The Cosmic Hunt

[lpetrich]

We human beings have been telling stories about ourselves and about the world around us for as long as we have any record of doing so, and likely for all of our existence as a species. Some such stories have rather obvious environmental origins, like the monster theory of eclipses. But others are not quite as obvious.

Like the  Cosmic Hunt

he Cosmic Hunt is an old and widely distributed family of cognate myths. They are stories about a large animal that is pursued by hunters, is wounded, and is transformed into a constellation. Variants of the Cosmic Hunt are common in cultures of Northern Eurasia and the Americas, and include the story of Callisto in classical sources.[1] The prey animal is either a bear or an ungulate, and the constellation it is transformed into is typically the four stars of the bowl in the Big Dipper asterism of Ursa Major. In some variants blood or grease may fall from the wounded animal; in an Iroquois version the blood causes leaves to change color in autumn.[1] Sometimes the hunters are also placed in the firmament, represented by the stars of the Big Dipper's handle.

The OLDEST story in the World - The Cosmic Hunt - An INCREDIBLE discovery - YouTube

Why might a Cosmic Hunt be common there and not elsewhere in the world? There are plenty of large animals in India and Southeast Asia and Africa, even if not as much in New Guinea or Australia, and plenty of bright stars observable from these places. Mid to far northern latitudes have cold winters and far northern latitudes are especially difficult to survive in. Might that make a difference? But these stories are about hunts, not about stocking up on pemmican to make it through the winter.

 

[lpetrich]

Scientists Trace Society's Myths to Primordial Origins - Scientific American

• Scholars have long wondered why complex mythical stories that surface in cultures widely separated in space and time are strikingly similar.
• New research models harness conceptual and statistical tools from evolutionary biology to untangle the history of myths.
• Phylogenetic trees reveal that species of myths evolve slowly and parallel patterns of mass human migration out of Africa and around the globe.
• Recent studies provide insights into the prehistoric origins of some myths and the migration of Eurasians to North America more than 15,000 years ago.

...
My phylogenetic studies make use of the extra rigor of statistical and computer-modeling techniques from biology to elucidate how and why myths and folktales evolve. In addition to the Cosmic Hunt, I have analyzed other major families of myths that share recurring themes and plot elements. Pygmalion stories depict a man who creates a sculpture and falls in love with it. In Polyphemus myths, a man gets trapped in the cave of a monster and escapes by insinuating himself into a herd of animals, under the monster’s watchful eye.

Psychologist Carl Jung believed that different people's myths look similar because they come from the same place, the "collective unconscious". But some more plausible hypothesis may be shared stimuli or how our minds work. An eclipse of the Moon or the Sun looks like something is eating those celestial bodies. Many origin stories feature Lamarckian inheritance, as does a lot of folklore, like maternal impressions and the genetic engineering of Genesis 30 in the Bible. Could that be what we find plausible?

There are plenty of large animals in most places that humanity lived before developing agriculture, and bright stars are visible from everywhere on our planet. So one might expect Cosmic Hunt stories to be everywhere.

Instead they are nearly absent in Indonesia and New Guinea and very rare in Australia but present on both sides of the Bering Strait, which geologic and archaeological evidence indicates was above water between 28,000 and 13,000 B.C. The most credible working hypothesis is that Eurasian ancestors of the first Americans brought the family of myths with them.

So author Julien d'Huy decided to try to construct a family tree of myths. He collected numerous myths and sorted out the story motifs or "mythemes" in them, and then used phylogeny software on them.

What he found for the Cosmic Hunt:

One branch of the tree connects Greek and Algonquin versions of the myth. Another branch indicates passage through the Bering Strait, which then continued into Eskimo country and to the northeastern Americas, possibly in two different waves. Other branches suggest that some versions of the myth spread later than the others from Asia toward Africa and the Americas.

 

[lpetrich]

Another common sort of myth is versions of the Pygmalion story. In Greek mythology, he carved a statue of a woman, dressed it up, and talked to it and caressed it every day. He sacrificed a bull to Aphrodite, praying to her to have a wife just like that statue, and when he returned home, he found that that statue was now a real woman.

