>>510022830
The hunter-gatherer existed in a state of pure immediacy that rendered gods psychologically unnecessary and practically irrelevant. Their entire cognitive apparatus was devoted to survival's concrete demands—tracking animal movements, reading weather patterns, identifying edible plants, navigating terrain, and maintaining group cohesion. Every mental resource was allocated to tangible, observable realities that demanded immediate response. There was no luxury of contemplating abstract causation when a missed opportunity meant hunger, when a misread sign meant death, when group dynamics required constant attention to prevent exile. The hunter-gatherer's relationship with nature was direct and transactional—they understood storms as weather to shelter from, not as expressions of divine anger requiring interpretation or appeasement.

This cognitive state represented a kind of intellectual purity that agricultural societies would never recapture. The hunter-gatherer's mind operated like a finely tuned instrument of practical intelligence, processing environmental data without the interference of metaphysical speculation. They experienced what modern humans might call "flow state" as their default mode—completely absorbed in the present moment's demands, with no mental bandwidth for existential anxiety or cosmic questioning. Death was simply another environmental factor to avoid, not a philosophical problem requiring supernatural explanation. Pain, beauty, and mystery were immediate experiences to navigate rather than puzzles demanding narrative resolution. The absence of gods in their worldview wasn't intellectual limitation but cognitive efficiency—their minds were too occupied with reality's demands to construct elaborate fictions about invisible agents orchestrating their lives.