ABSTRACT
Does human society evolve? Are its various features and aspects organisms like man himself, that are born and grow till they are what we see today? Maybe, but to think so is to surrender to a metaphor. Perhaps the metaphor is useful for political systems or the history of engineering, but other aspects are so deeply ingrown in human nature that their beginnings seem untraceable or even implausible. The origins of religion fascinated speculators in the nineteenth century, but no evidence takes us to a time before men became religious. Equally, few theories are more entertaining than those which tell how language first developed, but there is no evidence for a Homo sapiens who did not speak. If, then, we cannot reach a time when man was without religion or speech and if we cannot find societies so primitive that they have no traditional stories, how can we believe that mythology had a beginning which we can conceive? The well of mythology is to all intents bottomless.