JdH concludes that the story started out in northern Africa and spread northward to Greece and southward to eastern Africa then southern Africa.

This story seems rather obvious. Making statues and statuettes has been a very common practice, going back into the Paleolithic, and a man might fantasize about making a woman for himself. But what is the distribution of Pygmalion stories?

Then Polyphemus stories, from Homer's Odyssey. On his way home from fighting in Troy, Odysseus has lots of misadventures, like when he and his men end up in a cave that the Cyclops Polyphemus keeps his livestock in during the night. Each day, the one-eyed giant moves a rock to let his livestock out to pasture for the day, so they can graze, and he moves it again to let the livestock back in. Polyphemus was eating Odysseus's men, and Odysseus thought of a plan. He sharpened a stick and hardened it in a fire, and he gave the giant some undiluted wine. Who gave this great gift, he asked. "Nobody", responded Odysseus, "oudeis" in Greek, which sounds like his name.

But one night, as Polyphemus slept, Odysseus poked his only eye out with that sharpened stick. Polyphemus was outraged, asking who did that. "Nobody", responded Odysseus, and Polyphemus told his fellow Cyclopses that it was nobody who poked his eye out. The next morning, Odysseus and his remaining men held on to Polyphemus's livestock, hanging beneath the animals' bellies, as Polyphemus led the animals out to pasture, and these men escaped.

The Blackfoot Indians, an Algonquin tribe that depended on hunting buffalo to get enough food to survive, passed a related story from generation to generation. The trickster Crow, who is both human and bird, hides a herd of buffalo in a cave. Crow is eventually captured and placed over a smoke hole, which explains why, ever since, crows are black. Crow promises to free the buffalo. But he breaks his promise. Two heroic hunters transform themselves—one into a puppy, the other into a wood staff. Crow’s daughter picks up the puppy and staff and takes them to the cave. There the two hunters transform themselves again, one into a large dog, the other into a man, to drive the buffalo aboveground. They get past Crow by hiding under the skin of a buffalo as the herd charges out of the cave.

A composite phylogenetic tree of the family of Polyphemus myths indicates that the stories followed two major migratory patterns: The first, in Paleolithic times, spread the myth in Europe and North America. The second, in Neolithic times, paralleled the proliferation of livestock farming.

This story is plausibly inspired by animal herding, but a Paleolithic antecedent is more difficult to picture, since the animals roam without having any definite home. But the Greek-mythology version has something in common with trickster stories, since Odysseus wins by trickery.

This protomyth—revealed by three separate phylogenetic databases, many statistical methods and independent ethnological data—reflects the belief, widely held by ancient cultures, in the existence of a master of animals who keeps them in a cave and the need for an intermediary to free them. It could also be part of a Paleolithic conception of how game emerges from an underworld.

Then some discussion of Paleolithic cave paintings, noting features that seem to fit versions of these myths.

 

[lpetrich]

Julien d'Huy then discussed stories of legendary serpents and dragons, concluding that they are older than present humanity's departure from Africa some 60,000 years ago.

Mythological serpents guard water sources, releasing the liquid only under certain conditions. They can fly and form a rainbow. They are giants and have horns or antlers on their heads. They can produce rain and thunderstorms. Reptiles, immortal like others who shed their skin or bark and thus rejuvenate, are contrasted with mortal men and/or are considered responsible for originating death, perhaps by their bite. In this context, a person in a desperate situation gets to see how a snake or other small animal revives or cures itself or other animals. The person uses the same remedy and succeeds.

Like the Australian Rainbow Serpent.

Could it be as old as humanity?

He hopes to continue his researches.

My more immediate goal is to expand and refine the burgeoning phylogenetic supertree of Paleolithic myths, which already includes stories of the life-giving sun as a big mammal and of women as primordial guardians of sacred knowledge sanctuaries.

The Sun as a large animal? I'd expect a big fire in the sky, which is more-or-less what the Sun actually is, to within a lot of hand-waving about what is a fire. But then again, the Sun moves across the sky, and that's what may suggest a large animal.

