> Religion was more likely a way of understanding the natural world, like death, floods, luck, etc.
It’s impossible to know because we lack written records from the period, but this largely aligns with the earliest religious writings; they are mythical stories, often a sort of folk physics. The point is that the search for meaning is implicit in being able to ask a question. Animals might try to discover an algorithm of behavior to obtain a reward (e.g. press the button, get a biscuit), but it isn’t clear that they can even ask questions (“Why does pressing the button produce a biscuit?”). The question “Why does it rain?” doesn’t ask anything philosophical, but it does imply “I need to know why it rains.”
We could reduce this all to purely evolutionary terms (“I need to know why it rains to further propagate my genes”), but my hunch is that something deeper is going on.
> I think there is no universal meaning innate to humanity. There are meaningful things, like love, friendship, having your basic physical needs met.
I appreciate from the tone of your post that this probably is not your position, but this line of reasoning is the cause of a lot of strife. If there is no universal meaning (or no means by which we can ascertain it, e.g. in moral skepticism), then we can’t really go on to say that there is an ethical imperative to fight injustice; we can’t even really define anything as injustice.
> All of your needs are met, you don’t need to go and gather or hunt for food every day.
I see what you mean. I had interpreted your comment to be in the vein of certain strains of eastern or postmodern thought which take that claim rather literally; we don’t “have” to do anything, and every choice is just as valid as every other choice. Whereas what it sounds like you are saying is that when our physical needs are met, the mind has time to wander, and this leads to the hedonic treadmill that motivates adventure, conquest, philosophizing, and things like that.
I think there’s some merit to this idea; I suspect being engaged in satisfying pressing physical needs would correlate with lower levels of neuroticism (anxiety, depression, etc.), though this is only a hunch. The reason I took exception to your comment was that it seemed like it was reducing all of those activities to being merely a product of a flawed mentality resulting from material excess, whereas I would contest that and say that human history is in fact a product of something meaningful - not just personally meaningful, but ultimately meaningful.