The Stories That Crossed Beringia

TL;DR

• A specific set of stories exists on both sides of the Bering Strait and is thin or absent in sub-Saharan Africa and Australia: the Cosmic Hunt, the dog of the dead, the Sun-Moon pursuit, the Milky Way as a ski track, the Earth Diver, and the Raven who steals daylight (Berezkin 2005; Berezkin 2010).
• The shared details are arbitrary enough to rule out coincidence. The faint star Alcor is a cooking pot carried by the second hunter among the Khanty of the Ob and the Seneca of New York (Berezkin 2005, pp. 81–88).
• The motifs did not arrive together. Berezkin’s catalogue of more than 2,200 motifs across more than 900 traditions sorts them into an early Pacific stream that reached South America, a later continental Siberian stream that filled North America east of the Rockies, and a late circum-Bering layer (Berezkin 2015).
• That stratigraphy matches ancient DNA: a founding population isolated in Beringia by about 25,000 years ago, a branching into northern and southern lineages after the move south, and Paleo-Eskimo gene flow into the Arctic and the Na-Dene after 5,000 years ago (Moreno-Mayar et al. 2018; Raghavan et al. 2015; Flegontov et al. 2019).
• Phylogenetic reconstruction of the Cosmic Hunt puts the Big Dipper version at more than 15,000 years old, which makes it among the oldest stories whose content we can state (d’Huy 2012).

“Its association with a dog and especially with the cooking pot carried by the second hunter is highly specific and could not emerge independently in Asia and in America.” — Yuri Berezkin, “The Cosmic Hunt” (2005), p. 88

What the Seneca and the Khanty both saw in the Big Dipper #

Six Seneca men went hunting far from home and found nothing. One of them said he was sick. He was in fact lazy, but four of the others built a litter of two poles and a skin and carried him, each still bearing his own pack. The sixth carried the kettle. When hunger sharpened they cut the track of a bear, dropped the malingerer and their loads, and ran. The track was old at first, then three days old, then fresher every day. The abandoned man, rested from being carried, ran after them, passed them, caught the bear, and killed it. None of them had noticed that in the chase they had left the ground. “Many persons saw them in the air, always rising as they ran,” the story says. They are still there, near the Pole Star. The kettle-bearer is the middle star of the Dipper’s handle, and the faint star beside him is the kettle. Every autumn at first frost the oak leaves show drops of blood and oil, and people say the lazy man has killed the bear (Curtin and Hewitt 1918, pp. 276–277).

Four thousand miles west, on the Ob and the Yenisei, the Khanty, the Selkup, and the Ket tell the same sky. The bowl of the Dipper is an elk, the three handle stars are hunters, and the small star beside the second hunter is the pot he carries to cook the meat. The Evenki of the Amur and the Udeghe make the same small star a hunter’s dog, and so do the Salish, the Chinook, the Mohawk, the Lenape, and the Fox in North America (Berezkin 2005, pp. 81–83).

That small star is Alcor. It sits so close to Mizar that Arab and Latin writers used it as a test of eyesight. Berezkin calls it probably “the smallest of the sky objects singled out in the pre-scientific era.” A polar constellation naturally attracts a story, but nothing in human psychology or in the night sky makes a person put a cooking pot on Alcor. Two unrelated peoples on two continents doing so is not convergence. It is memory.

This essay is about that memory: a corpus of stories that crossed the Bering land bridge with the ancestors of Native Americans, in more than one wave, and that still lie across the map of two continents in the order the people arrived. The occasion is a viral post pairing the Dendera zodiac with an Aztec codex and claiming that Egypt and Mexico share a story of twelve races charting the sky. They do not. The twelve signs at Dendera are a Babylonian import barely five centuries old when the ceiling was carved, and the Aztec page is a calendar with no twelve in it. But the reflex behind the post, the sense that two hemispheres drew the same cosmos, is aimed at the wrong artifacts rather than at nothing. The shared cosmos is not in temple ceilings. It is in a kettle on Alcor.

