With grave goods being a prominent aspect of funerary customs from many of the ancient cultures, some around 12,000 years old, and the oldest at the Qafzeh caves in Israel from around 90,000 BP it seems our ancestors felt the need to acknowledge death as an event to be remarked upon. Do we think these earlier humans were engaging in religious activity or socio-cultural customs?
Good question. I doubt if those ancients had a concept of religion. They were just following social customs.
That would be true, Indeed, religion is a Western concept and many of the descriptive - isms don't arise until post Enlightened. See the work of Csntwell Smith on the subject
Perhaps a combination of both plus a third factor that may well have been the origin of all burial practices that no one has mentioned. Completely nomadic groups that were constantly on the move in the African savanna could leave their dead where they fell without consequence. Later groups settling in certain locations for some time (cave dwellers is one example) faced a problem when it came to their dead. Aside from the disagreeable odor of a decomposing body in the house there was the existential problem of the scent attracting predators and large scavengers.
I am of the opinion, based on what evidence there is so far, that burial was originally driven because of survival/odor issues and that any ceremony revolving around the burial of clan members came at a later stage. Of course I could be wrong, but it seems to be the more logical sequence.