Long before recorded history, humans lived (out of necessity) much closer to the natural cycles. It is out of this affinity with nature that humans first began to personify the inherent energies of the land as individual Gods and Goddesses. In this manner, the ancients attempted to make sense of what must often have been a very illogical universe.
The earliest peoples would have practiced a lifestyle very closely tied to the cycles of hunting and gathering (for obvious reasons, anthropologists refer to them as "hunter-gatherers").
Some research supports the theory that the most ancient formalized religion was one of ancestor worship. During those periods just after the beginnings of recorded history, we see evidence, which points towards this conclusion. The earliest evidence of pre-Christian Roman culture indicates that the Romans practiced some forms of ancestor worship. Early Roman culture borrowed extensively from the Etruscans; in fact many scholars accept that the Etruscan culture had an enormous impact on the civilizations of their time. Etruscan pottery has been found in excavations throughout the "Roman Empire", even as distant as Britain.
In addition to the reverence placed on the ancestors of a tribe or clan, the role of women appears to have remained significant. Long before the advent of patriarchal societies, an individual's family ties were determined by the line of descent from the mother's side. Some cultures still determine descent in this manner, however they are now greatly in the minority. The patriarchal lineage appears to have its strongest foothold in warrior societies or their offshoots. As the Celts had strong warrior women, it is decidedly unclear if patriarchy is the cause or result of such societies.
Eventually, the hunter-gatherer societies changed. Their pastoral culture slowly transformed either by natural evolution of by force, into an agrarian one. This culture was delineated less by the cycles of the hunat, and more by the ability to sow and reap the corps of the field. Several clans may have settled in a single area, and by developing more specialized functions became a small village. Gods and Goddesses of the forest and the wild places slowly began to be passed by and occasionally forgotten: their places userped by those of field or cattle and flocks. As these areas grew from village to towns and larger urban areas, so the Gods and Goddesses changed. "New" deities appear on the scene and new aspects of the Older Gods emerge: smithcraft, milling, and the like needed patrons to oversee them. In the East, and in other lands, many bands still clung to nomadic ways. Others still, spent some or all of their energies on the process of war. The divine spirits of these warrior bands appear to be almost exclusively male. Within those societies, it became the physiological strength of the male, which is of prime importance. As these bands grew and conquered others, so their patriarchal views of the order of things began to spread.
History is written by the conquerors, and re-written by the next one. So too, is religion. As the patriarchal bands, and later, patriarchal cultures, conquered and expanded their territories, so they re-wrote the histories and practices of the peoples they conquered. Several fine examples of this have much later dates in history:
