Long before language, scripture or named gods, something in our ancestors noticed an absence—and it would not go away. The Meaning Gap traces the deep history of that disturbance: from animals whose behaviour changes around the dead to hominins who deliberately treated bodies, from repeated places and gestures to the first marks that pointed beyond the immediate. Drawing on comparative animal behaviour, archaeology, cognitive science, psychology and the study of religion, Royd James Moore asks what had to become possible before anything could be meaningful, sacred or in need of an answer. The inquiry moves through eight layered thresholds: social disturbance, persistent absence, recurrent significance, mimetic preservation, symbolic reference, narrative, the problem of meaning and sacred order. Along the way, it confronts the work of David Lewis-Williams, Merlin Donald, Terrence Deacon, Robin Dunbar, Clifford Geertz, Ernest Becker, Émile Durkheim and Rudolf Otto. The book also examines the disputed evidence from the Rising Star cave system in South Africa—not as proof of an early religion, but as a test of the assumptions connecting brain size, species and meaning-making. This is not a book arguing for or against belief. It asks what had to change before belief, art, philosophy and religion became possible—and why an empty place could continue to matter after the body was gone.