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The root of this idea lies in human experience and observation. When primitive people fell asleep, they had the most fantastic dreams with their own participation or friends, while others could accurately report that the body remained in place.
Without reliable information about dreams, they considered sleep to be as important a part of life as being awake.
But if the body is at rest, then there is another part of the person that can exist separately, only at a different time.
This idea is inevitably born out of simple observations. Physical bodies have no will, no desires, no drives, no reasoning, no memory. After death, the human body loses its will and motivation, loses the ability to reason, etc. It becomes a physical body. What is called together (as a whole) all that a person loses at the time of death? Let's call it the soul. Even the most primitive peoples are capable of such simple (and unavoidable) conclusions.
More developed peoples notice new properties in the soul – self-consciousness, the ability to abstract, the ability and need to perceive and create beauty, etc. This is all that a person (or we can say the human body) also loses at the moment of death. But this is not available (or almost not available) to animals. Further, some cultures introduce another level here – spirit. They consider reason and beauty to belong to the spirit, as something that is not equal to the soul. But not all, some cultures do not distinguish between spirit and soul.