Healsatin
Legend
They were also concerned with why the sky seemed angry with them. Or why their young/women had a high mortality rate during child birth. And why food was more scare during different seasons. Gods and other superstitions became the explanations for all these problems early humans faced. Religion has always been around, even before organized religion.
Early man was significantly more likely to be religious than man today. I would have to disagree that anyone was atheist back then.
I don't believe that religion has always been around. Someone came up with the idea of religion and before that the idea didn't exist, so I believe that there were human beings who were self-aware who did not believe in any religion. That's not saying that those first humans were self-aware didn't invent that idea, i'm merely suggesting that there has to have been at least a time in their lives where the first self-aware people didn't have an answer to any questions of the universe and therefore made up their own. I do however agree that early man's inclination to be affiliated with a religion was significantly more likely than it is today simply because of the amount of scientific knowledge we have accumulated in the past few centuries. We now have answers to some of these questions of the universe, and religion is no longer necessary to explain how the universe works since we actually know how some of it works now.