Review Essays

The Paleolithic Turn: Michael Witzels Theory of Laurasian Mythology

THE ORIGINS OF THE WORLDS MYTHOLOGIES

By E. J. Michael Witzel Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012 Pp. xxi + 665. Paper, $45.00.
REVIEWER:

Frederick M. Smith University of Iowa Iowa City, IA 52242-1323

MYTH AND ITS ANTIQUITY

Until the appearance of this book, Professor Witzel has been best known for his engagement with specically Indian antiquity. All Vedic scholars have proted from his careful identication and reconstruction of Vedic dialects in second millennium BCE India and his dexterity in deploying IndoEuropean linguistics. With this book, however, he redenes what it means to be engaging antiquity. He stretches his own stratigraphic timetable, which most of us had recognized as vast, of about four thousand years, to proportions that are gigantic by the scale of all but a few archaeologists and scholars of Paleolithic cave art, as well as geologists and cosmologists accustomed to dealing with millions and billions of years. He employs his time-tested method of historical reconstruction of languages and dialects in order to retrieve the prehistory and stratigraphy of mythology, taking the origins of the worlds mythologies back to transitional dates of approximately 65,000 years ago (the beginning of the exodus of Homo sapiens sapiens from Africa), 40,000 years ago (the explosion of cave art and the beginnings of Laurasian mythology), and 20,000 years ago (the migration of humans to the Americas). This mythology, he argues, contains most of the key ideas and themes that have penetrated into most of the worlds mythologies and, therefore, most of the worlds basic ways of thinking. In constructing his arguments, Witzel replicates the largely successful method that he has employed in his writing on comparative linguistics, language borrowing, and Vedic dialectology. His reading is epic, the scale of the project is epic, and this book will receive epic discussion, pro and con, for at least the next generation. Just as Witzel has brought order and clarity to our sense of the composition of the R gveda, which now
Religious Studies Review, Vol. 39 No. 3, September 2013 2013 Rice University.

appears ludicrously recent, he seeks to do the same with world mythology, which, he argues, is of startling antiquity. The numbers recited above will be shocking, even offputting, to most scholars, a few of whose initial reaction will be to write Witzels book off as a work of crank scholarship, with inadequate attention given to anthropological and religious studies theorists whose ideas framed and dominated twentieth-century thought, such as Emile Durkheim, J. Z. Smith, Walter Burkert, and many others. That would be a mistake. To begin, Witzels opus is not simply an exercise in applying the method of historical comparative linguistics to the vast but largely disconnected research on myth and folktale that accumulated in the last century and a half. As strongly articulated is a solid knowledge of history, archaeology, and (what is new) physical anthropology, the history of food production and pastoralism, geological theories of continental drift and glaciation, and, crucially, population genetics and its links with language families. This is part of a larger movement in the humanities and social sciences to take natural and applied sciences seriously. Most explanations of myth, he shows, are monolithic and unilateral, attempts to read individual myths and comparative mythology through a single methodological lens. Witzels considerable armamentarium is designed to include all evidence and, as noted, time spans so vast that they have never been incorporated in the history of scholarly discussion of mythology, except by a few stray ethologists who have posited myth and quasi-religious ritual to prehominid apes. However, Witzel argues, both data collection and positive science have advanced to the point that all of these perspectives, particularly geological history and genetics, must be included in the discussion. That said, he is not the rst to make this attempt. His massive bibliography is lled with smaller, more targeted, and less ambitious studies in which historical linguistics, genetics, and the other named disciplines are applied to the study of mythology. What Witzel does here is expand the scope of all of this in order to create a mind-altering and truly groundbreaking theory. Even if not all scholars will agree with what he writes here, or may disagree strongly with parts of it, there can be little doubt that by the end of the book they will view recent developments in religion and

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mythrecent being the last two millenniain a far different light than they did before they picked up this book. Near the beginning, Witzel offers a comprehensive and lengthy denition of myth, which is important to reproduce here. He denes it as a narrative that is told or recited at certain special occasions; that is standardized (to some extent); that is collectively owned and managed (often by specialists); that is considered by its owners to be of great and enduring signicance; that (whether or not these owners are consciously aware of this point) contains and brings out such images of the world (a cosmology), of past and present society (a history and sociology), and of the human condition (an anthropology) as are eminently constitutive of the life society in which that narrative circulates, or at least where it circulated originally; that, if this constitutive aspect is consciously realized by its owners, may be invoked (etiologically) to explain and justify present-day conditions; and that is therefore a powerful device to create collectively underpinned meaning and collectively recognized truth (regardless of whether such truth would be recognized outside the community whose myth it is. (7) It can, and does, have almost innite variants and structures.
ASSESSMENT OF PREVIOUS THEORIES AND THE NEED FOR AN INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH

