge. This is the word of the gods, demons and spirit animals. It exists today for those who believe in the spiritual. It existed in prehistoric times too. Long before we wrote down our religious beliefs as stories, we expressed our beliefs materially-in the form of images, and in rituals.