The Siberian folklore and its neighbours

The research is based on Analytical Electronic Catalogue that contains information on the spread of ca. 3000 motifs in ca. 1000 traditions of the world. “The motif’ is an episode or an image recorded in two or more traditions. “The tradition” is a set of texts recorded from the people who speak a particular language or live across a particular territory. Patterns of motifs’ spread show no significant correlation with the territorial spread of other factors and processes besides large-scale migrations and cultural interactions. If the time of such processes is established thanks to the data of other historical disciplines, we are able to segregate particular regional and epochal complexes inside the amorphous mass of the motifs. The data are processed by factor analysis. This method can be applied to the material in which new units emerge not only phylogenically but also thanks to the exchange of the elements between genetically unrelated groups. It makes possible to select a few meaningful tendencies, the so called principal components (PC), inside a vast and heterogenic material. Main categories and thematic groups of the folklore and mythological motifs are processed separately. The analysis demonstrates the uneven frequency of the occurrence of different groups of motifs in particular regions. Motifs related to the interpretation of the objects of the night sky are widespread in Northern Eurasia from which they had been bought to North America. Motifs related to the origin of the man, gender and sex and human anatomy are typical for the circum-Pacific region and for the nonAryan India. Both groups are rare in the sub-Saharan Africa. These differences could be a consequence of the independent development of mythologies in the continental Eurasia and in the Indo-Pacific region after their peopling by the modern man. The earliest set of motifs in Siberia consists of the motifs that find parallels in North (but not in South) America and can be dated to the Terminal Pleistocene. The Indo-Pacific set of motifs that is different from the continental Eurasian one must exist in East Asia at least at the time when the peopling of the New World began (ca. 16,000 cal. B.P.). In the Holocene time new spheres of interaction emerged in Eurasia. The analysis of the spread of the episodes of myths sensu stricto demonstrates links between Siberia and the East and Southeast Asia. The opposite set of motifs is widespread across Europe and the Caucasus with an Eastern fringe as far as Xinjiang. The processing of the episodes of the tales of magic and of the animal tales selects the zone of civilizations from the Atlantic to Southeast Asia and contrasts it with Siberia and Eastern Europe. The most recent tendency in the areal spread of the motifs is revealed thanks to processing of tales of magic and realistic tales. Here the Christian Europe is separated from traditions that are affiliated to the Islamic world and the Steppe.

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