He sets out in the rst two chapters to review the elds of the study of myth and comparative method, and to lay out his own method, with conscious attention to its scientic validity and application. Invoking the scientic spirit, he states repeatedly that he is willing to discard his theory if it can be proven wrong and resorts to counterchecks that place limits on it. He rst shows that the theories of mythology from the last century and a half have been decient, mistakenly evolutionary, motivated by fashionable political or sociological theory, or based on psychological assumptions and theory that are better explained through sophisticated historical method. He addresses, and subsequently sets aside, many of the prevailing theories of myth, including the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud, Karl Jung, and the latters popular disciple Joseph Campbell; Bruce Lincolns approach to Indo-European myth; the evolutionary theorizing of Robert Bellah and Ina Wunn (although he engages the latter, a German scholar of Paleolithic cave art, quite thoroughly); Mircea Eliades important early work, even if he accepts

parts of it; the notable nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury scholars F. Max Mller and James Frazer, both of whose work Witzel sees as monolithic, written to establish unilateral theories; structuralists such as George Dumzil, whose application is quite limited; and diffusionists such as Leo Frobenius, Stith Thompson, and others (even if he cites Thompsons work constantly), not least because of critical aws he sees in their notions of diffusion. He dismisses Freud as a modern mythmaker (86), whose work is of no help in ferreting out the deep roots of the worlds mythologies, not least because his interpretations apply to only a small and relatively recent segment of the broad panorama of mythology. For Witzel, Jungs insights are intriguing, including his notions of archetypes and a collective unconscious. But he argues that they are better explained as the result of story and myth transmitted in very old historical migrations rather than because they are inherent in the human psyche. Bellahs division of myth into primitive and archaic, beginning with the Paleolithic, was subsequently taken up by Wunn, who Witzel feels has limited the possibilities of ancient religion to what can be read from the bare facts of archaeology and cave art. [T]he Bellah/Wunn scheme is contradicted by comparative, geographical, and historical evidence. There is more to religion than meets the eye (33). Witzel thoroughly eschews the Chicago school of comparative religion, including most of Eliade. He regards J. Z. Smiths approach as much too limited and strongly disagrees with Smiths skepticism about historical comparison (41 42). His comments on Bruce Lincoln (2728, 9599) will be discussed below. He has nothing to say about Wendy Doniger (46) and does not substantively mention some of Chicagos more notable students, such as Laurie Patton or Jeffrey Kripal, although he does draw from Lawrence Sullivans work on South American mythology. In short, Witzel does not locate his project within the eld of religious studies. His historical comparative mythology, as he calls it (48, passim), draws from historical linguistics, anthropology and folklore, population genetics, and other sciences, but rarely from the eld of religious studies. He states: The procedure proposed in this book thus closely echoes that of comparative linguistics: isolated and unmotivated similarities found in widely separated areas usually are indicators of an older, lost common system, higher on the structural and cladistic tree (44). Thus, his method, illustrated in countless helpful and sometimes lengthy charts and tables, is to build a family tree of myth, comparable with constructing a manuscript stemma. Even if Witzel does not place himself within religious studies, it is certain that a signicant segment of his readership is located and will continue to be located within that eld. What this says is that religious studies is no longer (if it has ever been) unilateral and monochromatic;

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it does embrace different methods (which was unnecessary for Witzel to discuss) and has never legitimized itself through adherence to a single dominant mode of analysis, such as the so-called Chicago school. Witzels method will undoubtedly be taken up within the precincts of religious studies, and Witzel himself will be one of the scholars to push the boundaries of that eld. Consequently, he avoids religious studies theorizing or indulging in Freudian, Jungian, sociological, Marxist, or postmodern theorizing. He always refers back to his own approach, which he stoutly defends. The goals of resorting to a Jungian style collective unconscious, he says often (and as was stated above), are better achieved by informed comparative and historical understanding. As for the argument that certain mythemes or complex motifs, the archetypes, are universally human (12), Witzel states that scholars have used this as a comfortable escape route (13). More incriminating, in the end, is that these approaches are atemporal and nonspatial (72), and thus fail the historical standards that he feels give a much more accurate picture of the history of mythology. He places Jungian theory in the same category as diffusion theory, which in the hands of many mythologists who have exerted a major inuence in the eld, such as Joseph Campbell, is part of a toolbox approach that ends up evaporating into randomness rather than systematic in approach. Witzel explains that it is not the aim of this book to explain the psychic background or ultimate neurological basis of individual myths but, rather, to establish how ancient and contemporary myths are ordered and interpreted in Eurasia and beyond (14). For example, in his discussion of Pygmy mythology, Witzel critiques Campbells view that the Pygmies somehow live in close connection with their collective unconscious, as if they were somehow more primitive than other populations as simplication and overinterpretation (315), and with good reason. The structure of Pygmy myth, falling within the orbit of Gondwana mythology with its concept of a distant high god (a few scholars might critique his frequent use of the term deus otiosus) and a primordial human misdeed, is similar to those of indigenous Australians and other seemingly unrelated African groups because of deep historical afliations, not because of an ineffable highly specied undercurrent in a fundamental human unconscious. Lincolns promising early work, Witzel asserts, was initially compromised by his failure to follow through on the methods of Indo-European linguistics, in which he was trained (96), and was eventually contaminated by sociological and Marxist approaches that limited myth to its social function, leaving out all spiritual aspects (28). Witzels ontological assumptions throughout the book are unerringly materialist and positivist. Thus, it is of interest to consider what he means by spiritual aspects. Because of his rejec-

tion of nearly all religious studies, anthropological, and psychological theory, he retrieves what he regards as spiritual in his reconstructions of mythology from the integrated perspective of his multidisciplinary and scientic research framework. What he retrieves is a deep history of shamanism, which will be discussed below; it is only important to mention here because we need to know how, if at all, he conceives of the spiritual.
GEOGRAPHY, PERIODIZATION, AND METHOD

