Having painted a picture of quite different ancient social structures and pre-modern cultures mostly from the outside, we will now try to discover their psychology - through interpretations that can be quite surprising and controversial. It is usually a default assumption of the modern age that while the customs and technologies of our ancestors were different, their inner lives were much the same as our own. We read the epics of Homer or the tragedies of Sophocles and imagine that the grief of Achilles or the anguish of Oedipus were felt in a way we would immediately recognize. We assume a fundamental psychological uniformity across history, a stable human nature experiencing the world through the same cognitive lens. This chapter will challenge that assumption. It proposes that while the brains of ancient peoples were biologically modern, their cognitive architecture - the functional organization of their minds - was fundamentally different.
The central premise is that for much of antiquity, the mind was an extended system, a dynamic loop between the organism and a carefully structured environment, rather than a private, internal sanctum. This perspective transcends the view of the world as merely an object of thought, reframing it instead as a component of thought. This is a theory of "active externalism," based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes. Where we see a clear boundary between the thinking self and the external world, many ancient cultures may have experienced a "coupled system," where neural, bodily, and environmental processes were so tightly integrated that they constituted a single cognitive entity. This requires a shift from a purely "brain-centric" model of cognition to one of embodied and extended cognition, where thinking happens not just in the head but through the body and in the world. This perspective draws on the idea that Bronze Age minds operated through participatory consciousness rather than our modern subject-object distinction - a mode of cognition Henri Frankfort termed "mythopoeic thought".
This line of inquiry has provocative precursors. In the 1970s, the psychologist Julian Jaynes advanced the hypothesis of a "bicameral mind," arguing that until roughly 3,000 years ago, humans lacked modern notion of consciousness and instead experienced auditory commands - the voices of gods. Jaynes theorized these were directives passing between brain hemispheres, but this material explanation does not necessarily disenchant the phenomenon. If a divine force were to speak, it would presumably do so through the vehicle of the brain's language centers. The biological mechanism describes how the voice was heard, not necessarily what was speaking. While Jaynes's specific neurological model is widely considered a metaphor rather than biological fact today, his core intuition - that the "inner space" of the mind is a recent cultural invention rather than a biological default - provides a useful framing. This chapter will refine that intuition, proposing a theory grounded not in internal neurology, but in pervasive environmental scaffolding.
To understand the foundations of this scaffolding, we must look further back than the city-states, to the very ontologies of our earliest ancestors. When we attempt to peer into the worldviews of the earliest human societies, our modern categories limit us even more. For over a century, the standard tool for describing these prehistoric worldviews was "animism," a concept popularized by the 19th-century anthropologist Sir Edward Tylor. He defined it as the "belief in spiritual beings" and proposed it as the earliest, most primitive form of all belief systems. Tylor argued that early humans, trying to make sense of phenomena like dreams and death, made an intellectual "mistake," concluding that a soul-like entity could exist separately from the body and then incorrectly extending this concept to animals, plants, and inanimate objects. This theory, a product of its time, framed the "animist" worldview as a kind of failed science, a "savage dogma" representing the lowest rung on an evolutionary ladder that culminated in modern scientific rationality.
This perspective is now widely seen as imposing a modern philosophical framework - specifically, a sharp distinction between subjects (humans) and objects (nature) - onto cultures that do not share it. The most insightful critique comes from a recent movement in anthropology known as the "ontological turn." Thinkers in this school argue that the entire Western approach is a category error. Animism, they contend, is an ontology - a different way of being in the world - rather than an epistemology or a set of mistaken beliefs about it.
This shift in understanding is articulated through two key concepts. First, Nurit Bird-David's work on the Nayaka hunter-gatherers of South India proposes that their animism is a "relational epistemology". For the Nayaka, the world is composed of relatives with whom one engages, rather than objects to be known. Knowledge is acquired not through detached observation, but through intimate, attentive, and responsive relationships with the beings - human and other-than-human - that constitute their environment. Second, and more radically, the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, drawing on Amazonian ethnography, developed the theory of "perspectivism" or "multinaturalism". This is an ontology where "culture" or "humanity" is the universal condition, and "nature" is what differentiates beings. All beings - jaguars, tapirs, spirits, humans - share a common internal subjectivity; they see themselves as "human" and live in societies with chiefs, shamans, and ceremonies. What differs is their bodily form, their "nature," which in turn determines their perspective on the world. As Viveiros de Castro famously puts it, "what to us is blood, is maize beer to the jaguar". The world is thus a multiplicity of natures viewed from a single cultural standpoint, the inverse of the Western multiculturalist view of a single nature viewed from multiple cultural standpoints.