The claim is old. Franz Boas and Waldemar Bogoras were making it in 1902. What is new is that it can now be counted. Yuri Berezkin’s Analytical Catalogue of world mythology codes some 40,000 oral texts into 2,264 motifs across 934 traditions from South Africa to Tierra del Fuego, as of 2018 (Berezkin 2015; Thuillard et al. 2018). When you sort that table, Siberia and the Americas fall together, and they fall together in layers.

Why “Laurasian” is the right word and Witzel the wrong authority #

Michael Witzel gave the pattern its name. In The Origins of the World’s Mythologies he divided the world’s myths into two families. Laurasian mythology, across Eurasia, North Africa, Polynesia, and the Americas, tells a single storyline: creation out of chaos or primordial water, the separation of heaven and earth, generations of gods who overthrow their elders, a dragon slain, a flood, the deeds of culture heroes, and a final destruction of the world. Gondwanan mythology, in sub-Saharan Africa, Australia, and Melanesia, has no such arc. The world in those stories already exists; nobody made it and nobody will end it. Witzel dates the Laurasian storyline to roughly 40,000 years ago, before the Americas were peopled, which is the whole point of the date: the first Americans had to carry it with them (Witzel 2012).

The word is useful and the framework is real. The book that proposed it is not the evidence for it. Witzel worked by impressionistic comparison of storylines, leaned on early twentieth-century German culture-circle theory, and put people south of the ice in America at 20,000 years ago, several thousand years before the archaeological and genomic record does. Folklorists reviewed the book savagely.¹ The reason to keep the term is that a separate, quantitative tradition reached the same two-family split without him. Thuillard, Le Quellec, d’Huy, and Berezkin ran two clustering methods across the whole catalogue and found the motifs “are best classified into two main groups” (Thuillard et al. 2018). Berezkin’s own labels are Continental Eurasian and Indo-Pacific, and the traditions that share the fewest motifs with each other sit in continental Eurasia and in Melanesia (Berezkin 2010b).

So the story of this essay is Berezkin’s, told with Witzel’s vocabulary. Berezkin, at the Kunstkamera in St Petersburg, spent forty years reading the ethnographies in their original languages and coding them into a binary table drawn from more than 7,000 sources, where Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index drew on 639 (Thuillard et al. 2018, p. 408). He is also, by temperament, the least credulous man in the field. He concedes that three bright stars in Orion’s Belt could become three animals anywhere, then insists that an arrow tip fixed on one particular star above the Belt “is too specific to be a random coincidence” (Berezkin 2005, p. 86). That discrimination between the natural and the arbitrary is what lets the cases below carry weight.

The Cosmic Hunt and the oldest story we can reconstruct #

Berezkin distinguishes three Cosmic Hunts. The first is the western Siberian type already described: Dipper handle as hunters, bowl as animal, Alcor as pot or dog. It links the Khanty, Selkup, Ket, Khakas, and western Evenki to the Salish, Chinook, Iroquois, Cherokee, Fox, Lenape, and Mi’kmaq. The second is Central Asian: Orion’s Belt as three ungulates, a hunter below, his arrow at Betelgeuse or another star above the Belt, shared by South Siberia and the American Great Basin and Southwest. The third is circum-Arctic, with Orion or the Pleiades as the hunters, and it runs from the Sami to the Polar Inuit. Berezkin assigns the third to the Thule expansion after the birth of Christ. The first two, he writes, are “unknown in Northeast Asia and in Alaska” and “probably date to the time of initial settling of the New World” (Berezkin 2005, p. 79). They are absent where a recent crossing would have left them and present deep in the interior of both continents.

The Evenki version shows what the story looked like closer to the source. The Big Dipper is Kheglen, the elk; the bowl is her body and the handle the hunters at her heels, and Ursa Minor is her calf. Kheglen steals the sun and carries it into the sky-taiga, and the world goes dark. Mangi, the ancestral bear-man, straps on winged skis and runs her down across the whole vault of heaven in one day. The furrow his skis cut remains as the Milky Way, which the Evenki call Mangi’s ski track. At midnight he overtakes the elk, shoots her, and returns the sun, and day begins again. Anisimov read the chase as the solar year, the theft in autumn and the recovery in spring, so that the hunt is run and won every year (Anisimov 1963, pp. 157–229). The Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia run the same annual cycle with the same cast in different feathers: seven bird-hunters pursue the bear along the horizon all summer, the weaker hunters fall away in autumn, Robin makes the kill and shakes the blood from his feathers onto the leaves, and all winter the bear’s skeleton lies on its back in the sky while, as Hagar recorded it, her life passes into another bear asleep in the den of Corona Borealis (Hagar 1900, pp. 93–97). Autumn leaves red with the bear’s blood appear in both the Seneca and the Mi’kmaq tellings, and the whole apparatus, from hunters to pot to seasonal death and return, spans the Ob to the Atlantic.