It is important that Witzel asserts that human intelligence and mythmaking capabilities were no less 40,000 years ago, his terminus post quem of Laurasian mythology, than they are today; the differences are cultural. What I suspect is that most modern scholars tacitly accept that humans today are more intelligent and capable of complex symbolic thought than they were 40,000 years ago, that human evolution and the development of literacy are proof of this. But Witzel disagrees and devotes much of the core of this book to providing details that illustrate this. Countless nely wrought minutiae in the complex tapestry of early mythology are marshaled in an attempt to answer an initial question: why and how similarities in myth exist in distant parts of the globe (31). The most critical terms Witzel uses are Laurasia and Gondwana. World mythology, he argues, can be divided between the dominant Luarasian model and the remnant Gondwana model. Close comparison, he writes, allows us to reconstruct a coherent early mythology that will be called Laurasian, after the well-established geological term derived from Laurentia in Canada, and of Greater Asia and the northern parts of the original Pan-Gaean supercontinent (45). The primary countercheck to this dominant mythology is Gondwana mythology, utilizing another geological term that indicates the southern parts of the original supercontinent that existed long before the emergence of humans (5). The latter, for the purpose of myth, includes sub-Saharan Africa, the Andaman Islands, Melanesia, New Guinea, Australia, and a few remnants in South America. Several major sections of the book discuss the relationship between these two, and their substantial prehistory, which he calls Pan-Gaean. He sums up his introductory argument with the following:
Worldwide similarities between individual myths are habitually explained by diffusion or by common human psychic traits (Jungian archetypes). However the current Laurasian proposal supersedes these approaches as it involves a whole system of myths, notably one characterized by a narrative structure (story line) from the creation of the world to its end. This mythology has been spread not by diffusion but above all by the constant advance of humans: after their exodus out of Africa into northern Eurasia and beyond after the past two ice ages, respectively (c. 52.00045,000 BCE and 10,000 BCE). (35)

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Well before the publication of this book, Witzel dubbed his theory Out of Africa. Indeed, he acknowledges that certain aspects of all Out of Africa mythologies must have been present, at the latest, c. 40,000 years ago, . . . while those of Laurasian mythology must have been present by c. 20,000 years ago (418). An example of his deployment of his Out of Africa theory is found in a subsection called the creation of humans, part of the long chapter describing the narrative details of Laurasian mythology. Witzel accumulates data, some of it reconstructed, from many disparate cultures, in which a semidivine character, usually of solar origins, was responsible for the beginning of humankind on earth and their subsequent lineages (167). Examples include Indian (Manu), Greek (Herakles), Japanese (Jimmu), Mayan (Hunahpu and Xbalanque), and Incan (Huiracocha). Earlier advocates of diffusionist theories (e.g., Frobenius) did not marshal all the evidence that Witzel does (much of it was of course not available in the early twentieth century), but more importantly the earlier idea that this was an example of historical diffusion out of the Middle East is only an artifact of literary attestation (ibid.). However, the evidence Witzel brings to bear is too broadly distributed for this to have been possible within the temporal limits previously ascribed. Thus, a much greater time frame must be considered for this (part of the) story, namely the period before the migration of humans across the Aleutian land bridge between Siberia and Alaska, which must have occurred before it was inundated by the melting of the polar ice cap after c. 11,500 BCE. Resorting to archaeological evidence, Witzel dates this migration to c. 20,000 BCE, which indicates that this notion of semidivine lineage must have been older, much older. The most obvious solution, Witzel states, is to assume an older Laurasian version that sees human origins in some solar deity (167). He acknowledges that historians may object to much of his early rendering of the divine origin of nobles, chieftains, and kings in the late Paleolithic, assigning the date only to a much later period (174177). Historians will aver only that, during the period in question, small bands of huntergatherers migrated away from Africa, concluding that there is no historical evidence for any Laurasian (or Gondwana or Pan-Gaean) mythology at all, not to speak of a mythology so well ordered that Witzel refers to it as the worlds rst novel. But Witzel stands by the probability of his reconstruction, that in this case, for example, shamans may already have claimed a link with the celestial spirits and deities (176). We shall return to his views on early shamanism below. He devotes a long second chapter to method, focusing on the history of comparative mythology. He explains his method as a type of multivariate analysis, a term adopted from population genetics, in which a number of disparate data sets must be considered independently, then taken