Also, in some languages, the word for "Sun" literally means "eye of the day" (Indonesian matahari, for instance) or "eye of the sky",

 

[bilby]

Psychologist Carl Jung believed that different people's myths look similar because they come from the same place, the "collective unconscious". But some more plausible hypothesis may be shared stimuli or how our minds work.

More likely than either hypothesis is simply that there aren't very many possible stories.

We have persuaded ourselves that our narrative worlds are rich and varied, and we have millions of books, plays, movies, TV serials, etc., etc., to bear this out.

But once you start comparing stories to examine their similarities, you discover that there's only a tiny number of different basic tales; The rest is just recombining these basic elements in different ways, and giving the roles to different characters.

Of course, as my link above discusses, there's much debate of how few (or how many) stories there are; But as the range goes from three to thirty six, with most assessments in the single digits, it would be remarkable if widely separated peoples didn't have a considerable overlap in the kinds of stories they tell, particularly when inspired by an almost universally shared phenomenon, such as the patterns of stars in the night sky.

 

[lpetrich]

jCOMPARING MYTHOLOGIES ON A GLOBAL SCALE: A REVIEW ARTICLE BY N.J. ALLEN/url]

E.J. Michael Witzel, The origins of the world’s mythologies, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2012, xx, 665 pp.

...
Attested mythologies fall into two classes. Laurasian mythologies are found across North Africa, Eurasia and the Americas, while Gondwana ones occur in sub-Saharan Africa, the Andaman Islands, Papua and Australia, with smaller remnant pockets elsewhere, e.g. among the Todas in South India and the Semang in Malaya.

Laurasian mythologies are presented first and at twice the length of the Gondwana ones, the latter being studied less in their own right than as a ‘countercheck’ on the validity of the other group. Laurasian mythologies are said to possess a single story line running from the creation of the world to its destruction, while other typical features include the creation of Father Heaven and Mother Earth; four or five generations of supernaturals; heaven pushed up; killing the dragon; flood as punishment for hubris; trickster deities bring culture; local history begins. In Gondwana mythologies the existence of Earth, Heaven and Sea is taken for granted and not narrated, nor is there any final destruction with the emergence of a new heaven and earth. Despite certain overlaps, for instance regarding floods and culture bringers (323, Table 5.3), many features of Laurasian mythology are simply absent. The ‘forest of tales’ found in Gondwana contrasts with ‘our first novel’ – the ‘well-laid-out garden of symbols’ in Laurasia (430).

Gondwanan mythologies were humanity's first ones, brought out of Africa some 60,000 years ago by the first of our species to depart our continent of origin. They went to Arabia, India, Southeast Asia, New Guinea, and Australia.  Early human migrations

Some 40,000 years ago, an offshoot population headed northward and spread out over northern Eurasia, and then into the Americas.  Ancient North Eurasian were some early ones of these. Their mythologies were the Laurasian ones.

Why might Laurasian people have such a dramatic overall storyline? My best guess at the moment is the cold winters of northern Eurasia. These require plenty of preparation to survive, like making warm clothing and warm blankets, collecting firewood and dried dung, and even stockpiling food -  Pemmican - "a mixture of tallow, dried meat, and sometimes dried berries."

The long-term thinking necessary for such survival may have provoked thinking about the Universe's overall history.

 

[lpetrich]

bilby's link: Three, six or 36: how many basic plots are there in all stories ever written? | Books | The Guardian

[1606.07772v2] The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes

Advances in computing power, natural language processing, and digitization of text now make it possible to study our a culture's evolution through its texts using a "big data" lens. Our ability to communicate relies in part upon a shared emotional experience, with stories often following distinct emotional trajectories, forming patterns that are meaningful to us. Here, by classifying the emotional arcs for a filtered subset of 1,737 stories from Project Gutenberg's fiction collection, we find a set of six core trajectories which form the building blocks of complex narratives. We strengthen our findings by separately applying optimization, linear decomposition, supervised learning, and unsupervised learning. For each of these six core emotional arcs, we examine the closest characteristic stories in publication today and find that particular emotional arcs enjoy greater success, as measured by downloads.

