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By Root 430 0

among indigenous peoples, of course, neatly fit this description. Landau, however, goes on to show how scientific theories of human origins are no less susceptible to narrative bias. Was it bipedalism that gave rise to tool use, which generated big brains? Or was it tool use that led to bipedalism and then big brains? Were early hominids primarily hunters—man the killer ape, warlike in nature? Or were they primarily gatherers—man the vegetarian, pacifist in nature? More importantly, does the narrative change in response to empirical evidence, or does the interpretation of the evidence change as a result of the currently popular narrative? This is a serious problem in the philosophy of science: To what extent are observations in science driven by theory? Quite a bit, as it turns out, especially in history and the social sciences. And this fact supports the thesis that humans are primarily storytelling animals. The scientific method of purposefully searching for evidence to falsify our most deeply held beliefs does not come naturally. Telling stories in the service of a scientific theory does.

FROM STORYTELLING TO MYTHMAKING

One night in the early 1970s a young couple was parked in a vacant lot high in the Hollywood hills overlooking the lights of Los Angeles. The young man told his date about a recently escaped one-armed convict who was known to be roaming those very foothills, killing parked young couples by slashing them with his arm hook. The girl got scared and insisted her date take her home at once. He did, and when he went to open her car door he discovered a hook dangling from the handle.

For decades now high school kids have been telling this story, along with another favorite, the vanishing hitchhiker: Driving along a country road you pick up a hitchhiker who gets in the backseat of your car and instructs you where to drop her (sometimes it is a he) off. When you arrive at the house (sometimes it is a graveyard) you discover that the girl has disappeared from your car. You then discover that the girl was killed (sometimes “disappeared”) while hitchhiking on that very stretch of highway that same day the year before.

As Jan Harold Brunvand noted in his 1981 book about such urban legends, The Vanishing Hitchhiker. such stories are appealing because they contain three mythic elements: (1) a strong story; (2) a foundation in actual belief; (3) a meaningful message. (He presents no less than fifteen versions of the vanishing hitchhiker story!) Myths contain a staggering diversity of themes, including stories about life and death, birth and rebirth, adolescence and coming of age, love and marriage, the origin and end of the universe, moral dilemmas, the meaning of life, and all manner of human triumphs and traumas. A myth should not be thought of in terms of its veracity or lack thereof, as when we say that an urban legend is a myth, meaning it is not true. Urban legends, in fact, are a subspecies of myths; they are stories about our fears and anxieties, as in the hook-man and vanishing hitchhiker, or others like alligators living in New York City sewers. All cultures throughout the world, and all peoples throughout history have had myths. Long before there was the written word there was the spoken word, and with language humans told stories—stories about ourselves and our relationships, stories about our origin and our end, and stories about our world and our environment. These stories became myths.

What are myths, what do they mean, and what methods should we employ to understand them? The Oxford English Dictionary’s history of the word’s usage is enlightening in this regard. A myth is “a purely fictitious narrative usually involving supernatural persons, actions, or events, and embodying some popular idea concerning natural or historical phenomena.” In fact, the original Greek meaning of mythos was “word,” in the sense of a final pronouncement, to be contrasted with logos, also “word,” but one whose veracity may be disputed. The point of a myth is not whether it is true or false, but what it represents.