together. In his version of multivariate analysis, Witzel utilizes geographical distribution (he carefully maps selected stories and mythemes), genetically based inheritance patterns, and what he awkwardly labels path dependencies, a term he helped coin in an article a decade earlier (Farmer et al. 2002). Path dependencies help explain local mythological modications that are based on earlier cultural stages that strongly inform contemporary social and religious conditions (34). A path dependency indicates a set of foundational topics in each civilization that have exercised extraordinary inuence on all its subsequent stages (39). Attitudes and ideas stimulated or inherited through path dependencies have helped spawn new myths that, nevertheless, do not (and cannot) make a clean break with the past. This notion helps Witzel immensely in tracing myth back tens of thousands of years. But it could not be possible by itself; it must be part of a multivariate or multicomponent analysis. Witzel clearly states that his method replicates that of comparative linguistics, particularly the historically developed method of arriving at Proto-Indo-European, which is used here at length as a model for comparative historical linguistics and, by extension, mythology (189). He postulates that the overlap between language and mythology must necessarily have been much closer in the past (188). This, he argues, is defensible, particularly in view of Edward Sapirs observations nearly a century ago that (l)anguage, race, and culture are not necessarily correlated (1921: 111). Witzel, to be sure, agrees with Sapir, updating it to say, Obviously, there are no inherent and automatic links among genetic features, languages, and mythology (210). He argues that just as word comparison, rules of regular sound change, and locating common grammatical features are used effectively in establishing language families such as Indo-European, it is equally possible to compare language families, resulting, eventually, in superfamilies and, even more distantly, hyperfamilies of languages. This has been little studied, however, because of several factors, including 1) the fact that very few linguists know the requisite languages, 2) the strong resistance of mainstream linguists (200), and 3) because of 2) funding opportunities for such research are virtually nonexistent. Witzel, does, however, cite recent Russian attempts to establish a Nostratic language superfamily (192195) scattered across the Eurasian land mass that included among its afliations Indo-European, Dravidian, Uralic, Altaic, Kartvelian, and Afro-Asiatic. Exploratory research of this kind is called Long-Range linguistics (cf. the Association for the Study of Language in Prehistory and its journal Mother Tongue). The analogy is clear. If language reconstruction is possible through well-attested methods, even if it is no longer fashionable in the eld of linguistics, in which historical

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linguistics is no longer deemed a sufciently viable topic to be taught at most universities (including my own, the University of Iowa), then reconstruction of mythology, along the same methodological lines, is also possible, even if at this point it is highly speculative. Witzels attempt here, then, should, we hope, attract as many serious and committed researchers as it will preemptive and reexive detractors. Complementary to this, Witzels attempt to recapture a Laurasian mythology, a contemporaneous but also much earlier Gondwana mythology from which the Laurasian is derived, and an even earlier Pan-Gaean mythology requires a series of comparisons involving not just mythemes or specic narrative cycles, as in previous accounts of mythological history, but of complete mythological systems. Although at every step he emphasizes the tentative and speculative nature of the project, he also gains condence in its plausibility, even its likelihood, because of the increasing sophistication of his selected allied scientic systems, including historical linguistics, physical anthropology (of negligible value here, Witzel admits [207]), population genetics (of great value), and archaeology (of high value, but fraught with limitations). Witzel supports the consistency of his method within these sciences, noting that they use the same stemmatic and cladistic approach as historical comparative mythology (184). What this means, as noted above, is that these complementary disciplines in the humanities and social and natural sciences establish their hypotheses through the reconstructive act of building family trees. Through a logical reverse progression of mythic events, Witzel is forced to take his dating not just to recognizable prehistoric periods, but to much earlier eras, when early humans could have carried an inherited story out of Africa, across continents and land bridges that achieved their present shape as the result of postglaciation climatic conditions. The dominant Laurasian mythology, which, Witzel argues, emerged around 40,000 BCE, was to a great extent transmitted through the Nostratic languages. Study of this is in its infancy, and perhaps it can never be condently recovered or proven through the mechanisms of linguistic reconstruction. But within Witzels panorama of corroborating disciplines, this proposition appears reasonable. The primary challenge in proving this is the difculty of linguistic reconstruction in prehistoric and early historic times. For example, studies carried out in the last four decades that attempted to link Proto-Dravidian with ProtoElamite have not met with a kind reception, even if the idea is tempting and ts within the conceptual eld of long-range linguistics. The Nostratic and Proto-Nostratic theses constitute part of a web of assumptions based on scanty evidence that Witzel proceeds to build on with further assumptions, even if he is able to present evidence that it is now possible to reconstruct a list of Nostratic religious terms, for example

