What a comparison of creation stories tells us about the human species
When the Greek traveller Aristeas visited the Gobi desert in 675 BC, Scythian nomads told him about an area where griffins hoarded gold, fighting all who dared approach. They were said to be lion-sized, with curved beaks like that of an eagle.
The nomads warned the traveller against his trespass on the guarded land. Aristeas headed their warnings, and as good fortune would have it, was able to make his way through the desert free of griffin encounters.
He survived to return and tell his tale to the Greeks, where griffins were recorded and became one of many inclusions in the mythos of the land.
In the 1920s, American adventurer Roy Chapman Andrews followed caravan trails across China to the Gobi desert, tracking down the same trail Aristeas had walked 2,597 years ago before.
Crossing Mongolia, the adventurer found the fossilised remains of a Psittacosaurus, a beaked dinosaur the size of a lion, the same shape as those described by the nomads.
After thousands of years, the griffin had finally been uncovered.
Before recorded history, ancient peoples made many attempts to explain the world around them. The fruit of their efforts survives only in the orally-performed myths which survive today, with their various versions scattered to every corner of the earth, and yet surviving still.
But despite their variety, patterns in myth do emerge. Joseph Campbell identified archetypes from his study of myth, but until recently, human creation stories had little or nothing to do with the geological record.
With recent discoveries, however, some of those assumptions may have changed for good.
The themes
There are many themes which persist universally across creation stories found in every part of the world. Below is a list of themes found across at least two cultures which did not have contact with one another that we know of and therefore are unlikely to have spread through cross-cultural communication.
Their prevalence is better explained by evolutionary psychological recollection of either geological or socio-anthropological events, passed down through oral tradition (storytelling which existed prior to written languages).
The themes are taken from the major twenty-five creation stories including the Inuit, Navajo, Iroquois, Hawaiian, Aztec, Mayan, Voudon, Inca, Mapuche, Celtic, Norse, Greek, Dogon, Yoruba, Zulu, Ancient Israelite, Egyptian, Norse, Babylonian, Sumerian, Hindu, Chinese, Japanese, Ceram, Aboriginal and Maori creation stories.
Out of all twenty five, the two most common motifs which emerge are as follows: humans being made from clay and the flood myth.
Other common features emerge, such as water existing before creation, a war among the gods, incest, humans being created against the wishes of some gods, natural disasters like earthquakes which the gods initiate in revenge for greed or trespass, humans having knowledge taken away from them by the gods, snakes (or dragons), eggs, journeys to the underworld, humans steeling fire, aspects of the world created from the parts of dead gods, an axis mundi (the rotation point of the earth, often serving as a connection between the human world and that of the gods), dualism, and end-of-the-world predictions.
Throughout the article, I will outline what geological explanations exists for the themes occurring across cultures before they were in contact with each other. While evidence has come to light, many remain a mystery.
The flood myth
The flood myth, or variants thereof, are universally familiar to the human species, not least because of its prominent role in the Old Testament.
Scientists have for decades linked the events described in the Noah’s Ark tale to the melting of the glaciers that covered the earth until the end of the Pleistocene Epoch.
More specifically, two Columbia University scientists propose a gigantic flood happening in the Black Sea region. The Black Sea was once an isolated freshwater lake surrounded by farmland, goes the theory, until it was flooded by thawing ice falling into the Mediterranean and forcing the water to cascade at two hundred times that of Niagara Falls.
Underwater archaeologist Robert Ballard carbon dated shells near the Black Sea and estimated the event to have occurred at around 5,000 BC.
"At some magic moment, it broke through and flooded this place violently, and a lot of real estate, 150,000 square kilometres of land, went under,” said Ballard, speaking to ABC news in 2012.
Around 13 out of the 25 creation myths reference a flood or talk about primeval waters existing before creation. Others, like the Babylonian creation myth, speak of god-embodied waters fighting and swirling to form the world.
Out of the nine that make up the creation myths of the Americas, only the Hawaiian, Inca and Inuit creation myths do not include flooding or pre-existing waters which covered the earth.
The flood myth also seems more concentrated among Middle Eastern creation stories, such as in the Old Testament or Sumerian retelling, for example, than almost all equivalent stories found in Africa or Asia. The Chinese creation myth is an exception, where geological evidence was found for flooding at the Liangzhu site in modern day Hebei from around 3,400 BC.
The Old Testament creation story is eerily similar to the Aztec creation story, where both involve an angry god looking to punish greedy sinners, leading to the deity choosing a single couple to survive and repopulate the earth with their children.
In the Mapuche creation myth, a similar line of events unfolds:
“The people fled up into the mountains, looking for protection from the rolling boulders, earthquakes and floods created by Kai-Kai Filu’s big tail. But it was of no use; the earth trembled so hard that all people died except for one boy and one girl, who hid in a cave on the mountain.”
