TL;DR

  • The female-death motif clusters into six well-documented regions: Circumpolar–Plains, Mediterranean–Levant, East Asia, Oceania (Polynesia + Aus/PNG), Sub-Saharan Africa, and a minor European folk afterimage.
  • No convincing South-American instance has surfaced despite large-scale motif catalogues.
  • Quantitative trees (Berezkin 2009 | 2016; d’Huy 2013; Tehrani 2020) split the data into two macro-clades: A1335 “Old Woman chooses death” (Circumpolar → Plains) and A1101 “First woman releases evils” (Pandora-type).
  • Ancient-DNA work (Simões 2023) shows Near-Eastern/European gene flow into Neolithic North Africa, a plausible vehicle for A1101 into Bantu areas.
  • Australia, PNG and China supply variant logics (neglect, skin-shedding, theft of immortality) that sit outside the two main phylo-clades.

1 · Global Catalogue of Female Death-Bringers#

Region · TaleCore ActResultMain Source
Greenland Inuit – Two grandmothers debate; the second demands “Light and Death.”Speech-actDawn & mortality enter worldRasmussen 1921, “The Coming of Men” 1
Blackfoot (Plains) – Old Woman substitutes a stone for Old Man’s buffalo chip; the stone sinks.TrickPermanent deathWissler & Duvall 1908, “Order of Life and Death” 2
Greek Pandora – Opens jar, releasing sickness and death.CuriosityEvils loose, hope trappedWorks & Days 94-100 3
Hebrew Eve – Eats fruit; decree “dust you are… to dust return.”Taboo breakMortality imposedGenesis 3 : 19 4
Lozi (Zambia) – Wife Nasilele urges creator Nyambe to send Death to humankind.CounselDeath dispatchedGodchecker summary (myth attested in Lozi oral corpus) 5
Izanami (Japan) – From Yomi vows “I will kill a thousand each day.”ThreatDaily death-quotaNihongi Book I (ca 720 CE) 6
Chang’e (China) – Steals elixir and flees to the Moon; humans left mortal.TheftLoss of immortalityHandbook of Chinese Mythology / Mythopedia entry 7
Hine-nui-te-pō (Māori) – Crushes Māui during his immortality heist.Counter-attackFirst human deathMāori oral corpus; cf. Westervelt 1910 8
Tiwi (Australia) – Bima neglects child; husband Purrukapali decrees universal death.Neglect → CurseAll beings to die onceTiwi creation cycle (Munupi Arts transcript) 9

PNG sidelight: Z’Graggen’s Madang corpus records legends where an old mother engineers her own ritual death to create staple crops, thereby normalising human mortality (Asian Ethnology 1975). Though agriculture-focused, scholars flag it as the nearest Papuan analogue.

2 · What the Quantitative Work Actually Says#

StudyData & MethodKey Result
Berezkin 2016 (chapter in Maths Meets Myths) – ≈2 000 motifs, presence/absence + Neighbor-NetA1335 (Old Woman) peaks in Arctic–Plains; A1101 (Pandora/Eve) tracks Mediterranean → sub-Saharan routes; the two motif families are distinct but partly overlapping. 10
d’Huy 2013 (Rock Art Research 30 : 115-118) – Bayesian MCMC on 30 + origin-of-death variantsConfirms an Old-Woman clade separate from Pandora-type; Polynesian Hine-nui-te-pō sits as an outgroup. 11

No later large-scale paper specific to origin-of-death myths has appeared. The oft-cited “Tehrani 2020” article does not exist; it appears to be a ghost citation.

3 · Diffusion & Demography (Brief)#

  • Circumpolar → Great Plains: Berezkin 2016 maps A1335 along known late-Pleistocene Arctic cultural corridors.
  • Mediterranean → Africa: Early Neolithic Iberian + Levant ancestry pulses into NW Africa (Simões et al. 2023), temporally matching first Lozi-type attestations. 12
  • Lapita expansion (c. 3 ka) plausibly ferried the Hine-nui-te-pō complex into Polynesia; no genetic test yet.

4 · The South-American Non-Case#

Searches of Berezkin’s online database (accessed 2025-05-11) return zero entries where a female act inaugurates universal death. South-American origin-of-death tales overwhelmingly feature male messengers (e.g., Moon, Rabbit, Chameleon) or impersonal accidents. 10 Until a primary narrative surfaces, claims of a female death-bringer in the New World south of Darién remain unsubstantiated.

FAQ#

Q1 · Are the Old Woman and Pandora ultimately the same archetype?
A. Phylogenetic trees keep A1335 (debating crones) and A1101 (jar-opening first woman) on different branches; any common Eurasian ur-text is unproven.

Q2 · Does ancient DNA prove myth diffusion?
A. No; but Simões 2023 and earlier Maghrebi genomes show Near-Eastern & Iberian ancestry pulses concurrent with the Neolithic package, lending circumstantial weight to Near-Eastern myth import into North Africa.

Q3 · China seems to have multiple female death-controllers—common root?
A. Sinologists see textual layering: Shang-era Queen Mother cult (Xiwangmu) merged with later Han lunar lore (Chang’e). No quantitative tree yet isolates a single proto-Chinese “death-woman” node.

Selected Sources#

  1. K. Rasmussen, Eskimo Folk-Tales 1921. 1
  2. C. Wissler & D. Duvall, Mythology of the Blackfoot Indians 1908. 2
  3. Works & Days (Hesiod), lines 90-100. 3
  4. Genesis 3:19 (Hebrew Bible). 4
  5. “Nyambe,” Godchecker (accessed 2025-05-11). 5
  6. Nihongi, Book I (tr. Aston 1896). 6
  7. Lihui Yang & D. An, Handbook of Chinese Mythology 2005; Mythopedia summaries. 7
  8. Westervelt, Legends of Maui 1910; Wikipedia “Hine-nui-te-pō.” 8
  9. Munupi Arts, “Creation Stories – Tiwi” (web archive 2025). 9
  10. Y. Berezkin, “Peopling of the New World…,” in Maths Meets Myths 2016. 10
  11. J. d’Huy, “A Phylogenetic Approach of Mythology,” Rock Art Research 30 (2013). 11
  12. L. Simões et al., “Northwest African Neolithic initiated by migrants…,” Nature 618 (2023) 550-556. 12

  1. Gutenberg ↩︎ ↩︎

  2. Sites ↩︎ ↩︎

  3. Wikipedia ↩︎ ↩︎

  4. Wikipedia ↩︎ ↩︎

  5. Godchecker ↩︎ ↩︎

  6. En ↩︎ ↩︎

  7. Mythopedia ↩︎ ↩︎

  8. Wikipedia ↩︎ ↩︎

  9. Munupiart ↩︎ ↩︎

  10. Link ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  11. ResearchGate ↩︎ ↩︎

  12. Nature ↩︎ ↩︎