The Hunt for the World's Oldest Story(newyorker.com)
newyorker.com
The Hunt for the World's Oldest Story
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/10/20/review-the-roots-of-ancient-mythology-books
6 comments
https://archive.ph/MqXBj
the archiological.work in Turkey is upending a great deal of unfounded assumption regarding the development of technology and culture, and not by some lttle margin either, the sites there predate, by many millenia, anything else, with very strong evidence for ritual, clan based religious/cultural practices useing animal and human characters that are recognisable, here, 10000 years later.
The scale in time and space of the evidence in Turkey, strongly points to a much older cultural practice
that has left traces yet to be connected in an unequivicable fashion.
As to oral traditions, then work done with austrailian peoples demonstrates a continuity of storys surviving the divergence of language groups as long as 15000 years ago or more, and as always, austrailian cultural practice shows continuilty on a time scale only seen in a few other places in africa, 10's of thousands of years rather than the much more modest timelines seen elsewhere
The Hyborean Age, eh?
At the intersection of linguistics and mythology, "Gods dance on our tongues". Indeed.
I am surprised they dont mention Julien D'Huy latest work.
We should be searching for the last story.