for spirits. But as Witzel says several times, fully italicized, The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence (e.g., 33, 241). He is aware of the danger of creating a house of cards and resorts to counterchecks within the eld of mythology, particularly local mythologies, but most importantly Gondwana mythology, which, as noted, he posits as prior to Laurasian. Thus, it is essential that he backs up his radical thesis with evidence amassed from archaeology, linguistics, and population genetics. Witzel issues strong warnings about his work (96100). He recognizes that much of his speculation rests on suggestion rather than conrmation. The reasons are always that the corroborating sciences are thus far insufciently developed. But he remains hopeful that the science will eventually fall into place. For example, he says population genetics depends partly on so-far-untestable assumptions about rates of genetic drift that have not yet been established (97). Another of his linchpins is the positing of superfamilies of language, such as Nostratic (or, an alternative suggestion, Eurasiatic), that would have accompanied early population drift. So far traditional linguists have rejected these proposals, although, as Witzel says, too easily, if not supercially (97). He warns that some of his archaeological, genetic, linguistic, and mythological data surely suffers from contamination of various kinds, including by partially destroyed and compromised archaeological sites, uncertain word reconstructions, corruption of oral source material by missionary activity, the tendency of literary traditions to obscure transmitted mythology, and poor compilation of materials in modern scholarship. He constantly questions his own data, which in the end is more reassuring than it is damaging. The reader feels more comfortable with an author who questions his material at every step, particularly if the thesis is both grand and adventurous. Nevertheless, taking all the evidence together, the likelihood is that early H. sapiens sapiens and their presumptive mythologies could only have migrated such great distances if the movements of peoples that can positively be traced to a period between the last two ice ages had not yet occurred. Witzel sums up the uniqueness of his approach as follows:
[T]he comparative method in mythology starts out from similarities found in various sets of evidence (myths). Such comparisons are normally carried out in random fashion, across space and time. They are not performed systematically or in historical fashion; in other words, the application of the historical comparative approach, as employed in the present book, is an entirely new method. So far, comparativists have stopped at the rather general level of comparison (whether Jungian or diffusionist), and in many cases, they have resorted to the facile omnicomparativist approach: anything in myth, anywhere and anytime, was compared with anything else. (74)

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Round up the usual suspects. Guilty as charged. The logical result, the Laurasian mythology, is attractive and appears to validate Witzels careful use of assumptions. This mythology, he asserts, represents our oldest complex story. It is a novel of the creation, growth, and destruction of the world, of divine and human evolution and decay, from birth to death, from creation to destruction. . . . [T]he universe is ultimately regarded as a living body, not surprisingly in analogy to the human one: it is born, grows, and nally dies (5455). Witzel begins his long story with events that could be as distant as 125,000 years ago, the development of modern hominids in Africa, their migration from there in about 65,000 BCE, and their subsequent settlement of the entire planet. Using genetic markers as his guide, notably the spread of certain families within the nonrecombitant Y (NRY) chromosome through (probably) ten male lineages that then expanded to eighteen, biologists are now able to trace the march of hominids out of Africa, eastward along the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean coastline into Southeast Asia, Melanesia, and Australia. The picture is also now emerging of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) lineages, which travel along maternal lines. This science is still under development, and future research will yield much more exact results. What Witzel is searching for here is evidence for the spread of Laurasian mythology among genetically marked peoples. At this point, the evidence suggests that a branch appears to have migrated from the Southeast Asian subcontinent northwards into China, Japan, Siberia, and the Americas, and from Southwest Asia in northerly and northwesterly directions into Central Asia and Europe. At length, drawing on long-range linguistic studies, Witzel suggests links between language families and both NRY and mtDNA spread and distribution. Although this is important in obtaining a clearer picture of the early spread of, rst, Gondwana culture and mythology and, second, of Laurasian, this is not critical to his results. He states, the reconstruction of Laurasian mythology importantly does not depend on, though it can be aided by linguistic and genetic comparisons. Nor does it depend on the unlikely assumption that myths, languages, and genes always spread together (241). Witzel summarizes the results of archaeological investigations into the early movements of both Neanderthals and H. sapiens sapiens. He addresses the possibility that Neanderthals were able to speak. The current results appear to oppose this, but are not conclusive. The reason he addresses this is because Neanderthals have a deep antiquity that precedes H. sapiens sapiens. They also had burial practices that appear to have reected symbolic thought. Even if they did not intermarry with H. sapiens sapiens, it is possible that they inuenced them. The possibility of their intermarriage,

however, has once again arisen as a result of recent evidence (cited in an addendum to Witzels introduction, as well as in his notes) that Europeans have up to ve percent Neanderthal genes. Regardless of how this plays out in future research, this too is not essential to Witzels argument. He rejects the New Archaeology that valorizes the scientic self-sufciency of the discipline while viewing all culture change strictly in terms of local developments. In the nal analysis, he sees archaeology as supporting the dating of his own efforts at mythological reconstruction, which is to say an exodus out of Africa at c. 65,000 BCE, developments dated to the late Paleolithic, c. 40,000 BCE, and the migrations to the Americas, c. 20,000 BCE. Among the unilateral theories he rejects are the claims by archaeologists and specialists in Paleolithic art that the physical remains must stand alone as interpretative tools. Witzel understands that there are no Stone Age texts (261), but that the evidence from archaeology and Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic art can be supplemented with ndings from the other disciplines he deploys in order to arrive at a late Paleolithic text, which is none other than Laurasian mythology. With the help of these disciplines, [t]he study of Stone Age art can overcome, in this fashion, the structuralist, religious, evolutionist trends that have dominated it so far (261).
A NOVEL ATTEMPT