The trajectories:

• Rise - Rags to riches”
• Fall - “Tragedy”, or “Riches to rags”
• Rise-Fall - “Icarus”
• Fall-Rise - “Man in a hole”
• Rise-Fall-Rise - "Cinderella”
• Fall-Rise-Fall - "Oedipus"
• Rise-Fall-Rise-Fall
• Fall-Rise-Fall-Rise
• Rise-Fall-Rise-Fall-Rise
• Fall-Rise-Fall-Rise-Fall

 

[lpetrich]

Three plots: In his 1959 book, Foster-Harris contends that there are three basic patterns of plot (extending from the one central pattern of conflict): the happy ending, the unhappy ending, and the tragedy [18]. In these three versions, the outcome of the story hinges on the nature and fortune of a central character: virtuous, selfish, or struck by fate, respectively.

In short, rise, fall, rise-fall.

Seven plots: Often espoused as early as elementary school in the United States, we have the notion that plots revolve around the conflict of an individual with either (1) him or herself, (2) nature, (3) another individual, (4) the environment, (5) technology, (6) the supernatural, or (7) a higher power.

Seems like too much of a split. I'll simplify: conflict with...

• Oneself
• Other sentient entities
• Nonsentient but complex entities (animals, machines)
• One's environment

An orthogonal dimension of storytelling from main-character happiness-level curves.

Seven plots: Representing over three decades of work, Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots: Why we tell stories describes in great detail seven narrative structures: [20]
– Overcoming the monster (e.g., Beowulf ).
– Rags to riches (e.g., Cinderella).
– The quest (e.g., King Solomons Mines).
– Voyage and return (e.g., The Time Machine).
– Comedy (e.g., A Midsummer Night’s Dream).
– Tragedy (e.g., Anna Karenina).
– Rebirth (e.g., Beauty and the Beast).
In addition to these seven, Booker contends that the unhappy ending of all but the tragedy are also possible.

Twenty plots: In 20 Master Plots, Ronald Tobias proposes plots that include “quest”, “underdog”, “metamorphosis”, “ascension”, and “descension”[21].

Thirty-six plots: In a translation by Lucille Ray, Georges Polti attempts to reconstruct the 36 plots that he posits Gozzi originally enumerated [22]. These are quite specific and include “rivalry of kinsmen”, “all sacrificed for passion”, both involuntary and voluntary “crimes of love” (with many more on this theme), “pursuit”, and “falling prey to cruelty of misfortune”.

Getting into detail - lots of detail.

 

[lpetrich]

Other names:

• Boreal = Laurasian
• Austral = Gondwanan

Michael Witzel himself

The complex course of investigations begins with the contents of the various Laurasian mythologies and, more importantly, their unique narrative structure. They share a common story line that tells of the creation, in mythic time, of the world, of several generations of deities during four or five ages, of the creation and fall of humans, and finally of an end of the universe, sometimes coupled with the hope for a new world.

...
The reconstruction and analysis of Laurasian mythology is counterchecked by a survey of the ‘southern’ mythologies (of Gondwana Land). They differ in some crucial aspects, such as in missing an account of the original creation of the earth. More importantly, they do not have a comprehensive story line such as the Laurasian one.

The results of these investigations are closely mirrored by those of archaeology including early Upper Paleolithic art, of comparative linguistics and human population genetics. They all point to the origin of anatomically modern humans in Africa and their subsequent spread along the shores of the Indian Ocean, up to Australia and southern China, around 65,000 BCE.

Indeed, some of their early mythology is preserved in sub-Saharan Africa and along the path of migration: in the Andaman Islands, Melanesia, and Australia. Laurasian mythology developed somewhere along the emigration path, probably in southwest Asia around 40,000 BCE.

Shared elements may be called Pangaean mythology.

 

[lpetrich]

The Laurasian storyline:

It is dominated by creation myths that tell how the world and human beings originated. This begins with primordial emergence, and leads, via four generations of deities to early semi-divine heroes, and to the origin of humans. The establishment of a sustained biosphere (oikumene) and human culture follows, as well as the later stages of human history, the origin of local ‘noble’ (subsequently, “royal”) lineages. Frequently, a violent end to our present world is envisaged, sometimes with the hope for a new world rising from its remains.

