From Dragons to Floods: The Universals of Cultural Myth

These are the stories we keep telling.

There is a somewhat popular idea in pop anthropology that says “given enough time, every culture will create dragons.” Another version goes “given enough time, every culture will build a monolith.”

Proponents of this idea appeal to a sense of universality of human culture, highlighting that under the hood, we are all the same, and our brains lead us to u…