Geomythology

Geomythology is the branch of geology that aims to discover the relationship between various ancient people's myths and the geological environments where their early civilizations developed.

The long history of the human being, Homo sapiens,is divided into two long periods: the historic period that starts with the invention of writing and the prehistoric one. For the purposes of geomythology, the prehistoric period should be further divided into two subperiods, specifically, when Homo sapiens is in the hunting-and-gathering stage (a food gatherer) and a later one, whenHomo sapiens is a food producer, that is, after the initiation of agriculture and mainly after the cultivation of wheat.

The mythological period is the prehistoric period that refers to the acts of gods, deities, and heroes. These acts may not have been recorded in writing but have remained in the memory of different people, either through tradition or as they were later recorded by various authors. These texts constitute the different mythologies. Such characteristic texts are the “Gilgamesh epic,” which refers to the people of the prehistoric Mesopotamia, and Hesiod's “Theogony,” which represents the mythology of the Ancient Greeks.

Most people believe that the modern geoenvironment of a place, particularly of a coastal area, remains almost invariable, meaning that whatever landscape contemporary people see around them, no matter on which place on Earth they live nowadays, is the same as that seen by their prehistoric predecessors. This point of view is inaccurate, because the geoenvironment does not remain the same, but constantly changes. In fact, the geoenvironment that we can see around us was created in approximately 5,000 to 6,000 years BP (before the present). This period is known as “Holocene Climatic Optimum.” Before that period, everything was different, especially in higher latitudes where the paleogeographic conditions were totally different in land areas as well as in coastal areas. On the contrary, in lower latitudes, the paleogeographic changes were very important, mainly in coastal areas, while at continental and intracontinental areas, the changes are of lesser importance, even though they still exist.

Examples from different parts of the Earth exist where these geographical–relief morphology changes are so drastic that the present-day picture is totally different compared to prehistory. For example:

• 1.
  The Persian Gulf did not exist until 12,000BP.
• 2.
  The Sahara area became a desert just after the5th millennium. Before this period, the climate in Sahara was more favorable for the prehistoric inhabitants of the area, as a great number of hydrotopes and even lakes existed between 4,500 and 8,500BP.

Prehistoric people created gods directly connected to their geoenvironment. In the Scandinavian mythology, for example, ice is often related to the myth, while ice is nonexistent in the synchronous mythologies of the people of tropical Africa. Some gods, however, were common in almost all ancient mythologies. For example, the sun and the moon have been deified by nearly all prehistoric people. In most ancient religions, the sun belongs to the early generations of gods; in Greek mythology, the sun belongs to the fourth generation of gods but not to an older one.

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