This reminds me too much of our old debate here about the first French speaker, and I’m not sure it’s productive to revisit that exchange. That being said, regardless of whatever one believes about whether there was a first French speaker or first conscious person, one can can also say the same about the afterlife. There are two routes one can take:
- Perhaps there is also a spectrum of levels in the afterlife, where all living things (or even inanimate things too, assuming some sort of panpsychism is true) share in an afterlife, but the duration and/or nature of the afterlife depends on how “human-like” they are.
- Perhaps some living things do not have an afterlife, so there was indeed a “first hominid with an afterlife”, but we cannot determine when that person lived, just like we cannot determine the first French speaker.