I agree 100%. I do not have an answer for this. I listened to this episode because that very question has haunted me for decades.
I will say that I tend to try to first look for mundane explanations these days (having been burned by overzealously embracing alternative theories in the past), so I am a bit resistant to the jump to "divine inspiration". I am not opposed to the divine inspiration explanation, but I think the possibility a mundane explanation needs to be explored far more fully first.
Religious people today fervently believe, embrace and re-tell their myths, but without any direct experience to whatever events inspired those stories in the first place. This has been going on for thousands of years in some cases. So none of them are inspired from the original source, yet the beliefs and re-telling of the myths persists.
To me, this parallels what happened with the ancient star myth cultures and the proposed unknown core mother civilization that inspired them all, with each historical culture spinning off their version and mixing up the details a bit through the retelling.
Again, I realize this doesn't explain why the fixation on stars for the original culture. But seeing as how this purported "seed culture" (which I think existed) has yet to be conclusively proven to exist, I think just getting to the point where we can point to the origin of these star myths is a great step.
Since we don't even know "who" seeded these stories, it seems a misplaced effort to skip that and go to the "why".
The myths would not be about food/water production/preservation, but the tools to provide those. I am (speculatively) suggesting that perhaps a core survival technique was the ability to travel long distances to procure food or water. Either by land or by sea. A robust and infallible navigation tool would be necessary, particularly if the journeys were long in distance and/or time.
I'm suggesting that maybe using the stars as navigation tools was an essential survival tool, thus the emphasis put upon it as a cultural cornerstone.
Again, this is just armchair speculation, looking for a more practical and mundane solution. I am not proposing this to solve the riddle of the star myths, nor as a refutation of Mathisen's work/theory. Just food for thought. More "Devil's Advocate" thinking.
I read an article years ago (and cannot find a link) about this so-called "primitive" culture who navigated a multitude of distant islands in the Pacific oceans, using only a method that employed an extensive mental catalog of the stars (it was quite ingenious). To survive, they had to know the stars and celestial mechanics intimately.
If your life literally depended on this knowledge, it would take primacy in your culture. Perhaps the stories are as I suggested a mnemonic device to help people learn these methods. I think there is plenty of evidence that ancient cultures were traveling across vast oceanic distances, and this could account for the dissemination of the star myths to these remote cultures. The star myths both enabled the sea travel and resulted in the dissemination.
Once arriving at the remote location, through retelling these myths take on the local flavors and idiosyncrasies that keep these myths as being literally the same story — rather, the incorporate elements that hint at a common source.
If there were a non-mundane, direct inspiration to these myths, I would expect to see far more concordance between cultures. Instead, we see echoes, innuendo and correlations. This to me points to an indirect handed-down transmission.
Again, I still think the preoccupation with the stars probably transcends the mundane explanation (even my own). But that doesn't mean the next step is to assume divine inspiration.
My aim here is to see if Mathisen is correct by dismantling possible alternatives and objections.
Thanks for these replies (mainly to points raised by Alex, but I will jump in also since these are also topics in which I am very interested and about which I have spent some time pondering).
First, to answer the very final point / objection raised in your reply that is numbered #191, I certainly agree that we must look at all possible explanations (as well as admitting that there may be explanations we have yet to imagine, one of which may also be the actual explanation), rather than "jump to" or "assume" any single explanation and assert it dogmatically.
I myself certainly do not "assume divine inspiration" or assert that dogmatically as the solution, although I also do not rule it out as a possibility.
I also do not "assume alien intervention," although there are many who will assert that possibility as the only explanation (and they can be quite dogmatic about it). On the other hand, I do not categorically rule it out as a possibility, although as I said in the interview, I do not believe it is a necessary conclusion at all.
I personally believe that the evidence we have at hand is beginning to paint a more and more compelling picture that argues for an extremely ancient civilization. This evidence is actually fairly extensive. Authors and researchers such as Graham Hancock, John Anthony West, Robert Bauval, Robert Schoch, and many others have written about this evidence for decades, much of it focused on monuments at Giza including the Sphinx and the giant pyramids (far larger and using much larger stones, as well as different types of stones, than the later pyramids), underwater ruins, Central American pyramids and monuments and artwork, mysterious South Pacific megalithic construction, Nazca lines, acoustics at sites such as Stonehenge and the Malta megalithic chambers, etc. I have written many blog posts about various aspects of this evidence, such as evidence found at
Nabta Playa, evidence in the apparent location of ancient
sites on "great circle lines" evincing understanding of the size and shape of the globe (not to mention the evidence in the Great Pyramid at Giza and at other sites which appear to evince understanding of the size and shape of the globe),
mummies and
human remains found in
various parts of the world which appear to defy conventional paradigms of ancient human history, etc.
While people like Graham Hancock, Robert Schoch and John West (and their predecessors) have been writing about this evidence for many decades, their arguments have been (I believe) given a serious boost of support in the past two decades by the excavations at Gobekli Tepe, which are positively paradigm-busting in their importance, showing evidence of extensive and advanced stoneworking at incredibly remote dates (apparently completed by 10,000 BC or thereabouts). I believe that this site provides one of the strongest new pieces of evidence supporting the "extremely ancient, and at present pretty-much mysterious-and-unknown" culture (cultures) or civilization (civilizations), and have a
lengthy blog post discussing its significance -- and potential significance in light of the evidence of worldwide dispersion of what appears to be a common system of celestial metaphor (again, I would emphasize that the common elements and details in this system are quite "obscure" and also specific, not to mention incredibly widespread and numerous, arguing against "coincident" development in isolation across many different cultures acting without knowledge of one another).
Gobekli Tepe (and the other evidence for an ancient culture / civilization predating ancient Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia etc) is very important, because despite the evidence of ancient ability to navigate across the oceans (which is denied by most conventional academic paradigms but, as you point out, supported by extensive evidence), I do not believe that a good explanation for the commonalities in the myths would include dispersion during periods of recorded history -- I believe the evidence argues that the origin stretches back prior to recorded history, prior to the first texts and artwork we find in ancient Egypt or ancient Mesopotamia, prior to the mysterious (and very important to this question) Indus and Saraswati River civilization (
Mohenjo Daro etc), prior to the Vedas, etc. The fact that Gobekli Tepe appears to have been deliberately buried (a massive task) argues that there may have been some catastrophe which devastated that ancient now-forgotten civilization (or civilizations).
But some aspects of their knowledge appears to have survived, to resurface thousands of years later in Egypt and Mesopotamia and elsewhere, and I believe the common system underlying the ancient myths may also be potentially attributable to ancient knowledge from before that catastrophe. Some understanding of what it was for also seems to have survived, although perhaps imperfect -- and distortions obviously began to creep in, as well as intentional efforts to subvert or suppress it.
I absolutely do not deny the evidence of incredible ancient seafaring technologies based upon the stars, which appear to have been in practice around the globe during the "post-catastrophe" period, including among the peoples of the Pacific who populated islands covering the most incredibly vast amount of space covered by any culture on earth, as well as among other places (certain ancient Mediterranean cultures, the Norse, east Asia, etc). The book you may be thinking about is a book called
Wayfinders, by Wade Davis. The techniques for navigating across great distances in the open ocean described in that book (and on the website of the Polynesian Voyaging Society) are incredible.
But, I don't believe these ancient myths were "brought" to the various cultures around the world by outsiders -- rather, I believe it is much more likely that they are all "original instructions" preserved by the various cultures around the world from remote antiquity, probably from before whatever catastrophe it was that caused people to decide to bury Gobekli Tepe.