Julien d’Huy has treated these versions the way a biologist treats genomes. In 2012 he coded 18 Eurasian and American variants into 44 binary traits and built trees with two independent methods; both converged on a route that runs, in his summary, from Greece through Central Asia to Siberia, then British Columbia, then northeastern America. The Big Dipper version, he concludes, “must be even older than 15,000 years, coming from Asia, when North America was populated by the migration across the Bering Strait” (d’Huy 2012). The 2013 expansion to 47 versions and 93 traits reconstructed the ancestral tale itself: a man hunts an ungulate; the hunt takes place in the sky or ends there; the animal is alive when it becomes a constellation; and the constellation is Ursa Major (d’Huy 2013; d’Huy 2016). d’Huy also proposes that the wounded-man scene in the Shaft at Lascaux is a Cosmic Hunt painted 17,000 years ago: in his reading the lone black spot near the bison’s withers is a star, the animal’s stillness marks a constellation, and the dark stains beneath it are the bloodied autumn leaves. His own words are that such examples “serve simply to illustrate the interpretive power of the phylogenetic method,” and that is the weight to give them. The reconstructed protomyth needs no cave to stand on. It stands on Alcor.

The consequence Berezkin draws is worth stating because he is willing to own it. If the pot-star is inherited, then the distant ancestors of the Iroquois were cooking meat in containers, of skin or wood or by stone-boiling, before they left Asia (Berezkin 2005, n. 4). A star name is a piece of Ice Age kitchen equipment.

The dog at the river of the dead #

Sahagún’s Nahua informants described the soul’s journey through Mictlan as ending, in its fourth year, at a wide river. The dead had already passed the clashing mountains, the obsidian wind, and the hill of knives. At the river the dogs carried them across. A yellow dog was the right one; a white dog would refuse, saying it had just washed, and a black dog would refuse, saying it was already stained (Sahagún, Florentine Codex, Book 3, Appendix, ch. 1). In the fuller Mesoamerican tradition Berezkin tabulates, the dog that carries you is one you kept and fed in life, and this is why people raised dogs. The shaft tombs of Colima, fifteen hundred years earlier, are full of fat ceramic dogs placed with the dead (LACMA).

The Huron of Ontario knew a harsher dog. The soul’s road is a track of stars, and beside it runs a second star-track for the souls of dogs. Where the road crosses a river the only bridge is a fallen log, and a dog is posted on it. It attacks those who try to pass and throws many into the water, where they sink and never arrive (Sagard 1632, as summarized in Schwartz 1997, p. 93). The Rig Veda gives the dead traveler two dogs, “four-eyed, who look on men and guard the pathway,” the brindled offspring of Saramā (RV 10.14.10–11). The Avesta warns the man who has harmed a dog that “nor will the dogs that keep the Chinwad bridge help his departing soul” (Vendidad 13.9). Egypt has Anubis and Wepwawet, the Opener of the Ways; Greece has Cerberus; the Norse have Garm at Gnipahellir.

Berezkin broke this complex into eight sub-motifs and tabulated them from Finland to the Andes: the dog as helper, the dog that ferries the dead across a river, help made conditional on how you treated real dogs, the dog as guard of the other world, the dog bought off with food, the dog on the Milky Way, villages of dogs in the beyond, and rivers of tears or blood. The Eurasian distribution is continuous, from the Vedas and the Avesta through the Turks, Finns, Komi, Nenets, Selkup, Evenki, Nanai, and Koryak. The American distribution runs from the Central Yupik of Alaska down through the Eastern Woodlands and into Mesoamerica and the Andes, and is missing from the American West. His conclusion is flat: “The otherworldly dog is a complex of motifs of Eurasian origin,” carried into America “through Central, rather than Southern, Alaska,” down the Yukon and Mackenzie rather than along the coast (Berezkin 2005b, pp. 133–147).