What is this rst novel? It is impossible to repeat or even summarize in a review all the plot lines in this rst novel; but a brief digest of Laurasian mythology will not be out of place. It is a story or narrative (novel might be pressing a deliberately ctive quality that is unjustied in late Paleolithic culture) of emergence (as Witzel rightly points out, this is more correct than creation); father heaven, mother earth, and their offspring; the defeat and displacement of current gods over their predecessors; the hidden sun revealed, after which the sun deity spawns humans; the defeat of the dragon; the birth of human, followed by their primal misdeed and subsequent death; the Promethean act of bringing culture, by a hero or shaman; the emergence of local nobility and history; nal destruction, usually with variants on the theme of the four (or ve) ages; and an eventual rebirth or heaven, or a new earth (63ff., and the long Ch. 3, 105185). The Laurasian story line, he states, thus is a metaphor of the human condition, of human life from its mysterious beginnings to its impending ominous end (422). Yet, after completing the book, the exact details of Laurasian mythology, fascinating and compelling although they surely are even if most of it has a distinct ring of familiarity, become less important than Witzels interdisciplinary breakthrough, the continuities of the story line in recent history (recent by the glacial time scales dealt with in this book), and its implications for the modern world.

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Witzels thesis of a Laurasian mythology that largely derives from and builds upon an earlier stratum of Gondwana mythology, which in turn is preceded by a PanGaean mythology, hinges on the consistency of seemingly subtle distinctions between mythic narratives, which might in fact be arbitrary, accidents of history rather than decisive narrativization. But we must discount the latter, casting it for the time being into the shadows and deal with the evidence as he presents it. The narrative difference, which he casts in negative terms in his discussion of Gondwana mythology, is that the Gondwana narrative is not concerned at all with the creation of the universe, or even of the earth. Nor does it possess an explicit eschatology of eternal return (366). It is these big questions that are the driving force of Laurasian mythology and of nearly all dominant sociopolitical ideologies of redemption for the last several thousand years, all of which Witzel sees as developments from Laurasian ways of thinking. However, [t]he only question that is of interest for Gondwana myth is how the earth can be shaped properly so as to make human life possible (361). This is clearly demarcated from the Laurasian narrative, Witzels rst novel. If this is a novel, then who wrote it? Indeed, Witzel addresses this question. Because of the thematic density of the Paleolithic hunt, the rebirth of animals, and shamanism, it must have been a shaman (422) with a clear sense of the universe, the human condition, the possibility of divine powers, and a sophisticated sense of metaphor and symbol. All of this, Witzel contends, was well within the grasp of late Paleolithic culture. Shamans, he notes following many others, may be clearly inferred from the evidence of early cave art from Australia to Europe, and from Africa as well. In his rendition of early shamanism (382393), Witzel rst grapples with various denitions of the much-contested term (this is necessary), then moves from Pan-Gaean and Gondwana versions that lack shamanic dress and (probably) drumming, but does feature dancing, to later more clearly dened versions in which shamans undergo symbolic death, initiation, and descent to the underworld or ascent to heaven. Based on shared global characteristics, we can conclude that Paleolithic shamanism was an archaic part of Pan-Gaean and Gondwana religions, but in a less complex version of what later developed into classical Siberian shamanism and its offshoots in Eurasia and the Americas (392). One feature is worth mentioning here, the phenomenon of shamanic heat. Extrapolating from mythic sources across the globe, from Africa to Australia to the Andaman Islands to Siberia to South Asia, it is possible to trace the later Indian yogic phenomenon of serpent power or kun d alin, an internal heat that rises up through the body from the base of the spine, into deep prehistory (387). This is helpful to me because I have been asked more than once in

classes on the history of yoga why there is no mention of kun d alin either in Indic yoga traditions prior to the mid- to late rst millennium CE or in other religious traditions elsewhere in the world. The answer is that it has been there for a very long time, and now we have evidence for it. One of the most fascinating topics in this book is Witzels account of the antiquity of the ood myth. At one time, he believed that it was strictly Laurasian, but he informs us often he has retracted his views on this (e.g., 178179). He now sees it as not only Laurasian, but Gondwana and even Pan-Gaean. All versions of this myth, whether Biblical or Mesopotamian, whether in deep prehistory or in Australia, whether the ood was rain stuck on a mountain, the result of a rain spell gone amok, or an emanation from a calabash, see it as punishment or retribution for human misdeeds, involve very few survivors, and are closely related to the mythic origination of death. It appears to be a precursor to (later) ideas of justice and even karma. What could this ood have been? Rain is a potent image that was surely understood in deep antiquity very differently from ours. Could it be read symbolically as a shamanic or visionary image of the experience of death? Witzel does not doubt the capabilities of Paleolithic humans for high-level symbolic thought. It is doubtful that we will ever know more than what Witzel presents here. As noted, Witzel has not been slack in his reading; indeed, nearly every page of this long book, and nearly every one of its 2500 + notes, is loaded with details of myths and stories from every corner of the globe, even if some areas have received greater attention than others (Witzels keenest interests are in Japanese myth, which he hopes to address exclusively in a future book, and South Asian, his fallback eld). The main area of uncertainty in the book is that he creates a otilla of assumptions based on prior assumptions. Occasionally, their ow leaves the reader breathless, with the impression that the farther one moves from the center, the likelier we are to enter domains of suggestion and speculation. Educated speculation, to be sure, but through the rear-view mirror it often appears to be a large-scale narrative construction in which the end result must perforce be very different than the prototype, than what we saw as we drove through it. But Witzel recognizes this as he recounts the path dependencies of modern Abrahamic religions, Indic religion, and other designated religious complexes, in which the ancient roots are nearly, but importantly not completely, buried under layers of more recent ideologies. In the end, he states, some 75 percent of humanity still fervently adhere to one form of Laurasian belief or the othereven though they do not know it (410). One example of the applicability and altered perspective gained from Witzels multidimensional study occurred to me as I recalled the comparative work on Greek and Indian

