Part of mythology (tales of cosmic catastrophes) changes with distance from Africa. Data on motifs' inventory were taken from Berezkin's database (motifs C1-C32 ; http://ruthenia. ru/folklore/berezkin) and were coded in the form of a binary matrix. The Jaccard distance was calculated between each mythology and the nearest mythology from Africa (Bulgaria), and the results were plotted against the geographic distance from Africa to each mythology. Distance from an African origin alone explains between 8% and 32% of the variation in mythological diversity (according to different factors such as the database's size or the deletion of certain linguistic families; table 1; Pearson and Spearman correlation coefficients). The correlation increases significantly when only mythologies with a higher number of motifs were retained for analysis (triangles in the map). These mythologies are essentially located in Northern Eurasia and America and this increase suggests a mythological diffusion from the Near East / Balkans through Northern Eurasia to Northern America during the Paleolithic period. Phylogenetic trees were build from the same database (UPGMA ; NJ ; heuristic search with parcimony algorithm then agreement subtree via PAUP*) and the midpoint roots found in these trees orroborate a southwestern origin of a great part of the Eurasian mythology. The extrapolation back in time from current mythologies based on a majority rule consensus tree (via Mesquite; reconstruction using different roots and different methods ; table 2) allows to recover the following primitive motifs : ‘‘A person or animal dives to the bottom of the water to bring something back’’ ; ‘‘A bird brings something from the bottom of the water’’ ; ‘‘A person or a creature dives to the bottom of the water or into the infra-world to bring back a solid substance that will become the Earth’’; ‘‘The first ancestors acquired with difficulty the sun, that was hidden or stolen’’ ; ‘‘Cutting nails or hair has a special meaning as to the fate of the soul or the future of the whole world’’. All these motifs (except the last one) have been independently identified as having a Paleolithic origin by other searchers, using different databases and methods of analysis.