Makes sense. I always thought religion was born the moment our intellect was. When an animal gazes up at the stars, it passes them off, only because its mind can only register one thing at a time, and those things tend to be based on survival, like eat, sleep, sex, survive, etc. However when we set foot out of our metaphorical caves and gazed up at the stars, the thing that ran through our minds was "What the hell are those thing?" We were familiar with what was around us like the animals we could eat and the animals that could eat us. But when it came to things like the stars or the glowing orange hot liquid spewing forth from the nearby mountain, our then primitive minds we're left puzzled. More importantly, we were left frightened. In order to quell our fear of these distant anomalies, our primitive minds placed human faces and personalities on them. The stars became say "Guggaglownorn and his giant pet fireflies." The nearby volcano became Pele, and so on and so forth. By putting a human face on the unknown, these things became less frightening, gave us comfort so to speak as we lived in their shadow. Over time we wove elaborate stories around their existence in an effort to explain their perfectly natural actions. We performed "early science" with them. Hypothesizing over whether throwing an animal or a man into the volcano will quell it's rage or not. In short, religion to me was an early attempt to explain away the irrational events around us, similar to the overload of cause and effect mentioned in the article.