The detail that carries the case is the conditional. A dog will carry you over only if you fed dogs in life, in Iran and in Tenochtitlan. A jackal scavenging desert graves can explain a canine god of the dead in Egypt on its own. It cannot explain a moral contract with your own dog, enforced at a river, on two continents. For the long life of dog sacrifice as the material side of this belief, see dog sacrifice from the Ice Age to the Iron Age.

Sister Sun and the brother she marked with soot #

Henry Rink collected this in West Greenland in the 1860s. Young people used to gather for games in the dark, and afterward the young men would pursue the girls, who could never tell who had chosen them. One girl, wanting to know, blackened her hands with soot before the games and drew them down her lover’s back. When the young people came in and undressed, she saw no marks, until her brother entered last with the back of his white jacket smeared black. She sharpened a knife, cut off her breasts, and offered them to him: since her body pleased him, let him eat these. He pursued her still. He lit a torch of bad moss and she a torch of good moss, and she ran out and he after her, and they were lifted into the sky. High up his light went out and hers kept burning. She is the Sun; he is the Moon, dim and marked (Rink 1875, no. 35, pp. 236–237). Boas took down the same tale independently on Baffin Island, down to the breasts and the two torches, and there the new moon sings as it rises: Aningaga tapika, “My brother up there, he is coming up there” (Boas 1888, p. 597). Rink notes that a Royal Navy surgeon heard the sister’s line in nearly the same words at Point Barrow, Alaska, four thousand kilometers from Greenland.

In Berezkin’s catalogue the pursuit is motif A7, the Sun chasing the Moon or the Moon the Sun across the sky forever. Its American arc is a textbook Beringian chain: the Nanai of the lower Amur, then the Central Yupik and Inupiat, then the Koyukon, Tlingit, Netsilik, Iglulik, Polar Inuit, and Greenlanders, then the Blackfoot, then the Totonac, Mixtec, and Trique of Mexico, and at the far end the Selk’nam and Yámana of Tierra del Fuego (Berezkin and Duvakin, motif A7). The pursuit alone is also recorded among a few Bantu peoples and in southeast Australia, so the case rests on the unbroken chain from the Amur to Tierra del Fuego, not on absence elsewhere. The soot-marking is catalogued separately, and its indexed distribution is Old World, from the Berbers of Tunisia through the Caucasus to the Philippines, even though the Inuit tales above contain it. The two components are welded together only on the Arctic rim, which is exactly where a story carried by the founding Beringians and reinforced by later Arctic arrivals should show its strongest form.

The Milky Way as a ski track #

The Milky Way as the road of souls looks like a Beringian marker and is not. Berezkin’s catalogue records it in 103 traditions, including Bantu Africa and Aboriginal Australia, and almost nowhere in Siberia (motif I65). A story that is missing in Siberia did not cross Beringia. The Milky Way that did cross is an animal track.

Among the Khanty and Mansi the band of light is the trace of the skis of the hunter who chased the six-legged sky elk, cut off its extra legs, and drove it into the sky where it became the Big Dipper. The ski trace is the dominant name for the Milky Way among the Samoyeds, in Eastern Siberia, on the lower Amur, and in Alaska. A second name, the path of birds, runs from the Balts and Finns across the Turks to the Evenki of the middle Amur and then reappears among the Ojibwa and Saulteaux north of the Great Lakes (Berezkin 2010c, p. 15). The Cherokee have a running dog. Some people in the south kept a corn mill, and several mornings found meal stolen from the bowl. They found dog tracks, lay in wait, and whipped the thief when he came from the north to eat. He ran home howling with the meal falling from his mouth, and where it fell the Milky Way lies. The Cherokee name for it is Gi’lï′-utsûñ′stänûñ′yï, “where the dog ran” (Mooney 1900, no. 11, p. 259). Berezkin files these together as animal tracks on the Milky Way, a motif whose American members run from the Blackfoot and Pawnee to the Chumash and on into Guiana (motif I64).