The retelling that humans at one point were forced to flee gigantic floods which wiped out the majority of human settlements is not so far-fetched once viewing the geological record, even though not all versions of the story are the same.
Asteroid strike
Every school child knows about the asteroid which struck the earth at the end of the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) period, causing the last of the big five mass-extinction events and ending the reign of the dinosaurs long before humans existed.
But far fewer people have heard of the meteorite impact which hit the earth’s arctic sheet towards the end of the ice age.
In November 2018, scientists in Greenland discovered a 19-mile-wide crater beneath the Hiawatha Glacier, the first meteorite impact crater ever discovered under the Earth’s ice sheets.
Three months later, the same team found a second impact crater buried under more than a mile of ice in northwest Greenland.
"The only other circular structure that might approach this size would be a collapsed volcanic caldera," said Joe MacGregor, a glaciologist with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland. "But the areas of known volcanic activity in Greenland are several hundred miles away. Also, a volcano should have a clear positive magnetic anomaly, and we don’t see that at all."
The ice in the area was at least 79,000 years old, suggesting that the craters were made towards the end of the last ice-age, making them some of the youngest on the planet.
In the Navajo creation story, the gods created new worlds in which to plant their creations. After several wars between the gods and their creations, the creator Begochiddy creates a third world on top of reeds, where man and women are created.
The Water Monster, a pre-third-world deity, becomes outraged when another being – known as Coyote in the myth – steals his infant son.
The deity punishes Coyote by producing rainstorms, flooding the world which humans inhabit and leading to the creation of the fourth world, where they live now.
In the Vodoun creation story, flooding occurs when Damballa, the father serpent, sheds his skin.
The version of the flood myth where the water comes from the sky is more common among tribes in the Northern Hemisphere, closer to where the meteorite strikes would have hit the ice glacier.
Even before evidence of the meteorite strikes in Greenland presented themselves, conflicting archaeological evidence around human migration has given rise to the Younger Dryas Impact Theory, which proposes that the great flood is likely a pre-historic retelling of the human migrations following the impact of these meteorites.
This would have occurred around the time when humans were still co-existing alongside woolly mammoths.
The impact is thought to have brought about an impact winter – long periods of prolonged cold weather and an enormous dust cloud. This is supported by one commonly mentioned feature of creation myths which begins with the earth existing in darkness.
Extreme climate change would have followed, which advocates of the theory say contributed to the demise of mega fauna like woolly mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses.
When the earth was struck, enormous rainfall would have followed the impacts for hundreds of years, bringing about the so-called great flood in most previously habitable parts of the world and forcing mass migrations.
It may be impossible to know for certain until further evidence surfaces, but in the meantime, it would be wise to remain skeptical of those who claim to know for certain what did and what did not take place 80,000 years ago.
While the geological records only dates as far back as technology allows us to look, story-telling has outdated science by millennia. In examining the past, it is one of our most valuable resources.
The world of myth
Further explanations of various myths including the discovery of fossils by ancient peoples. Entire catalogues of mythical beings seem to have originated from ancient paleontology in an attempt to reconcile the findings of large, fossilised creatures which once inhabited the world.
Other linkages include monster bison recounted from Native American tribes, or giants in Tlaxcala, both stories thought to have originated from the remains of mammoths inhabiting the region.
Dracorex fossils also bear a striking resemblance to the dragons depicted in ancient China and Medieval Europe, while woolly rhinoceros bones found in northern Europe point to the origin of Nordic frost giant stories.
This is not dissimilar to now narwhal tusks were first presented to sailors and merchants as unicorn horns, sold for their magical properties.
From the island of Samos, a Corinthian vase depicts the legend of Herakles (Hercules, in Roman vernacular) slaying the Monster of Troy on the way to rescue Hesinone.
Scholars have noted the similarity of the depiction in the vase to that of a fossilised giraffe, which were known to the Greek world through their contact with Arabic populations.
Fossilised remains are also thought to have served as an explanation of Neades, sea beasts of Greek myth whose roar could tear the earth. The Greeks therefore killed two birds with one narrative stone, explaining the mythical beasts as well as the frequent earthquakes which troubled the island of Samos.
It is worth paying attention to the knowledge stored in myths precisely because they present a wealth of up-tapped scientific knowledge. While inaccurate and fragmented, they can often provide a roadmap for real events and record belief systems more authentically, if not more accurately, than written sources.
When 16th, 17th, and 18th century naturalists encountered dinosaur remains, the prevailing view was that these fossils were simply a natural imitation of human life by the rock forms, not considered to have been real creatures at all.
If the world was only a few thousand years old, then dinosaur fossils could only have been created by supernatural forces within the earth.
Inversely, the ancient view of fossils was actually much more aligned with our own modern understanding of dinosaur remains, even though scientific observation was far less advanced in many areas than it would be during the renaissance.
