Worldwide patterns in mythology echo the human expansion out of Africa

Similarities between geographically distant mythological and folkloric traditions have been noted for a long time. With the elaboration of large banks of data describing the presence and absence of narrative motifs around the world, scholars have been able to statistically investigate their potential routes and mechanisms of diffusion. However, despite genetic data allowing for increasingly refined demographic movement inferences, few have integrated it into their models, and none at a global scale. In this work, we capitalise on the augmenting availability of modern and ancient genetic data and on Yuri E. Berezkin’s database of more than 2000 mythological motifs worldwide to investigate the mechanisms involved in generating their present-day distribution at a global scale. The direct combination of both kinds of evidence allows us to explore in more depth the respective influences of population movement and replacement versus cultural diffusion on motif transmission. Our results show that both processes have played important roles in shaping their present-day distribution. By leveraging available ancient DNA (aDNA) and deepening the temporal scale of the detected signals, we reveal that correlations between mythemes and genetic patterns can be traced back to population movements that pre-date the Last Glacial Maximum and go back to at least 38,000 years ago, and possibly even earlier to the human expansion out of Africa some 60,000 years ago. Our work shows the earliest evidence for the transmission of stories and storytelling in human history, and supports the joint use of cultural evolutionary theory and population genetics to illuminate the biocultural processes that shaped our species.