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philosophy by Thomas McEvilley (2002), followed by a number of McEvilleys (often constructive) critics (esp. Allen 2005, Bussanich 2005, and Thompson 2005, all published in a much larger issue of the International Journal of Hindu Studies dedicated to critiques of McEvilley). McEvilley, an art critic and classicist with the barest fundamentals of Sanskrit to serve him, posited a close connection between Greek and Indian philosophical ideas, based on diffusion from and later to India. The similarities are striking. But is direct horizontal diffusion the best solution, especially when the mechanisms for such transfer are very difcult to locate? Based on Dumzil, Allen suggests an a priori possibility that an Indo-European protophilosophy lies behind both Greek and Indian philosophizing (2005: 62). Bussanich notes McEvilleys argument that inuence from India on Heraclitus must have occurred through literary borrowing from an earlier text, be it, Greek, Indian, or Mesopotamian (2005: 7). This, Bussanich asserts, is questionable. Bussanich generally praises McEvilleys understanding of ntic mystical metaphysics while nevNeoplatonic and Veda ertheless noting that McEvilley bends and twists Plotinus ntic orthodoxy (2005: 17). Thompson, like ideas to t Veda Allen and Bussanich, generally admires McEvilleys work, but nds his paucity of Sanskrit, Indo-Iranian, and IndoEuropean to be insufcient for the necessary task of tracing the roots of Greek thought to its more likely point of origin, Central Asia, and probably to early shamanism. Witzel would obviously have a lot to say about this. But a more serious critique Thompson offers is that McEvilleys basic method in this book has been to draw more or less vague parallels between similar looking elements from a large number of disparate cultures. . . . How do we distinguish a striking parallel from a weak one? (2005: 54). Parallels, Thompson notes, may be suggestive, but they are not in and of themselves proofs. McEvilleys project, had it been conducted twenty years later, might have considered Witzels work and come to more credible conclusions regarding diffusion, just as Allen and Thompson might have modied their critiques of McEvilley in the light of Witzels work. That Thompsons latter criticism of McEvilley might be applied equally to Witzels massive citation of parallel mythologies might have been met with the refutation that the parallels themselves, to be sure, do not constitute proof of a common Laurasian source, but the sheer density of the parallels, supported by genetics, archaeology, and linguistics, is sufcient to confer on them a critical mass that brings a common much earlier source into a realm beyond inference.
Problems and Reections

A few points must be raised in this groundbreaking book (even if Witzel constantly acknowledges his own path dependencies). Occasionally, the logic is not clear. For example,

Witzel states, A certain stress on fertility can also be observed in the clay sculptures of bison, found in the caves of Montespan and Tuc dAudoubert, one of them a copulating bison couple. As the bison gures prominently in the one possible example of a ritual killing at Lascaux, it is likely that this kind of plastic art was intended for the procreation of bison herds and for successfully hunting them with the aid of shamanic rituals (380). In fact, one can list a number of possible reasons for the production of these clay sculptures, including artistic development and representation. Yes, shamanism does appear to participate in whatever is represented here. But it would be safer to conclude that we really do not know the likely intention of this example of plastic art. In this case (and several others), Witzels enthusiasm for his generally meritorious theory has led him to conclusions that might be questioned. A few pages further, Witzel discusses choices for totems in various cultures, including Africa, Japan, and North America. Here again he asks why his theory does not match the evidence. He is bafed about the choice of the Amerindians of the raven, hare, coyote, and so on as trickster deities instead of the rather more impressive elk, bear, or buffalo (395). The reason, irrespective of the mass of data Witzel has collected on trickster deities, and his denition of the phenomenon, is that the raven, hare, and coyote are tricksters, not the elk, bear, or buffalo, as is plainly evident to anyone who has lived around all these animals in Amerindian country. The problem, I think, is that trickster deities in the Amerindian religious complex need not be represented by the same animals that are found in this role in East Asia or elsewhere, as Witzel himself appears to understand (146). Another interesting divergence that sheds light on the exibility of the Laurasian narrative in Eurasia and the Americas occurs in the different constructions of the four (or ve) ages and generations of deities. Among the Indo-Europeans and the Near East (and China) the trajectory is decidedly downwards, with a decrease in goodness/righteousness/dharma, whereas in Central and South America, the mythic narrative is one of increasing positivity. Among the problems is Witzels apparent assumption, for historical periods, that text equals practice. For example, in Witzels primary eld of expertise, South Asia, he states that the actual human sacrice was authenticated in ancient India because we nd the purus amedha (human sacrice) discussed in the Vedas. However, it is clear to any reader of the Vedic texts on the purus amedha that it is a scholarly exercise, an attempt to build a classicatory system of human occupations in the idiom of sacrice. There is no evidence that this particular sacrice was ever performed, or that it was even intended for performance, even if certain s rautasu dhu la/A yana S tra) mentions recent texts (the Va vala human sacrice, even providing names. The literary idiom is

