We know they had a capacity for ritual, from their burial practices, and they do seem to have had made artwork in some forms, as well as the flute that was found once before, and most of the early signs of religious behaviour and symbolism appear in the Middle Paleolithic.
While we obviously have no writing from that period, we have been able to make educated guesses about what Homo Sapiens of that time may have believed from comparative methods and reconstructions. So while we can never know for sure, we have something to work with. The Neanderthal case is much more sparse, but may well have been some similar animistic system for all we know.
What gets my curiosity, however, is not just the archaeological questions but the spiritual ones. Would the gods and spirits they venerated just be the same as us, just by other names? Or could they have had their own deities whose names have been lost to time? If so, could they still be contacted in some way? Or are they beyond us? And really, is there any way to know any of this for sure at all?

>>40652938 (OP)
Interesting idea

Have a bump

>>40652980
Thanks. I am very fond of studying the whole Pleistocene epoch, and it's been something on my mind for some time. We can logically extend it beyond the Neanderthals too, to other races with similar levels of development like the Denisovans, but I focused on them here because we know the most about them. I suspect in actuality their belief systems may have been fairly similar to homo sapiens of the period but that doesn't preclude possibilities of unique lost deities as well.

>>40653052
Do you think these pre historic deities may be precursors to early figures in places like Mesopotamia?

>>40653052
We can only assume that theiy worshipped gods of the same motiphs as other peoples of their time or at least similar, the only gods that may be different would be ones of motiphs exclusive to the lands they lived on, but how accurately could one guess those?

>>40653061
Sort of. I wouldn't necessarily say these hypothetical gods of the neanderthals were, however, I think prehistoric religion absolutely is in general however.
Some useful books to look at are The Catalpa Bow and Pagan Britain in part, but I'll elaborate a bit here. We can tell a lot about the Proto-Indo-European religion based on reconstruction, and so we know that all the gods of Europe and much of the Indo-Aryan region share a common root. But we can see that there are other similar cases as well. There is the unified sort of "Shamanic" tradition that we can see from the North Eurasian regions and extending even into the Americas. The Bear Cults, for example, we can see similarities even between the Ainu and the Uralic peoples. There is an underlying shamanic tradition beneath Shinto, and we can see odd similarities between a lot of the Native American and the Eurasian religions.
These are just two sort of examples but we can see other weird similarities and patterns in other regions in archetypes and forms.
For the early Homo Sapiens, they seem likely to have followed similar beliefs of animism and possibly shamanic practice. However, we can actually see traces of animism even in more developed polytheistic religions of these areas. The Elves and spirits of Germanic religion, the Kami of Shinto, the fey of the Celts.
I think we can then see a lot of Polytheism as a development and codification of the earlier religions of prehistoric peoples, and that the figures we recognize as the Gods of Mesopotamia and the Indo-Europeans may have their origins as either ancient spirits worshiped there, or as deified ancestors.

>>40653108
I think actually ones that are derived from the land are a lot more likely to have continued to be venerated by later peoples, just under new names or guises. The ones that are far less likely to be transmitted would be ancestral deities.

>>40653216

>ancestral deities

Likely closer to nature forces, animal spirits and ancestors in these Paleolithic shamanistic traditions. More archetype than deity still, something embodied by the shaman in altered states of mind. It would make good sense in such an old knowledge system (which we can assume any tool making hominid already had to some degree). Likely still retained this "shape" in the earliest permanent settlements until the tradition was slowly hollowed out in the later city / temple state administration Al takeover (*administrational but thank you, autocorrect) and turned into an idolatrous mechanism, only keeping some of the older myths and stories, not always with a deeper understanding of what they once meant.

>>40652938 (OP)

>>40653795
Likely, but this is probably more the basis for the ones we know of into history than anything. We can still see some signs of this here and there, so most likely the case.
>>40654902
Interestingly we don't get any statues proper until the Upper Paleolithic, and the oldest one we have is a therianthropic figure. Depictions of humans in cave art are pretty rare throughout the Paleolithic and even after that, it is nearly all animals and the occasional half-man half-beast figure as well.