That seems a lot like Greek mythology, with its multiple generations of dominant deities. From the primordial chaos emerged the first generation, Ouranos and Gaea, Sky and Earth. Their children, led by Kronos and Rhea, overthrew them, with Kronos castrating Ouranos, his father. Kronos, in turn, was afraid that he would have a son who would do to him what he did to his father, so he swallowed all the children that his partner Rhea gave birth to. But Rhea gave him a stone instead of her sixth one, Zeus, and Zeus was raised by some foster parents. When Zeus grew up, he made Kronos vomit up his brothers and sisters, and Zeus and his friends fought Kronos and his friends, with Zeus doing what Kronos feared, overthrowing him.

... it may be pointed out that Laurasian mythology knows of a number of actual ‘creations’ or myths of emergence of the world, from chaos, water, or with the help of an earth diver, of a primordial floating earth; further, creation by the cutting up of a primordial giant, bull or egg. There also are some versions that combine several such mythemes. Some of them follow a ‘logical’ order, while others stand apart as alternative myths of origins.

Involved in this is heaven and earth being pushed apart.

Once heaven and earth are separated, the earth can be prepared for the human oikumene, usually by a primordial demiurge or trickster. This includes stabilizing the earth, the creation of light (or its release from an underground cave) and the slaying of the dragon who encompasses the (sweet) water. This heroic deed found in many versions all over Laurasia. In many traditions, the theft of fire and of the heavenly drink follows. Only after this, the earth is ready for the emergence of humans.

In many ancient Laurasian traditions (such as India, China, Japan, Maya, etc.) humans are the descendants of the Sun deity, while in others the gradually emerging Neolithic nobilities have reserved this lineage for themselves (Egypt, Polynesia, etc.), and regular humans are then sometimes created from clay or have no afterlife. In later, post-Neolithic versions of Laurasian mythology, more is found about the emergence of local nobilities (and ‘kings’) and about their lineages. At this stage, more details of human culture, including rituals and the shaman-like performers are introduced as well. The change from myth to (legendary) local history usually occurs at this stage.

However, with the first humans, evil and death enter into the world. The evil and the hubris of humans is taken care of in different ways. Often, a great, all-devastating flood (Greece, Mesopotamia, Bible, Vedic India, Meso-America) is connected with the origin and spread of evil among early humans and with their hubris. Though the world and humans are restored after the primordial flood, we find the final destruction of the world and even of the gods (as a variant of the Four Ages theme) at the end of human history. A new heaven and a new earth or eternal bliss are promised in some mythologies.

The people with Laurasia-style mythology are people with mitochondrial genetic groups M, N, etc. and Y-chromosome genetic groups C, F, etc.

Language also fits, at least if one is willing to do some very speculative macro-linguistics. With one exception, the oldest generally-accepted language families are Mid-Holocene in age, about 5,000 - 6,000 years old, notably Indo-European and Austronesian. The exception is Afroasiatic, dating back to the beginning of the Holocene or a little earlier, about 12,000 years or more. Turning to speculative families, Eurasiatic (most of Nostratic), Dene-Caucasian, and Austric date back to the time of Afroasiatic, and there's an even more speculative one, Borean, which includes all four of them, and which goes back even further, to 20,000 years or more.

 

[lpetrich]

More from COMPARING MYTHOLOGIES ON A GLOBAL SCALE: A REVIEW ARTICLE BY N.J. ALLEN (title fixed) by EJ Michael Witzel

About Gondwanan mythologies, of sub-Saharan Africa, New Guinea, Melanesia, and Australia:

First, they lack the Laurasian types of creation myths. Instead, the earth and the universe are supposed to pre-exist. Their main interest is in the creation of humans and their culture, which is often carried out by a deus otiosus who subsequently withdraws back into the sky.

Second, and more importantly, the typical Laurasian story line is also absent. This is a critical point: it would constitute crucial counterevidence if a test could indicate that the non-Laurasian mythologies do in fact possess the same, or a very similar, type of story line. So far, this could not be shown, neither by the present author nor by others. In sum, the Laurasian theory stands.