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sacricial, to be sure, but so was much more theorizing in Vedic India that did not play out practically. One nettlesome problem is Witzels bibliographic style. As per usual citational style, Witzel refers in his copious notes to works in the bibliography by year. But the bibliography lists all published work in alphabetical order under each surname, with the year at the end of each entry, not, as per usual modern style, by year. This makes it very difcult to locate bibliographic items in which the author has more than a couple of articles or books listed. The publisher, Oxford University Press, should have enforced coordination in this. It is unnecessarily eccentric to suffer through discordance between citational style and bibliographic style. It forces the reader to look through long lists of works to nd (e.g.) Witzel 2005b, when it should be a very simple matter (indeed, under Witzels name one nds perhaps fty items listed in alphabetical order). A related problem is Witzels frequent use of Web sites for translations from exotic languages, and much other material. This is by no means bad scholarly practice today, but the fact that Web sites are not listed in the bibliography demonstrates that high-level scholarship has not yet gured out how to list them, how descriptive or annotated they should be, and how to attribute them when so many are unattributed. Not only Witzel, but also the publisher failed to confront this issue. Who rendered that long passage on the great hero Maui on p. 157? How authoritative is it? What were its sources? We need to see this in the bibliography even if it places greater burden on the author to provide a more informative, even an annotated, bibliographic entry. Humanities scholarship must address this issue soon. I write this review from the haven of a remote location in the Himalayas, an area that I feel fortunate cannot be found on Google Maps. This includes a nearby village in which just this morning I observed an oracle or local shaman in a state of possession, representing a deity that mediates disputes and xes timings for auspicious events and who speaks a local language that has not been fully studied. Immersed in Professor Witzels book, I could not help but ponder the possibility that I was here witnessing a distinctly Laurasian event, one of thousands that feeds into the themes that Witzel has explored in this book. The participants fall within one of the great worlds religions, Hinduism, even if almost none of them have ever ventured out of the Himalayas or met anyone who is not within their own community or a few in immediately surrounding areas. Most of them would never use the word Hindu as an identifying marker. But their systems of belief and practice are distinctly Hindu, by current designations, and distinctly Laurasian. While observing this, I recalled that Witzel has a message for adherents of modern world religions, most of them

Laurasian but resonating only distantly from what I see here in the Himalayas. The religions to which Witzel refers in this case are enveloped in what he calls missionary myths (92). These include the modern totalitarianisms (communism and fascism) and the globalizing ideology of Americanism, which, he shows, are all developments from Laurasian mythology and culture. Perhaps he would advise fundamentalists of all stripesChristian, Muslim, Hindu, Communist, Fascist, and any others: if you want to get fundamentalism right, then get the fundamentals right. By becoming Laurasian fundamentalists you could end wars, and peace would reign on earth. Who would be the enemy? The remnant Gondwanists? Witzels thesis changes the outlook on all other diffusionist models. By placing the diffusion of what we have commonly seen in the West as typical of Greek or Indian culture, for example, at a much earlier date than any of us would have hitherto ventured to speculate, we will look with fresh eyes on our own culture, not to mention diffusionist and substrate theories that have been presented for more than a century. Among Witzels accomplishments here is a return to what Max Mller attempted well over a century ago, to formulate a Science of Mythology. But Witzel does this by drawing on associated sciences that would not have been imagined at that time and which are now only slowly gaining acceptance in an academic culture in which disciplinary isolation remains the rule rather than the exception. What he confronts here is the prevailing view, stated just a few brief years ago by M. L. West: Comparative IndoEuropean mythology remains and is bound to remain a poor relation of comparative Indo-European philology. It is easy to see why. People change their gods and their mythologies more readily and quickly than they change their declensions and conjugations, and more capriciously. Rules can be formulated to predict how a given Indo-European phoneme will turn out in Old High German or Pale Dry Tocharian, but the mutations of divinities or of mythical motifs are subject to no rules (West 2007: 24). Witzel emphatically turns this cavalier statement on its head. His interdisciplinary approach not only demonstrates that it has a promising future, but that it has arrived and that nally one can actually speak of a science of mythology.
REFERENCES Allen, Nicholas J. 2005 Thomas McEvilley: The Missing Dimension. International Journal of Hindu Studies 9.13, 5975a. Bussanich, John nta: Comments 2005 The Roots of Platonism and Veda on McEvilley. International Journal of Hindu Studies 9.13, 120.

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Farmer, S., J.B. Henderson, and M. Witzel 2002 Neurobiology, Layered-Texts, and Correlative Cosmologies: A Cross-Cultural Framework for Premodern History. Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 72, 4890. McEvilley, Thomas 2002 The Shape of Ancient Thought. Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies. New York: Allworth Press.

Sapir, Edward 1921 Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Thompson, George 2005 On Thomas McEvilley: A Postmodern Pyrrhonist. International Journal of Hindu Studies 9.13, 4558. West, Martin L. 2007 Indo-European Poetry and Myth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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