Human Constants

"I saw it! It was hairy all over and walked on two legs. It lives in the forest. It looked like a beast and a man!" Quick! What creature is this obviously hysterical person describing? If you live in the U.S., you probably said Big Foot. But in South America it is Maricoxi, in New Zealand Moehau. Croatia has the sumske dekle and Scotland has the fear liath and India has the kala bandar. Oh! We mustn't forget the venerable Yeti, all the way from Nepal. One creature described all over the world, so it must be real! Right?

Humans the world over have many constants, though the details may vary wildly. Take lefse, injera, naan, pita, bao, bammy, pita, or biscuits. It's all bread in the end. Music, personal adornment, family, art, and mythology are all part of the human experience no matter where you look. But there are other things-strange and unexplainable things-that are shared by cultures that are not geographically adjacent. You can find pyramids in Egypt (of course), South America, Asia, and Northern Europe. Not every culture has the pyramid as part of its traditional architecture, but enough across the globe do to raise eyebrows. The same can be said of dragons, the flood myth, and even sasquatch.

There are many explanations to this seeming anomaly, structures and creatures and stories amazingly similar yet from far flung parts of the globe. Aliens and Atlantis seem to be a favorite explanation. Maybe si, maybe no. In my mind, barring supernatural or superterrestrial origin (which I haven't completely ruled out), the most likely explanations are either a common root, the human mind, or a combination of the two.

We all come from a common place: Africa. Perhaps the constants among humans originated with our original ancestors. Africa is a place of mountains rising from the flat savannah (pyramids), crocodiles and enormous land animals (dragons), periods of drought followed by intense rain or innundation (flood story), and gorillas (sasquatch). Perhaps, as people left for Europe and the Middle East and beyond, they took with them memories of these things with them and passed the memories on to their children. Who passed the stories on to their children, and so on and so forth. If you come across the same thing in many cultures with no visible connection, look to Africa before looking to outer space.

More likely, in my opinion, is that these stories and legends and ideas come from the human mind and how it perceives the world. Just as all cultures had the ability to create bread and clothing and an afterlife, why couldn't they use another human constant to create other things? Imagination is present in every human being, even the most literal and dull. Imagination led someone to bake bread, to wonder about purpose, to wonder what is over the next hill, to see a rock rolling down hill and create a wheel. To see the stars and build wonders and math. Perhaps people in the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa all saw mountains, saw their power and immortality and wanted to make their own mountains. Perhaps people saw floods and understood the destructive power that brought renewal of land as an important part of their lives. Perhaps people saw themselves, increasingly detached and controlling of nature, saw creatures that are almost human living as a part of nature, not its master. And because we all have the same brain, we created very similar physical and abstract concepts in our own lives. Birds all over the world live differently, eat differently, and look wildly differently. Yet, they all have some sort of nesting behavior. Our brain is the skeleton of culture, the same (very, very) basics all over the world. Our differences are the flesh.