Berezkin’s conclusion for the whole cosmonymy is unusually clean about its boundaries. “From Eurasia the corresponding ideas were brought to North America,” while in Australia and in South and Central America the names for the Milky Way “had developed independently,” and in sub-Saharan Africa their development “had been minimal” (Berezkin 2010c, p. 22). The sky-track belongs to the same northern package as the Cosmic Hunt, and in the Evenki telling it is literally the same story: the Milky Way is the furrow Mangi cut chasing the elk.

The Earth Diver arrives with the second wave #

At the beginning there was only water, and the waterfowl saw a woman falling from the sky. A flock of ducks rose to meet her and bore her down on their backs, and the Great Turtle floated his shell to the surface to receive her. Then Loon asked which of the divers could fetch up earth. Beaver went down and came up dead with empty paws. Otter stayed longer and surfaced dead with nothing. Muskrat went last and stayed longest, and floated up dead too, but “he brought up his paws and his mouth full of mud.” They spread the mud around the rim of the Turtle’s shell, and other muskrats dived and died in turn until the two ends of the work met. When the woman woke, willows had grown along the water’s edge (Hewitt 1903, Mohawk version, pp. 286–288).

Across the water the Buryat tell that three gods looked out over the primordial sea and saw a bird hovering, and commanded her: “Duck, forthwith ’neath ocean dive!” She went to the bottom, gathered red clay, black earth, and sand in her bill, and rose, and the gods threw what she brought upon the deep and it became land (Coxwell 1925, pp. 152–153). In the Altai the diver is a man who, sent down a second time, hides a mouthful of earth to make a world of his own; it swells and nearly chokes him, and when God makes him spit it out the spittle becomes the marshes and the man becomes Erlik, lord of the dead (Coxwell 1925, pp. 301–303, after Radloff). Elli Köngäs mapped this motif in 1960 and argued for a single North Eurasian and North American history (Köngäs 1960). The Ob-Ugrians, Samoyeds, Ket, Yakut, Buryat, Mongols, Altai Turks, and Tungus have it. So do the Iroquoians, Algonquians, Plains villagers, and Subarctic Athabaskans. South America does not have it, and neither does Australia, Melanesia, or Africa.

That absence is the clue Berezkin follows. Where the Earth Diver stops, another cosmogony begins: the emergence of the first people from under the earth, which dominates the American Southwest, Mesoamerica, and Amazonia, and has its Old World relatives in Melanesia and island Southeast Asia. “The earth-diver and the emergence myth are two major cosmogonic concepts that almost never overlap territorially,” he writes, “the earth-diver being of continental Eurasian and the emergence out of the earth of Indo-Pacific origin.” And then the sequence: “only the second stream people brought to America the Siberian earth-diver myth” (Berezkin 2010, pp. 128–129; Berezkin 2007). The first Americans, coming down the Pacific coast and on into South America, carried the Indo-Pacific package with emergence in it. A later movement through the ice-free Mackenzie corridor carried the continental Siberian package, with the diving muskrat, into the lands east of the Rockies. The Earth Diver is not evidence that one story crossed Beringia. It is evidence that two different populations did, and settled different halves of the hemisphere. For the emergence side of that divide, see serpents and women in the emergence myths of the Americas.

Raven’s daylight box and the latest layer #

Raven had been given the strength to make a world, but there was no light in it. Far up the Nass River a rich man kept the light in his house for himself. Raven made himself small, dropped into the water as a speck of dirt, and was swallowed by the rich man’s daughter, who bore him as a child with very bright, quick eyes. Round bundles hung about the walls. The child crawled among the people weeping and pointing until the grandfather gave him the bag on the end, the bag of stars; he rolled it about and let it go up the smoke hole and the stars scattered as they are now. He cried for the moon and was given it. “Now just one thing more remained, the box that held the daylight, and he cried for that.” The grandfather, grieving, untied it. The child seized the box, cried “Ga,” and flew out through the smoke hole. Downriver he came to people who had never seen day, quarreled with them across a creek, and opened the box; the sun flew up into the sky, and those wearing sea-mammal skins fled into the ocean and those in land-animal skins into the woods (Swanton 1909, pp. 3–5).

