13/11/2025
The patterns are out there: floods, tricksters, battles with monsters, creation and apocalypse. Could it mean that, beneath the confusion of gods, ghosts, and rituals, there is a primordial mythology, a long-lost ancestor dimly visible in its descendants? There’s “something intoxicating about the quest for a key: the notion that, by sifting through myth, we might retrieve the imaginative worlds of the earliest storytellers,” Manvir Singh writes. “Nor is the quest just a scholarly game; it’s an attempt to prove, against all odds, that our wild, warring species shares something irreducible at its core.”
Nowadays, we can unearth bones, extract DNA, even map ancient migrations, but only in myths can we glimpse the inner lives of our forebears—their fears and longings, their sense of wonder and dread. Linguists have reconstructed dead languages. Why not try to do the same for lost stories? And, if we can, how far back can we go? Singh writes about the hunt for the world’s oldest tales: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/yEwlsV
