Commonality of Worldwide Myths

This is a point that came up in a discussion about taking the Bible literally, but it echos stuff I've seen in other threads from time to time, so I'm proposing a new thread all it's own.There are many common elements in the mythologies of different cultures around the world. (ie Flood stories, dragons, man created from clay, etc.)Many of the YEC have sited these as evidence that their theory is correct.But aren't there other (better?) explainations for these stories. I'd like to suggest a few.1) Common experience - (the is very close to the YEC argument) world wide changes in climate / world wide events will have similiar effects on the cultures of different people. For example: At the end of the Ice Age, the water levels would have risen re-flooding the vast shoreline tracts which had openned and become inhabited. Peoples all over the world would have experienced "a great flood", but not "The Great Flood".2) Common reasoning - given similar discoveries, people from different cultures may draw similiar conclusions. For example: Megalodon (giant shark) teeth are fairly common fossils. There are a lot of them, they are generally well preserved. If someone with no frame of reference other than the natural world around them discovered one of these fist sized teeth, it's not hard to see how they would imagine it coming from a "dragon".3) Common psychology - No matter what culture you come from, some things don't change. Children are born, people grow old and die, some people are mean, others are nice. Isn't it reasonable that facing similiar experiences, people would develop similiar coping mechanisms/rationalizations? For example: As babies are born with a flood of water from the womb, so too, couldn't the world have been born from a flood of water?4) Common materials - The natural world offers up only so much for building materials. We've become very tricky at teasing out alloys and mixing up concrete, but clearly there was a time when people had only sticks, stones and clay. Given this limited exposure to materials isn't it reasonable that many different cultures have myths of man's creation being from clay. After all, clay is much more like flesh than sticks or stones.To my mind, these explain many of the points raised about the common myths. They do so within the framework of the evidence at hand and don't rely on "magic".Anyone have other examples? Questions? Disagreements?

Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.

Check out this book It is called Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge And It's Transmission Through Myth.He's some quotes of the reviews.

The basic idea is crankish to say the least. Even if some myths "coded" the Precession of the equinoxes (an idea that is at least superficially plausible as a possiblity) to take that further and claim that all myths are based on Precession or even that all cultures have a Precession myth is something that would require a lot of evidence.See this page for some critical views.
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I agree with nuggin, it comes down to people have a way of thinking alike no matter where they are, looking at talkorigins listing, all of them involve a flooding of some sort, the only ones that really have close relations are the ones from close proximity, such as the ones in the middle eastodd that some have no flood at all such as some african ones, most likely because they arn't near a large water source

Why no common language?

Well, that's a very loaded questionFirst, there is a common language we all share, it's body language. You can tell an angry person, even if you can't tell what they are angry about.Second, most languages can be traced back (much like the evolutionary tree) to earlier languages. As groups split off and become isolated, new words appear, differences crop up, etc.Third, this is a good question to be asking a YEC, since all people were born from Noah and his offspring only six thousand years ago, why is Chinese so different than Aztec or French.Fourth, nothing in my original statement suggests a common language. Just because people experience common events, emotions, etc, doesn't mean they'll make up the same word for it. Why would we assume that someone on one side of the world witnessing a comet would call it exactly the same thing that someone on the otherside of the world would?

Funny, though, how dogs bark the exact same way in China as they do anywhere else. Trans migratory birds sound the same, and as far as I know, animals in general are fairly uniform as to species in the sounds that they make. I am assuming, however. Does anyone know, or am I barking up the wrong tree?

You haven't been around a Pekingnese, I take it? Their bark sounds like a harelipped sneeze. And if I remember it right, my dad told me that the sound a three-year-old in China uses for "what does a doggie say" is "gwow gwow!" and not our "woof woof!"As to other critters: the greenish warblers of Asia are a pretty well known "ring species" consisting of five subspecies living in a band around Tibet (but absent in Tibet/ the Himalayas). Neighboring subspecies intergrade in appearance and song, and interbreed pretty freely except for the two northernmost types. Those two look very much alike but have songs so different that they don't recognize each other as potential mates. The whole species appears to have arisin from a southern population, and they diversified in "language" and biology as they spread up either side of the mountains.

Well, there is a great site, I'll try and find it, in which people from all over the world mimic the sounds of animals in their area. And these animals are pretty much "universal" (ie frogs, chickens, etc.) But each culture has a different description of what a frog sounds like, or what a chicken sounds like.Also, clearly a German Sheppard sounds different than a French Poodle. Just as a man from Germany sounds different than a man from France. I think the both the dogs and the people will recognize that their counterpart is also (dog/human) and trying to communicate.

As we learn more about critters we are finding far more variability as well as far more commonality than we supposed. Dialects between bird populations varies geographically as well as over time. The same is true for ground squirrels and prairie dogs. Whales have dialects that extend down to the individual level as do elephants.So what we see in other critters is very much the same as what we see in human populations. We find similar stories around the world because there are similar conditions and events. There were floods and landslides and storms and lightning and fires and wars and love triangles and dominate parents and unruly children and leaders and failures and crooks and heros and gain and loss.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

i'm not sure phat have you ever heard a beagle bark? they have a long drawn out howl rather than a bark, small dogs yap rather than bark, ie: weenier dogs

What I mean't is that a Beagle in China sounds like a Beagle in America....A German Shepherd sounds the same in Germany as in Galveston. A Conure squawks the same in my house as in a house in Moscow. Or in a jungle in South America. Why would it make sense for humans to have such diverse and differing dialects?

Well, a person speaking Chinese in Houston sounds a lot like a person speaking Chinese in Hong Kong. German in London sounds like German in Berlin.Your bigger question of why do we have so many languages is best answered by the fact that populations split from each other and spend huge amounts of time seperate, and during that time their languages evolve differently.

A possible answer, to be sure....a very astute answer, yet not consensual among all intellects. According to The World Book Encyclopedia, no one knows exactly how language began.According to the Bible, God allowed the languages to be confused.It is not clear whether He directly caused it, or whether the human wisdom gravitated towards territorial protective measures, but the authors make it clear that Gods presence contributed towards human independance.