Our live is all about stories, so have you ever wondered what is probably the oldest story we know?
Long before the Epic of Gilgamesh, before the Proto-Indo-Europeans, before the last mini-ice age, before the well-known Australian aboriginal stories, before that our ancestors were hunter-gatherers and told stories about their lives, what caused them to try the understand the world around them.
So what is the oldest story ever told? Well, one story was so popular it still exists today, and researchers call it the Cosmic Hunt. This video explains how we found out that this is the oldest story in the world, how it evolved and varied around the world, and how we can recreate it. A history that we can date with some accuracy, given the time scales, and that has produced many variants in Eurasia and America. It’s probably the oldest story we know, but that doesn’t mean an older one couldn’t be reconstructed, and that’s what will be touched upon.
There is a body of good research on the subject, some of which I have mentioned below, with stories of a hunter or hunters tracking down a large animal before something happens that affects the cosmos and the night sky.
Welcome to a world where humans eat birds, mammoths, gods and heroes, and welcome to the cosmic hunt!
Crecganford is a channel from an academic producing videos discussing Indo-European mythology, history, and culture. From the Vikings to the Vedas, from Zeus to Zoroastrianism, and from Sacrifices to Spirituality. We talk about Europe’s earliest people, the farmers, the Proto Indo-Europeans, and the cultures and religions that followed.
The main publications he refers to in this video are:
- The Cosmic Hunt: Variants of a Siberian-North American Myth by Yuri Berezkin
- A cosmic hunt in the Berber skies: a phylogenetic reconstruction of a Paleolithic mythology by Julien d’Huy
- The Constellation of Orion and the Cosmic Hunt in Equatorial Africa by Vincent Vieira
- On the Cosmic Hunt in North Eurasian Rock Painting by Enn Ernits
Scientific American also published an article by Julien d’Huy in December 2016 which is easy to read, although there is a fee to do so.
And here is a link to the interactive graphic showing the development of the story: http://demo.accurat.io/sci-am/