All Mythological Motifs That Back-Migrated to Africa Are Attested in the Americas
Eurasian Back-Migration: Traces in Mythology?
Berezkin Yuri Y.
https://doi.org/10.31857/S0869541524030094
The author examines the world distribution of mythological motifs peculiar for Northeast Africa but absent in other parts of this continent. The corresponding narratives describe the events of the time of creation, objects and beings localized at the ultimate limits of the human world as well as episodes of the journeys of heroes to these limits. The motifs in question are absent in Central Asia and Siberia but found across Western, South and Southeast Asia, in Oceania and across the New World. Considering such distribution, these stories probably appeared at the early stages of the peopling of the oikumene (definitely before the peopling of the New World) and were brought to Africa by the populations engaged into the Eurasian back-migrations that were going since the Terminal Pleistocene and possibly earlier.
This paper is in Russian.
Yuri Berezkin, the foremost Russian expert on the global distribution of mythological motifs, has published an attempt to find traces of a back-migration to Africa from Eurasia (presumably stretching for millennia between Pleistocene and Holocene according to genetic and possibly archaeological data) in his database of global mythological motifs. All of Eurasian motifs found at low-frequencies in Sub-Saharan Africa (Proteus, Burnt by the Sun, Cranes and Pygmies, Cesarean Birth), are well-attested in the Americas but notably not in Northeast Asia. Berezkin believes that America is the most recently peopled continent despite the fact that his own mythological evidence (both common African motifs and Eurasian motifs that are rare in Africa are found in the New World) contradicts it.
Most everything seems to have a basal condition from the Americans.
The pioneering ecologist Robert MacArthur said “there are worse things for a scientist than to be wrong. One is to be trivial.”
The following is a list of research topics central to the theory development of “Autochthonous in Americas.” (i) paleontological issues of the species definitions that set H sapiens apart from H erectus, (ii) evidence of “founding effects” in the Eastern Hemisphere including into not “out Africa, (iii) a lack of evidence or agreement as to Founding Effects in the populations of the Americas, (iv) the sudden shift defining the Middle/Upper Paleolithic Industries, (v) a theory to guide the acceptance of mid-Pleistocene “Reduced Paleolithic” archaeological context pre-dating the Clovis-First hypothetical, (vi) the problematic issue of dating the proposed “out of Africa” archaeological corridor within the greater Lavant, (vii) the scope of isolation and the initial migration out of the Western Hemisphere of the horse 2.4 Mya and, as proposed, tropically aligned Paleoamerindians delay 45,000 ybp, (viii) the anatomical behavioral and genetic similarities cladistical sustainment of a derived human platyrrhine component, (ix) the fundamental evolutionary cladistical relationship and the derivation of H erectus from Old World Catarrhines, (x) the ethics of discounting a theory for being trivial, (xi) the temporal reluctance to hypothesize anything but an “Eurasian” origin for H sapiens, (xii) the linguistic diversity of Amerind and the improbability of a “Beringia standstill” beyond the hypothetical (xiii) a Paleoamerican migration emanating south of the northern American Ice Sheets following the onset of the Holocene, (xiv) the inconsistency of any barriers for migrations out of Africa for H erectus groups or, (xv) a single bottleneck as proposed for a single exodus for H sapiens to account for the missing ancestral L mtDNA lineages.