In Chukotka the keeper is a spirit whose house swings to and fro, and the sun, moon, and stars are sewn up in black walrus hide like balls. Raven induces the spirit’s small daughter to beg for them; she is given the stars to play with, throws the ball to Raven, and he tosses it so hard it bursts and the stars stick to the sky, and so with the moon and the sun (Bogoras 1902, pp. 629–630). Bogoras found the Raven’s name itself shared across the strait, Kutq among the Itelmen, Kuykynnyaku among the Koryak, Kurkil among the Chukchi, and judged that “the character of the Raven is essentially the same as on the American side.” Jochelson counted 122 recurring episodes in Koryak myth and found 101 of them among the Indians of the Northwest Coast (Jochelson 1904, p. 424).

The Raven cycle is the tightest correspondence in this essay and also the youngest. It stops dead on both sides of the Bering Sea: Chukchi, Koryak, Itelmen, and Asiatic Eskimo on one shore, Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, Eyak, Northern Athabaskan, and Inupiat on the other, and nowhere else in either continent. Berezkin puts Raven’s homeland in Pacific Asia and assigns his American career to the latest phases of the peopling (Berezkin 2010, p. 134). Genetics agrees: Paleo-Eskimo ancestry from a single Siberian source is present in the Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut populations sampled, entering the American Arctic about 5,000 years ago, with a second Inuit expansion a thousand years ago (Flegontov et al. 2019). Raven crossed a strait, not a land bridge, and he kept crossing.

The bear who is addressed as grandfather #

The animal in the Seneca and Mi’kmaq sky is also the animal at the center of the one ritual complex that spans the whole boreal world. On the Nass a grizzly bear captured a high-caste Tlingit girl, and in time she married one of the bear people. An old woman among them, herself a captured human, asked whether she understood what had happened to her: “They captured you because you were angry with their tracks.” She taught the girl to gather wet wood as bears do, and after that her fire never went out and her husband loved her (Swanton 1909, pp. 382–383). In the Gitxsan and Haida Bear Mother the dying bear husband teaches his human wife the dirge and the treatment of his bones by which his kind will return (Barbeau 1946). That dirge is the narrative form of a rite Irving Hallowell traced in 1926 from the Sami and Finns through the Khanty, Evenki, Nivkh, and Ainu, and from the Penobscot and Ojibwe through the Cree and Tlingit: the bear addressed as grandfather or old man, apologized to at the kill, its skull and long bones set out so it can return. Hallowell concluded that “a bear cult was one of the characteristic features of an ancient Boreal culture” that “later became intercontinental in its scope, extending from Labrador to Lapland” (Hallowell 1926, pp. 148–162). He framed it as diffusion across a boreal culture belt in both directions rather than as founder baggage, so it does not sit in the stratigraphy below. It sits behind it: the people who carried the sky bear across Beringia already treated the earthly one as kin.

The map of the stories is the map of the people #

Put the motifs side by side and they do not behave alike. That is the point.

Berezkin reads this table as a sequence. An early stream came down the Pacific side and reached South America by about 15,000 years ago, carrying the Indo-Pacific package: emergence from the earth, and a set of motifs shared today only between Amazonia and Melanesia because those are the two places later continental influence never reached. A second stream came through the Mackenzie corridor into North America east of the Rockies with the continental Siberian package: the Earth Diver, the dog of the dead, the Dipper hunt in its fullest form. Later movements carried northern motifs south into South America, and the Na-Dene and Eskimo arrivals of the last 5,000 years laid Raven and the circum-Arctic Cosmic Hunt over the top (Berezkin 2010, Fig. 1; Berezkin 2017).

