Situating sub-Saharan African cosmogonic myths within a long-range intercontinental comparative perspective

The present argument reflects an attempt to write a coherent world history of mythology along strict methodological lines of empirical enquiry. Point of departure is the Out-of-Africa hypothesis. The argument seeks to identify the mythological content, if any, of the Out-of-Africa package (140,000 BP). For this purpose a corpus of c. 200 mythemes is constructed from sub-Saharan Africa cosmogonic myths as attested in historical times. The corpus is then subsumed under 20 Narrative Complexes, whose number is further reduced because some turn out to be implied in others. The Narrative Complexes are subjected to elaborate methodologies of absolute and relative dating, based on considerations from the fields of astronomy, genetics, archaeology, modes-of-production analysis, ethnographic distributional analysis, and hermeneutics; these are also argued to offer clues as to the location of origin of each Narrative Complex. It turns out that, as an abstract model with mainly heuristic claims, all Narrative Complexes may be situated, in space and time, along a sustained global mainstream process of mythological development. This starts out in South East Africa with a pre-Out-of-Africa package, subsequently follows the recursive path (first eastward along the Indian Ocean coast, then westward) of Anatomically Modern Humans across the Old World, finally to be fed back, secondarily, into Africa. In the process, the successive Narrative Complexes emerge, spread, and interact, i