Deus otiosus = idle god

Pangaean motifs: "This is especially the case with some of the creation myths: humans emerging from trees, from clay, etc."

Jayarava's Raves: Origins of the World's Mythologies quotes MW:

In the beginning there is nothing, chaos, non-being. Sometimes there are primordial waters. The universe is created from an egg or sometimes from a cosmic man. The earth is retrieved from the waters by a diver or fisherman. (Father) heaven and (mother) earth are in perpetual embrace and their children, the gods, are born in between them. They push their parents apart and often hold them apart with an enormous tree. The light of the sun is revealed for the first time. Several generations of gods are born and there is infighting. The younger generation defeat and kill the elder. One of the gods kills a dragon and this fertilises the earth. Slaying the dragon is often associated with an intoxicating drink. The sun fathers the human race (sometimes only the chieftains of humans). Humans flourish but begin to commit evil deeds. Humans also begin to die. A great flood nearly wipes out humanity which is re-seeded by the survivors. There is a period of heroic humans and particularly the bringing of culture in the form of fire, food. The benefactor is a hero or sometimes a shaman. having survived and now equipped with culture, humans spread out. Local histories and local nobility begin to emerge and then dominate. Consistent with their being four ages of the world everything ends in the destruction of the world, humans and gods. In some stories this destruction is the prelude for cyclic renewal.

A potential problem is that many of the better-known examples of Laurasian mythologies are from Neolithic or later societies, with farming and large-scale societies, and cosmic battles and eras may simply be a projection of what happens in such societies; new rulers taking over every now and then.

Pan-Gaean Flood myths: Gondwana myths -- and beyond - Michael Witzel proposes flood stories as a Pangaean myth.

The book: The Origins of the World's Mythologies - Paperback - E.J. Michael Witzel - Oxford University Press

 

[lpetrich]

Mother Tongue Archive – Mother Tongue - Volume 19 (2014) - PDF

Has Vaclav Blazhek's review of E.J. Michael Witzel's book "The Origins ofthe World’s Mythologies"

Laurasian or northern ones:

1. Primordial waters / chaos / ‘nonbeing’
2. Primordial egg / giant.
3. Primordial hill or island.
4. (Father) Heaven / (Mother) Earth and their children (4 or 5 generations / ages).
5. Heaven is pushed up (and origin of Milky Way).
6. The hidden sun light revealed.
7. Current gods defeat or kill their predecessors.
8. Killing the ‘dragon’ (and use of heavenly drink), fertilization of the earth.
9. Sun deity is the father of humans (or just of ‘chieftains’).
10. First humans and first evil deeds (often, still by a demi-god), origin of death / the flood.
11. Heroes and nymphs.
12. Bringing of culture: fire / food / culture by a culture hero or shaman; rituals.
13. Spread of humans / emergence of local nobility / local history begins.
14. Final destruction of humans, the world (and) the gods (variant of the Four Ages theme).
15. (A new heaven and a new earth).

Father Heaven - like Proto-Indo-European Dyeus Pater ("Father Sky")

Multiple generations is something familiar from Greek mythology. Primordial chaos, then Ouranos and Gaia, then Kronos and his fellow Titans, then Zeus and his fellow Olympians, with Kronos overthrowing Ouranos and Zeus overthrowing Kronos.

Gondwanan or southern ones:

1. In the beginning : heaven, earth (and the sea) already exist.
2. A High God lives in heaven, or on earth, or ascends to heaven later. This highest being has been described as the Rainbow Snake.
3. Series of lower gods, often children of High God, act as tricksters and culture heroes.
4. Primordial period ended by some evil deed of son of High God (or by humans).
5. Humans are created from trees and clay (or rock); occasionally, descend directly from the gods / totem ancestors.
6. Humans act haughtily or make a mistake; punishment by a great flood; humans reemerge in various ways. (An end to the world is missing.)

