Many of you asked for this, an in depth talk about, and telling of, probably the oldest story that we know of. Long before the Epic of Gilgamesh, before the Proto-Indo Europeans, before the last mini Ice Age, before the well known Australian aboriginal tales, before all that, our ancestors were hunter gatherers and told stories about their lives, what effected them, to try and understand the world around them. So what is the oldest story ever told? Well one story was so popular that it remains today, and researchers call this The Cosmic Hunt. This video explains how we found out that this is the oldest story in the world, how it evolved and varied across the world, and how we can recreate it. A story which we can date with some accuracy considering the timescales involved, and which has spawned many variants across Eurasia and the Americas. It is probably the oldest story we know, but that doesn't mean an older one couldn't be reconstructed, and that is touched on as well. There are a number of good research papers on the subject, some of which I have noted below, with stories involving one or more hunters, tracking down a large animal, before something happens that affects the cosmos and the nights sky. So welcome to a world of man eating birds, mammoths, gods, and heroes, and welcome to the cosmic hunt! The main papers I refer to are (and which are available from the usual repositories - I tend to use JSTOR which is free to most University students and Academics): The Cosmic Hunt: Variants of a Siberian-North American Myth by Yuri Berezkin A Cosmic Hunt in the Berber sky: a phylogenetic reconstruction of a Palaeolithic mythology by Julien d’Huy The Constellation of Orion and the Cosmic Hunt in Equatorial Africa by Vincent Vieira On the Cosmic Hunt in Northern Eurasian Rock Art by Enn Ernits Scientific American also published an article by Julien d'Huy in December 2016 which is an easy read, although this requires payment to read. And here is a link to the interactive graph showing the story evolution: http://demo.accurat.io/sci-am/ Chapters ================================ 0:00 Introduction 1:25 The Sky at Night 2:45 Polyphemus and Galatea 4:12 Polyphemus and Odysseus 6:41 Where was the Cosmic Hunt told? 7:41 An Australian Cosmic Hunt 9:09 One source and one myth 11:36 The variants, Western Siberian 15:37 The Central Asian variant 16:56 The Circum Artic variant 19:08 So what can we conclude from these variants? 20:48 The African Cosmic Hunt 22:38 A phylogenetic study of the Cosmic Hunt 24:35 The source, migration, and common traits of the story 26:20 The Original Story of the Cosmic Hunt 28:39 Cave art and paintings that represent the hunt 30:31 Artemis, the older Greek version 33:04 Further clues to the age of the Cosmic Hunt 34:12 O ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANRw-3C_MYA