The first and oldest stories in the world maybe lost to us, but we can reconstruct them by finding their motifs and piecing them together. In this video I look at the earliest creation myth motifs, focused particularly on the Earth Diver and Tree of Life, to do this. I will tell a few different creation stories, and discuss how motifs have evolved, mixed, and dispersed. And finally I tell a story, reconstructed from all these motifs.

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References
Berezkin, Yuri (2007). "“Earth-diver” and “emergence from under the earth”: Cosmogonic tales as evidence in favor of the heterogenic origins of the American Indians". In: Archaeology, Ethnology and Anthropology of Eurasia 32: 110–123. 10.1134/S156301100704010X.
Dundes, Alan. "Earth-Diver: Creation of the Mythopoeic Male". In: American Anthropologist, New Series, 64, no. 5 (1962): 1032–051. Accessed August 20, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/666952.
Napolskikh, Vladimir. "The Earth-Diver Myth (А812) in Northern Eurasia and North America: Twenty Years Later". Frog; Siikala, Anna-Leena; Stepanova, Eila (2012). Mythic Discourses: Studies in Uralic Traditions. Finnish Literature Society. pp. 120–140. ISBN 978-952-222-376-0.
Nagy, Ilona. "The Earth-Diver Myth (Mot. 812) and the Apocryphal Legend of the Tiberian Sea". In: Acta Ethnographica Hungarica 51, 3-4 (2006): 281–326. Accessed Aug 20, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1556/AEthn.51.2006...

Chapters
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0:00 Introduction
2:28 The Beginning was made from The Nothing?
3:52 The Research
5:50 The Underworld and Earth Divers motifs
7:30 Understanding motif changes, The Bird Scout
9:42 The Oldest Creation Myth Motifs, The Earth Driver
11:59 Creation Myth Structure
13:30 Looking for the Motifs of Voids and Chaotic Waters
16:02 The Tree of Life or World Tree
18:13 Mixed Motifs in the Creation Myth
20:20 North American motifs
22:07 Where did the Creation Myth with these motifs originate?
22:48 But why an Earth Diver?
23:57 The earliest mythology of our ancestors?
22:57 The Magic of Wind from Vedic to Abrahamic religions
27:37 Putting it all together and conclusion