Ancient DNA, worked out independently and later, gives the same shape. The founding population split from East Asians around 36,000 years ago and was isolated in Beringia by about 25,000 years ago (Moreno-Mayar et al. 2018). The move south began no earlier than 23,000 years ago, and the population then branched into northern and southern lineages, around 13,000 years ago in Raghavan’s estimate and somewhat earlier in Moreno-Mayar’s (Raghavan et al. 2015). Some Amazonian groups carry an excess of Australo-Melanesian-related ancestry that remains unexplained, and it sits in suggestive parallel with Berezkin’s Amazonia-Melanesia motif overlap, though no geneticist has claimed the signal carries stories (Skoglund et al. 2015). Paleo-Eskimo ancestry arrived around 5,000 years ago and the Inuit a thousand years ago (Flegontov et al. 2019; Willerslev and Meltzer 2021). Berezkin insists that stories move horizontally as well as vertically and need not track genes, and at village scale they do not. At continental scale the test has now been run: a 2025 preprint that set his full catalogue against modern and ancient genomes found that the correlation between motifs and genes “can be traced back to population movements that pre-date the Last Glacial Maximum and go back to at least 38,000 years ago” (Delbrassine et al. 2025). For the archaeological side of the two-way traffic, see Beringia’s two-way street, and for the Bering crossings of the animals in these stories, the animals that made America.

The stories shared by Siberia and the Americas are not a single inheritance but a stratigraphy. Where each motif is found, and where it is missing, records which population carried it and when, and the record agrees with the genomes.

What this settles #

The shared cosmos of the two hemispheres is real, and it is not in temple ceilings. It is in a kettle on Alcor, a yellow dog at a river, a sister with sooty hands, a muskrat that dies with mud in its paws. Those images are not grand enough to attract the ancient-astronaut crowd, which is one reason they survived scrutiny. They are also older than any temple by ten thousand years, and they did not arrive as one cargo. The first people down the Pacific coast carried emergence from the earth and a Sun who flees her brother. The people who came through the Mackenzie corridor carried the diving muskrat, the dog at the river, and the hunters with their pot. The last arrivals across the strait carried Raven and his box. Each layer stops where its carriers stopped, and the genomes stop there too.

For the Eve Theory of Consciousness, this corpus is the control experiment. It shows what a story looks like after 15,000 years of oral transmission with no writing and no contact: recognizable in outline, arbitrary in its diagnostic details, and confined to the descendants of the people who told it first. Any motif claimed to be older than the peopling of the Americas, the serpent, the Pleiades, the woman who brings death, has to meet that standard. The Cosmic Hunt sets it. A man chased an elk into the sky before anyone reached Alaska, and on two continents, in three waves, his descendants still point at the pot he carried.