It is worth remembering the stored knowledge in oral tradition before dismissing myths and legends as mere stories. Without written language and sufficient geological evidence, they are the only sources we have of a world which existed before the historical record began.
Interbreeding and incest
Almost every society with a pantheon of Gods, many of them lost to us, include references to incest as being acceptable not only among the gods who created and governed our lives but also among the first humans who set foot on the earth.
According to a 2013 study published by science journal Nature, incest among early humans was far more prevalent than it is today.
“The scientists performed simulations of inbreeding scenarios on the Neanderthal toe bone,” said the South China Morning Post, referencing the study. “They discovered that the parents of the siblings who had a mother in common were either half siblings who had a mother in common; double first cousins; an uncle and a niece; an aunt and a nephew; a grandfather and a granddaughter; or a grandmother and a grandson.”
The fact that the creators of humans are often practisers of incest is not so mysterious in this context.
More notably, interbreeding between different human subspecies was also common.
Neanderthal DNA makes up between 1.5% and 2.1% of the human genome today, with Africans being the only race where zero Neanderthal contributions are found.
Han Chinese and other mainland Asian populations have around 0.2% of these genes from the Denisovan human sub-group, who occupied Siberia before dying out. The study also found around 6% of the genomes from Australian aborigines came from this group.
In multiple creation stories, humans take multiple iterations to get right, with the Gods employing multiple materials before modern day humans are created.
In the Mayan creation myth, humans are first made from wood, which is found to be inadequate. These humans flee to the trees, becoming monkeys, which could perhaps be called the first conception of the idea that humans and primates shared a common ancestor.
The Hawaiian creation myth says: “The first man and first woman had many children. With each generation, their skins became lighter and lighter until they became the colour they are now,” perhaps alluding to the division of human races after the migration from Africa.
As well as the Mayan story, the Yoruban, Iroquoi, Summerian and Chinese creation myths all include references to the gods forming humans from wet clay.
Ancient people believed that statues were literally alive in some way, and that gods or spirits would live in them. It may be that the creation from clay myth came after humans acquired the ability to make these sculptures.
Interbreeding may also be alluded to through these mythical tales, where the different iterations of humans cross-over with each other for a time, before the modern human genome takes dominance.
Another prevalent theme, which we have not yet touched upon yet, is God jizz. In multiple creation stories, including that from the Rapa Nui people of Easter Island, humans or other deities are formed from a God masturbating into the sea.
In Greek mythology, Aphrodite is created after Kronos cuts off the penis of his father, Urasnos, and watches it fly into the sea spurting both jizz and blood; until the crimson froth combines with the seawater to form the goddess of love.
While it would have been impossible for indigenous tribes to conceive of life in such a way, it is at least interesting given the ongoing debate between chemists and biologists regarding the environmental origin of life.
Although most professionals agree life started between 3.8 to four billion years ago, some contend that we began as single-cell bacteria forming from deep-sea hypothermal alkaline vents, while others argue life began on land.
One wonders if scientists appreciate the irony of their split opinions reflecting a divergence in myths told between different societies envisioned long before science was conceived.
Answers and questions
When combined with geological evidence, stories can provide us many clues to the origin of the species.
But, along with most things, it seems as though we will always be left with more questions than answers. Stories, like dreams, are not easily explained.
What explanation could there be for the prevalence in deistic dismemberment, where gods are often carved up, their body parts taken to the far corners of the earth to create the world?
Or the persistent theme of humans both stealing knowledge and having knowledge stolen from them. Prometheus has his innards ripped out of him every day for giving the gift of knowledge to man, whereas in the Maori creation myth, Maui the trickster steals fire in the underworld from the god Mauike.
Studying our myths is in many ways similar to studying our dreams; the parts which remain obtuse and confusing to us are the same parts which remain obtuse and confusing about human imagination.
While geological evidence does exist to explain some of the narrative structures which persist across oral storytelling, they are still the combination of thousands and thousands of individual minds, all reacting to each other and finding new and inventive ways to tell the stories passed down to them from previous generations.
When Aristeas returned from the Gobi desert in what today we call Mongolia, he took with him stories of griffins who fought against one eyed people in the desert, guarding treasure.
Centuries later, archeologists would identify parallels with Germanic myth, suggesting that the Greek tales helped inspire a host of mythologies whereby bird-like creatures conveying the souls of the dead to the otherworld so they can be born anew.
Another tale of proto-European bird myth seems to have entered into Norse mythology from these shared stories. After the Æsir–Vanir War which created the Nordic pantheon, Odin transforms himself into an eagle in order to steal the Mead of Poetry from the giants, creating poetic inspiration and thereby storytelling itself.
Stories are the universal currency of humanity. Preserving them for their own narrative value, regardless of whatever scientific inklings they provide about our past, is worth every effort.
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Francis Kett