However, the kind of causation employed by primitive peoples is of a very special kind. It is personal causation. That is, the agent responsible for an action generally has the attributes of human personality. Impersonal causation, a hallmark of modern science, is regarded as insufficient by primitive peoples.* Impersonal forces may be the immediate cause of something, but they are always underlain by ultimate causes, which are usually personal in nature. Thus, the Kuikuru know it was the wind that blew the roof off a house, but they carry the search for explanation one step further and ask, "Who sent the wind?" Their implicit assumption, which they never seem to question, is that some personality, human or spirit, had to direct the natural force of the wind to produce its effect. How could it be otherwise? The members of a pre-literate society could not possibly know the physical causes of cyclonic storms generated high in the atmosphere by complex meteorological forces.
To be sure, primitive peoples apply causation to more than just immediate questions like why a man's tooth hurts or why his roof blew off. They are also interested in more remote and enduring questions. Who was the first man? How did people learn to plant? Why is the moon's face marked? What happens after death? For tens of thousands of years people have been crafting answers to these questions, answers that are embodied in the vast body of imaginative narratives we call origin myths. Over the last hundred years, anthropologists have developed a keen interest in origin myths and have made very extensive collections and analyses of them.
Certain myths are all but universal, and their extensive distribution attests to their great antiquity. The best example of this is the famous Flood myth. The Flood story recorded in the Bible was by no means original with the ancient Hebrews, but was derived by them from the earlier Gilgamesh Epic of the Babylonians. But the Babylonian version in turn drew on a pre-existing Flood myth that no doubt went back thousands of years earlier. So old is the Flood myth, in fact, that it has had a chance to diffuse far and wide. Indeed, it is known to practically every human society from aboriginal Australia to Tierra del Fuego.

One should not make the error of believing, however, that just because a myth is known throughout the world, it must necessarily reflect an actual occurrence. The near-universality of a flood story is no more proof that a flood once covered the earth than the widespread belief in a Fall-of-the-Sky myth is proof that the sky once actually fell.

Myths are not merely explanations, but also function to assure, encourage, and inspire. They are also literary creations: narrative epics, full of drama and romance, of novelty and imagination, of quest and conflict. But while often having great literary merit, origin myths should not be thought of as the work of a few creative geniuses. They are, instead, the product of untold thousands of narrators who, in telling and retelling a myth, have embellished it here, dropped a character there, transposed two incidents, amplified a cryptic part, given greater motive or justification to an action, and so on. Because they continuously change, then, there is no "official" version of a myth. Indeed, even in the same village one may readily obtain half a dozen versions of the same myth.

With these general considerations in mind, let us turn now to a brief survey of the kinds of origin myths found in the primitive world.

The view that the earth is the center of the universe, which, until Copernicus, prevailed throughout Europe, was by no means unique to Western thought. It is no doubt a legacy from Stone Age times. After all, since the earth is the place where people live and is what they know, and since people create the myths, why shouldn't they place their planet at the center of the cosmos? Moreover, if the earth is of prime importance to them - as it is - why not make its creation primary in time as well? Thus, in primitive mythology, it is the rule that the world was created first, and that the sun, the moon, and the stars follow it. In fact, the sun, moon, and stars are often mythological characters who first lived on earth but who, after a series of adventures or misfortunes, ended up in the sky to find their ultimate resting place as heavenly bodies.

A few societies have no myth to account for the origin of the world. For them, the world has always existed. More commonly, however, the earth is thought to have been created by the actions of supernatural beings. Rarely, though, does a deity create the world out of nothing: generally, he or she has something to work with. Some Polynesian peoples, for example, believe that the sea was primeval, and that the land was created by a god, Tane, who drove to the bottom and came up with mud from which to fashion it. The Norse gods Odin, Vill, and Ve made the world from the body of the giant Ymir, using his blood for oceans, his bones for mountains, his hair for trees, and so on. It is not unusual for several gods or culture heroes to be involved in the creation, each contributing his or her portion to the final structure.

Beliefs about the origin of human beings fall into three main types:

1. They have always existed on earth.
2. They did not always exist but were created in some way.
3. They previously existed, but in another world, and had somehow been brought to this one.

The first belief is exemplified by the Yanomamo of Venezuela about whom Napoleon Chagnon says, "The first beings cannot be accounted for. The Yanomamo simply presume that the cosmos originated with these people." Usually, though, there is a specific creation of the human species. The Norse god Odin created man from ash wood and woman from alder. The Machiguenga of Peru believe the were made by a god, Tasorinchi, who carved them out of balsa wood. The Tlingit of Alaska say the Raven created not only the first human beings, but also the first animals, as well as the sun, the moon, and the stars. And of course, in the Biblical account, it was God who created the progenitors of the human race, fashioning Adam out of clay and Eve from one of his ribs.

The Warao of the Orinoco delta, on the other hand, believe men first lived in a skyworld where the only animals were birds. Then one day a hunter shot a bird with such force that his arrow pierced the ground of the skyworld and continued to the earth below. Peering through the hole and seeing a rich land beneath them, teeming with all manner of game, the hunter attached a long cotton rope to a tree and lowered himself to earth. There he was ultimately joined by his fellows, who finally decided to abandon the skyworld and settle permanently on earth. The Karaja of central Brazil reverse the process. Their ancestors, they say, once dwelt in an underworld until one day one of them climbed up a hole in the ground and out onto the surface of the earth, where his fellow tribesmen later followed and where they eventually settled.

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