If the evolution of models involves a speciation of fields of meaning-making, then the more ancient the time period, the less differentiated such fields were. Out of all the present-day strands of meaning-making, the most ancient models that survive from the lineages of preliterate times are those preserved in religious traditions. The religious lineage might be seen as an original all-embracing trunk from which all other branches of modelling, including the arts and sciences, later diverged. As a unified system, it originally functioned not only as ‘religion’, but as ‘science’, ‘philosophy’, ‘history’, ‘law’, and the rest, for the small community who reproduced it, with variation, generation after generation.