Sources #

1. Anisimov, A. F. “Cosmological Concepts of the Peoples of the North.” In Studies in Siberian Shamanism, edited by Henry N. Michael, 157–229. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963.
2. Barbeau, Marius. “Bear Mother.” Journal of American Folklore 59, no. 231 (1946): 1–12.
3. Berezkin, Yuri. “The Cosmic Hunt: Variants of a Siberian–North-American Myth.” Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore 31 (2005): 79–100.
4. Berezkin, Yuri. "‘The Black Dog at the River of Tears’: Some Amerindian Representations of the Passage to the Land of the Dead and Their Eurasian Roots." Forum for Anthropology and Culture 2 (2005b): 130–170.
5. Berezkin, Yuri. "‘Earth-Diver’ and ‘Emergence from under the Earth’: Cosmogonic Tales as Evidence in Favor of the Heterogenic Origins of the American Indians." Archaeology, Ethnology and Anthropology of Eurasia 32, no. 4 (2007): 110–123.
6. Berezkin, Yuri. “Tricksters Trot to America: Areal Distribution of Folklore Motifs.” Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore 46 (2010): 125–142.
7. Berezkin, Yuri. “Sky-Maiden and World Mythology.” Iris 31 (2010b): 27–39.
8. Berezkin, Yuri. “The Pleiades as Openings, the Milky Way as the Path of Birds, and the Girl on the Moon: Cultural Links across Northern Eurasia.” Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore 44 (2010c): 7–34.
9. Berezkin, Yuri. “Folklore and Mythology Catalogue: Its Lay-Out and Potential for Research.” RMN Newsletter 10 (2015): 34–46.
10. Berezkin, Yuri. “Peopling of the New World from Data on Distributions of Folklore Motifs.” In Maths Meets Myths: Quantitative Approaches to Ancient Narratives, edited by Ralph Kenna, Máirín MacCarron, and Pádraig MacCarron. Cham: Springer, 2017.
11. Berezkin, Yuri, and Evgeny Duvakin. Thematic Classification and Distribution of Folklore and Mythological Motifs by Area: Analytical Catalogue. Motifs A7, I64, I65.
12. Boas, Franz. The Central Eskimo. Sixth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology. Washington, 1888.
13. Boas, Franz. Tsimshian Mythology. Thirty-first Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Washington, 1916.
14. Bogoras, Waldemar. “The Folklore of Northeastern Asia, as Compared with That of Northwestern America.” American Anthropologist 4, no. 4 (1902): 577–683. Open scan.
15. Coxwell, C. Fillingham. Siberian and Other Folk-Tales. London: C. W. Daniel, 1925.
16. Curtin, Jeremiah, and J. N. B. Hewitt. Seneca Fiction, Legends, and Myths. Thirty-second Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Washington, 1918.
17. Delbrassine, Hugo, et al. “Worldwide Patterns in Mythology Echo the Human Expansion out of Africa.” bioRxiv preprint, 2025.
18. d’Huy, Julien. “Un ours dans les étoiles: recherche phylogénétique sur un mythe préhistorique.” Préhistoire du Sud-Ouest 20, no. 1 (2012): 91–106.
19. d’Huy, Julien. “A Cosmic Hunt in the Berber Sky: A Phylogenetic Reconstruction of a Palaeolithic Mythology.” Les Cahiers de l’AARS 16 (2013): 93–106.
20. d’Huy, Julien. “The Evolution of Myths.” Scientific American 315, no. 6 (December 2016): 62–69.
21. Flegontov, Pavel, et al. “Palaeo-Eskimo Genetic Ancestry and the Peopling of Chukotka and North America.” Nature 570 (2019): 236–240.
22. Hagar, Stansbury. “The Celestial Bear.” Journal of American Folklore 13, no. 49 (1900): 92–103.
23. Hallowell, A. Irving. “Bear Ceremonialism in the Northern Hemisphere.” American Anthropologist 28, no. 1 (1926): 1–175. Open scan.
24. Hewitt, J. N. B. “Iroquoian Cosmology, First Part.” Twenty-first Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Washington, 1903.
25. Jochelson, Waldemar. “The Mythology of the Koryak.” American Anthropologist 6, no. 4 (1904): 413–425. Open scan.
26. Köngäs, Elli Kaija. “The Earth-Diver (Th. A 812).” Ethnohistory 7, no. 2 (1960): 151–180.
27. Mooney, James. Myths of the Cherokee. Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Washington, 1900.
28. Moreno-Mayar, J. Víctor, et al. “Terminal Pleistocene Alaskan Genome Reveals First Founding Population of Native Americans.” Nature 553 (2018): 203–207.
29. Raghavan, Maanasa, et al. “Genomic Evidence for the Pleistocene and Recent Population History of Native Americans.” Science 349, no. 6250 (2015): aab3884.
30. Rink, Henry. Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1875.
31. Sahagún, Bernardino de. Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain. Book 3, Appendix. Translated by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble. Santa Fe: School of American Research, 1952. Digital edition, Getty Research Institute.
32. Sagard, Gabriel. Le Grand Voyage du pays des Hurons. Paris, 1632.
33. Schwartz, Marion. A History of Dogs in the Early Americas. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.
34. Swanton, John R. Tlingit Myths and Texts. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 39. Washington, 1909.
35. Thuillard, Marc, Jean-Loïc Le Quellec, Julien d’Huy, and Yuri Berezkin. “A Large-Scale Study of World Myths.” Trames 22, no. 4 (2018): 407–424.
36. Skoglund, Pontus, et al. “Genetic Evidence for Two Founding Populations of the Americas.” Nature 525 (2015): 104–108.
37. Willerslev, Eske, and David J. Meltzer. “Peopling of the Americas as Inferred from Ancient Genomics.” Nature 594 (2021): 356–364.
38. Witzel, E. J. Michael. The Origins of the World’s Mythologies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
39. Griffith, Ralph T. H., trans. Rig Veda 10.14. 1896.
40. Darmesteter, James, trans. Vendidad, Fargard 13. Sacred Books of the East 4. Oxford, 1880.