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…you might conclude that ancient people, spending well over 95% of their waking time on survival in a hostile world, still had time to be the most religious people in history.

Survival in a hostile world is precisely why religion would have been important to ancient peoples and religions and rituals that centered on the sun and moon and the seasons would have made sense.

Absent an understanding of science, they would have wanted and needed to believe that someone or something was controlling the rhythms of the life cycle they observed and that these forces could be appealed to or appeased in order to ensure the sun really would continue to come up every morning, the long cold winter would end, the plants would grow and the animals they hunted would be plentiful.

Neolithic and Bronze Age people put a lot of time and effort and resources into the burial of their dead and often buried everyday or sentimental objects with the deceased and the burial mounds and chambers and stone circles became larger and more complex over time. The burials themselves are evidence of some type of belief in an afterlife and therefore religion.

The later ancient Egyptians were obsessed with the cult of death and the afterlife and spent a lot of their resources on religious ceremonies and rituals, mummification and their greatest building projects, the Pyramids were basically highly sophisticated and engineered burial mounds and their culture developed and thrived for a long time. But I’m sure that every day life for the average ancient Egyptian was hard, brutal and short. The change of seasons and predicable events like the flooding of the Nile was also very important to their survival and also played a big part in their religious beliefs.

In the European Middle Ages, the building of Cathedrals was a major undertaking and took a lot of time, money and resources but yet again, the world for everyday people was still pretty hostile yet they were by our modern standard, very religious.

And as earlier people became less nomadic, started cultivating crops and formed permanent settlements, religion and ritual would also have provided structure and cohesiveness to communities and perhaps early concepts of law and justice and governance.

Just my hypothesis, but I can envision that gatherings that some presume to be purely religious ceremonies may have also been practical and important community meetings where the leaders (elders, chiefs, priests, etc.) made and communicated their plans and decisions, heard grievances and settled disputes, etc.