Many of you asked for this, an in depth talk about, and telling of, probably the oldest story in the world that we know of. Yes, we know many motifs, parts of myths, but this story we can replicate in whole and have good evidence for its age.

Long before the Epic of Gilgamesh, before the Proto-Indo Europeans, before the last mini Ice Age, before the well known Australian aboriginal tales, before all that, our ancestors were hunter gatherers and told stories about their lives, what effected them, to try and understand the world around them.

So what is the oldest story ever told? Well one story was so popular that it remains today, and researchers call this The Cosmic Hunt. This video explains how we found out that this is the oldest story in the world, how it evolved and varied across the world, and how we can recreate it. A story which we can date with some accuracy considering the timescales involved, and which has spawned many variants across Eurasia and the Americas. It is probably the oldest story we know, but that doesn't mean an older one couldn't be reconstructed, and that is touched on as well.

There are a number of good research papers on the subject, some of which I have noted below, with stories involving one or more hunters, tracking down a large animal, before something happens that affects the cosmos and the nights sky.

So welcome to a world of man eating birds, mammoths, gods, and heroes, and welcome to the cosmic hunt!

APOLOGY: It was pointed out to me that a term I used to describe a particular cultures people is considered derogatory, and I want to apologize for using it, I was unaware of this at the time of recording, and I never meant to use it as a derogatory reference. The material I use is often published in a time before awareness too, and so these may often contain terms some find offensive.

The main papers I refer to are (and which are available from the usual repositories - I tend to use JSTOR which is free to most University students and Academics):

The Cosmic Hunt: Variants of a Siberian-North American Myth by Yuri Berezkin
A Cosmic Hunt in the Berber sky: a phylogenetic reconstruction of a Palaeolithic mythology by Julien d’Huy
The Constellation of Orion and the Cosmic Hunt in Equatorial Africa by Vincent Vieira
On the Cosmic Hunt in Northern Eurasian Rock Art by Enn Ernits

Scientific American also published an article by Julien d'Huy in December 2016 which is an easy read, although this requires payment to read.

And here is a link to the interactive graph showing the story evolution: http://demo.accurat.io/sci-am/


Chapters
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0:00 Introduction
1:25 The Sky at Night
2:45 Polyphemus and Galatea
4:12 Polyphemus and Odysseus
6:41 Where was the Cosmic Hunt told?
7:41 An Australian Cosmic Hunt
9:09 One source and one myth
11:36 The variants, Western Siberian
15:37 The Central Asian variant
16:56 The Circum Artic variant
19:08 So what can we conclude from these variants?
20:48 The African Cosmic Hunt
22:38 A phylogenetic study of the Cosmic Hunt
24:35 The source, migration, and common traits of the story
26:20 The Original Story of the Cosmic Hunt
28:39 Cave art and paintings that represent the hunt
30:31 Artemis, the older Greek version
33:04 Further clues to the age of the Cosmic Hunt
34:12 One final clue to its age
36:02 An older story to come?