This relational ontology transforms our understanding of the prehistoric hunter's engagement with the animal world. It moves beyond the simplistic binaries of the "noble savage" living in perfect harmony or the brutal pragmatist focused only on the kill. The relationship was a complex negotiation of care, control, respect, and reciprocity. To hunt successfully, one had to understand the animal as another agent, another person, in the world. This created a deep moral dilemma: to survive, one had to kill another person. Yukaghir hunters in Siberia express this tension, fearing spiritual counter-predation and feeling shame, as if they had killed a human. Rituals of respect, therefore, are not quaint superstitions but essential social protocols for managing this dangerous and reciprocal relationship. They are a way to appease the powerful spirit-masters of the animals, who are understood to "gift" their prey to the hunter, ensuring the continuity of life. Shamanic practices across both Siberia and Amazonia are built upon this foundation, where the shaman is a master diplomat who communicates and negotiates with the other-than-human persons that populate the cosmos.
Perhaps the most complete expression of such an integrated, relational ontology is the Australian Aboriginal concept of the Dreaming. This is not a past time of creation, but an "Everywhen" - a timeless, all-encompassing reality that enfolds the past, the present, and the future. The Dreaming is not a collection of myths about the land; it is the land. During the creative era, ancestral beings journeyed across the landscape, and their actions and bodies became the rivers, rocks, and waterholes we see today. The paths they traveled are the "songlines," which are simultaneously maps, legal codes, and sacred histories. This ontology is a lived, daily reality that provides a total, integrated moral and social framework, leaving no conceptual space for a separate "religious" or "secular" sphere. It is a world where one's ancestry, the land, and the cosmic order are one and the same.
The relational ontology described in the previous section finds concrete support in the linguistic and mythological structures of early societies. The very language used to describe cosmic forces reveals a world experienced not as a collection of static objects to be "worshipped" (which was most common later, during agriculture era), but as a dynamic community of active agents. An examination of early Indo-European, Egyptian, and Slavic deities shows that they are often defined not by nouns, but by verbs - their identity is their action.
The most securely reconstructed deity in the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) pantheon is the sky god, whose name is rendered as Dyews Phater, literally "Sky Father". This name is not merely a label; it is a description of an action. The root dyeu-, from which Dyews derives, means "to shine" or "daylight". This root is the etymological ancestor of a vast family of words across Indo-European languages related to divinity, sky, and day: Greek Zeus, Roman Jupiter (from Iou-pater), Sanskrit Dyáuṣ, and even the Latin words deus ("god") and dies ("day"). The primordial experience was not of a static entity named "Sky God" but of the active, divine, and paternal shining of the sky. The god was the phenomenon in action.
A similar agentic quality defines the Egyptian sun god, Ra. His mythology is a continuous narrative of doing. He is not simply the sun; he is the one who sails across the sky each day in his solar barque, the Mandjet. Each night, he journeys through the underworld, where he fights the chaos serpent Apophis to ensure the next day's dawn. He is the one who creates life by uttering the secret names of things, and humanity itself is said to have sprung from his tears. His various names and forms - Khepri (the scarab beetle) as the rising sun, Atum as the setting sun - are not static titles but markers for different phases of his daily cycle of activity. Ra's identity is inseparable from his perpetual, world-sustaining labor.
This pattern extends to Slavic mythology, where the creator god Svarog is conceived as a celestial blacksmith. His name is associated with the Slavic root for fire and heat (var). He is a god of action: he forges the sun and places it in the sky, creates the world with his divine hammer, and teaches humanity the craft of metallurgy. Like his Indo-European and Egyptian counterparts, his power is defined not by a state of being, but by a process of active, divine creation and intervention.
This linguistic and mythological evidence provides a concrete foundation for the more abstract anthropological theories of relational ontology. A world described primarily through verbs and active agents is a world one relates to, not one one merely observes from a distance. If the sky is "the shining one" and the sun is "the sailing one," these are not objects of worship in the modern sense but powerful persons with whom one must interact. The noun-based, objectifying tendency of modern scientific language, which allows us to speak of "the sky" or "the sun" as inert things, is itself a product of the great modern partition of subject and object. The language of our ancestors offers a window into an ontology where the cosmos was a verb.
As societies settled and grew more complex, this direct relation to cosmic agents evolved into a more structured framework for social survival. If the structure of the ancient mind was extended into the world, we must then ask about its content. What was the cultural logic that animated this distributed structure? A central feature of this cognitive ecology was the pervasive presence of gods, spirits, and other unseen agents. To a modern sensibility, this appears to be a matter of primitive belief. From a cognitive science perspective, however, it can be understood as a highly effective, and in some sense natural, way of interfacing with a complex and often unpredictable world.
Humans possess a highly developed cognitive system for perceiving minds and detecting intentional agency in our environment[1]. This "agency detection" mechanism is a deep-seated adaptation for living in complex social groups, where being able to infer the intentions, beliefs, and desires of others is a critical survival skill. This system is highly sensitive. This cognitive predisposition makes belief in unseen agents - spirits, ghosts, gods - cognitively natural. Whether this is an "overactive" error or a functional capacity to perceive a wider reality depends on one's metaphysical stance. In either case, it is the default state that requires a deliberate intellectual effort to override. Once a phenomenon is framed as an intentional agent, humans can deploy their most powerful predictive and manipulative tool: social intelligence. Reality was composed of agents that could be tracked, found, logically understood and somewhat reasoned with.