Pangaean, or in MW's spelling, Pan-Gaean:

1. High god.
2. Creation of heaven and earth.
3. Creation of humans from clay or from a tree.
4. Cultural hero or trickster.

Seems like an attempt to find an average. But I think that humanity's first mythology was Gondwanan, with Laurasian mythology being a later offshoot.

The  Rainbow Serpent is from Australian mythology.

 

[lpetrich]

Mother Tongue Archive – Mother Tongue - Volume 15 (2010), PDF

That issue has Yuri E. Berezkin: "From Africa and back: some areal patterns of mythological motifs" - what he calls boreal and austral - northern and southern

His work involved collecting lots of myths and folktales and finding out which motifs they have in common. He has ended up with over 45,000 stories, 813 clusters of storytellers, and over 1600 motifs.

YB first noticed that North American and South American mythologies had two different sets of motifs, then found that this difference extended to the Old World.

Some tendencies are especially clear if we minimize the entropic effect of the western Eurasian fairy-tale and compute only cosmological and etiological motifs, which are relatively rarely adopted into the fairy-tale, to be introduced with it to new territories. Some other tendencies can be better understood when we address just the motifs of adventure and tricks. Though they are used in the fairy-tale and heroic epics, at least some of them were adopted from the more archaic forms of folklore and could be quite old.

The greatest variation is along an axis between (1) northern and central continental Eurasia and (2) Melanesia and Latin America -- Melanesia and Amazonia have the same position

The second component of variation is from North America and the southern cone of South America to all the rest.

 

[lpetrich]

There are far fewer cosmological and etiological tales in Africa than in Eurasia, not to mention America. The ultimate reason could be the relative monotony of landscapes and climates in Tropical Africa. Cultural evolution accelerates in response to changes of natural and cultural conditions. Peopling of new territories certainly contributed to rapid cultural development of out-of- Africa migrants, while the Africans themselves continued to live in their homeland.

But that happened over a large number of generations, and one has to look for shorter-term effects, like whether the weather is very cold for part of the year. That forces long-term thinking.

Then noting some African stories about why we are mortal and distributions of similar stories elsewhere.

Shed skin. One can live forever if one can shed one's skin and become young again, as snakes and trees do.

Immortal Moon. It grows and shrinks, grows and shrinks, grows and shrinks, ...

Stones sink, wood floats, and we missed a change to be like wood.

Originator of death the first sufferer.

The muddled message. "Person is sent by god to bring instructions or certain objects but distorts, forgets or replaces them. This has fatal consequences for humanity or for a certain class of living beings."

Then, "African motifs in the Indo-Pacific world: origin of people, heavenly bodies, atmospheric phenomena"

First people from the underworld, or emergence more generally, People of both sexes and all ages came from the ground, a rock, a tree trunk, a bamboo stem, etc. and then spread across the Earth. Also a primordial couple that comes out of some enclosure along with various animals.

"Person tricked to kill his kin."

"Milky Way as divider of seasons"

The Moon is male, and he is married to the Morning Star, the Evening Star, or both.

The Rainbow Serpent - "Rainbow is a reptile (usually a snake) or related to reptiles, fish or invertebrates." Very widespread.

"Ensnared Sun. Person prepares a snare or noose to catch the Sun and/or the Sun is caught in a snare by chance." Noting that "Such texts are different from the more general and universally widespread Sun lost and returned stories."

"The dead shake the Earth."

Then proposing that some African motifs have Eurasian origins, especially in West Africa.

"Primeval sky close to earth."

Sky pushed up with a broom or something similar

"Many suns as a threat to mankind: Indian - Balkan parallels"

The cosmic hunt.

"Lost object claimed back. A person loans an object from another person and loses it. The owner rejects any compensation and claims his property back. The first person brings the lost object from another world and usually punishes the owner for his mercilessness. In most of the cases both persons are male and the object is hunting or fishing device or a fish itself"

"Strong and weak. People are mortal because they have been likened to something subject to decay and easy destruction, e.g. to soft wood and not to stone."


Author Yuri Berezkin concludes that some of these mythological motifs were likely brought out of Africa by the first of our present species to leave that continent some 60,000 years ago.