African Heritage in Mythology

Our analytical catalogue contains information on many thousands of folklore and mythological texts. The systemic approach to this material argues in favor of an African origin of episodes and images that were recorded in sub-Saharan Africa, the Indo-Pacific border of Asia and in America but are absent in continental Eurasia. Such a pattern corresponds to genetic and archaeological data concerning the early spread of the modern human from Africa in two directions, i.e. to the East along the coast of the Indian Ocean to Southeast Asia and Australia, and to the North into Europe, Central Asia and Siberia. The natural conditions of humankind in the Indo-Pacific Tropics and in the African homeland are essentially similar; conversely, in the Eurasian North, deep cultural changes and a loss of the African heritage are to be expected. Though there are no cultures in Asia that could be considered to be related to the ancestors of the earliest migrants into the New World still being identified by archaeologists, similar sets of motifs in South America and in the Indo-Pacific part of the Old World provide evidence in favor of the East Asian homeland of the first Americans. Later groups of migrants brought those motifs typical for continental Eurasia to North America. Though we take into account conclusions reached by specialists in other historical disciplines, big data on mythology and folklore is argued to be an independent source of information on the human past.