Prior to writing, all human societies presumably had language. Hell, it might be rudimentary language that made us people instead of just another set of apes, at least to some extent. Every culture that I’m aware of has creation stories or something like them. In the beginning, or long ago, or in some vast before, our people came to our modern ways of being thusly…

Without writing, all traditions are oral. All of culture is handed down through example, imitation, and through tales given to children. At any given time there are three, maybe four generations of a given culture alive. Everything that makes them who they are, all of their skills, traditions, important history, everything is stored in a cloud of human minds connected only by language, example, and imitation. How we be is the stuff of example and imitation; how we came to be is very likely the stuff of stories.

I don’t have a clue, but I have an idea that hunter/gatherer clans had little in the way of creation stories. Tens, hundreds of thousands of years ago, all over the globe, we be this way because it works, and we always be this way. Example, imitation, repeat. The earliest examples of written language seem to be inventory. Hunter/gatherers don’t keep inventory. Staying in one place and doing agriculture seems to be the genesis of writing. The temporal distance between the development of agriculture, growing populations, and the need for inventory is impossible to nail down, but scratches in a grain bin doorway to keep track of bushels in and out is probably the beginning of writing. The history of “zero” begins thousands of years after the concept of maintaining inventory because all of the societies that discovered “zero” earlier fucking died.

So what in the fuck does all of this have to do with creation myths? Well, what if we had none at all prior to farming? I mean, really, we probably always fed the medicine man, even as hunter/gatherers. Successful clans probably had the ancient one that they fed because he knew the obscure uses of plants, how to bind broken bones, etc., and probably fed a generation or two of apprentices. But farming? My God, the lore to be remembered! Sometime between the earliest agriculture and the earliest writing, there would have come to esteem a certain class of cultural historians, keepers of the culture’s institutional knowledge. Without writing, all they had to work with was stories! It isn’t enough to know how; we had to have some generationally transferable whys.

Whether a given clan discovered, invented, or imitated agriculture, once they had it they set roots. They became tied to a place. Everywhere farms were carved into the environment, all over the globe, beginnings were established. By the time these beginnings amounted to cultures—by the time keeping inventory necessitated the development of writing—the hundreds and thousands of years of history that was finally written down had been reduced by similar necessity to soundbite-like myths by the keepers of oral traditions. Every civilization had a beginning, and each were different because of environment and any number of other variables, but all of the early ones shared a common distinction—they rose up without writing and whatever written record they left behind reduces the time before writing as merely the beginning. Long ago it was thus and we are who we are because these few examples of our former glories have guided us since.