: Sort of like tracing the roots of many western languages
: back to their proto-Indo-European origins, and then,
: theoretically, tracing that language and other nearly
: primitive languages back to a common source. An
: interesting idea. In fact, I'd quite like to see how
: migration patterns of the worlds languages and the
: religious beliefs and mythologies of the ancient world
: match up.
There is some overlap, but it's not a nice neat matchup where language and mythology all originated together. The Indo-European language group originated off in the Caucaus mountains near Russia and spread radially out and down from there. The Indo-European genetic migration path, stretching from the the Indian penninsula up through Europe, is one of the major migration paths of the common mythologies travelled along, but I'm still not positive how exactly the correlation works.
It's currently thought in anthropological circles that Caucasian people originated up on one side of the Caucaus mountains - I want to say the northeast but I honestly don't remember - then migrated down across Eurasia into India, and then turned around and went back to Europe but around the other side of the Caucaus mountains this time. However, IIRC, genetically the oldest (most primitive, earliest, etc) Caucausian peoples around are the Australian Aboriginies. This correlates very nicely with the mythological commonalities which suggest that these common myths dispersed from what is now the South Pacific starting at the end of Pleistocene era.
So putting this all together - and keep in mind the only date I know off the top of my head is the end-of-Pleistocene date, roughly 8,000 BC - I would hypothesize that the Caucasian people originated in the South Pacific, and later dispersed from there along a series of migration paths, the major one being the Indo-European path into Europe; and that later, one group in the northeast Caucaus near Russia, the inventors of the IE language group, dispersed back into and conquered India, bringing IE language there (and also "updating" their mythology quite a bit; Arryan mythology almost entirely displaced Vedic mythology in India after the invasion). This way you get the India-Europe genetic and mythological migration path, as well as the Russia-India lingual and genetic migration path.
But if anybody could tell me the dates on some of these events, it might throw me entirely off. I've mostly just paid attention to the comparative mythology.
(And before anybody realizes the event I'm talking about at the end of the Pleistocene and all this stuff about Arryans and Caucasian people and accuses me of repeating Hitler's delusions - it's true that most of this deals with what are technically Caucasian people, and that African mythology and language and such [excluding Egypt and such, which I consider Mediterranean] has very little discernable connection, but Asian mythology is accounted for, and there's a surprizing bit about Semetic peoples' relation to ancient Polynesians that would have pissed off the Nazis royally [but probably made Hitler himself happy, seeing how he was actually semetic himself]).
