Previous articles have described folklore and mythological themes common to North America, Central Asia, and Siberia (Berezkin, 2003a; 2005a, b). They relate to the deeds of heroes and the origin of constellations. Since there are practically no such stories in Central and South America, it can be assumed that migrants from different cultures participated in the settlement of the New World. This is evidenced by the Indian cosmogonic texts considered in this article.
Texts classified as cosmogonic tell us how the world came into being and how the ancestors of its current inhabitants ended up in it. Texts of this kind everywhere form the sacred core of narrative traditions [Berezkin, 2005a; Berezkin, 2005]. The first part of the article describes the American versions of the myth of extracting land from the bottom of the sea, and the second part describes the myth of the first ancestors coming out of the ground. The discrepancy in the areas of these plots is an argument in favor of the fact that the carriers of the corresponding mythological traditions came to the New World from different regions of Eurasia.
The plot of "land diver" - American versions
Narratives about the origin of land from grains of solid substance brought from the lower world are typical for South Asia, Siberia, Eastern Europe, and North America (Fig. 1) (Vasilkov, 2006; Kuznetsova, 1998; Napolskikh, 1991; Count, 1952; Dundes, 1962; Köngäs, 1960; Prasad, 1989). Rooth, 1957; Walk, 1933]. In Northern Eurasia and America, it's not just about going down to the lower world, but about diving characters under water. In the myths of the Aleuts and Eskimos, there are no parallels to this story.
It is well known that the myth of the land diver is North American, while it is almost nonexistent in South America. However, the incompatibility of this fact with the recently prevailing and still not completely rejected hypothesis of a single origin of the "Amerinds" is poorly understood. According to this hypothe ...
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