Problem with that hypothesis is that pre modern people treated death very differently with in many places it was quite literal and physical, for example in ancient Germanic societies they thought of the underworld as someplace only the dead could travel to as in the actual corpses went to the underworld at night and returned to their grave during the day. Hell we can even see the ideas of the soul being refined during the Hellenic period with most philosophers settling on it being an “animating force” which is vague but about right with the ancient Greeks. The idea of the soul is probably relatively recent IE middle stone age at the earliest, and probably evolved out of far more ancient animistic traditions.
Problem with that hypothesis is that pre modern people treated death very differently with in many places it was quite literal and physical, for example in ancient Germanic societies they thought of the underworld as someplace only the dead could travel to as in the actual corpses went to the underworld at night and returned to their grave during the day. Hell we can even see the ideas of the soul being refined during the Hellenic period with most philosophers settling on it being an “animating force” which is vague but about right with the ancient Greeks. The idea of the soul is probably relatively recent IE middle stone age at the earliest, and probably evolved out of far more ancient animistic traditions.