I've spent the past few hours in a Youtube rabbit-hole diving into early Indo-European culture.

One of the coolest parts of proto-Indo-European is that we can plausibly reconstruct part of the ancient myths of these people, who were illiterate steppe-herders living north of the Baltic Sea roughly five thousand years ago.

Astonishingly, we can reconstruct two of their myths from linguistic, archaeological, and cultural lines of evidence.

The creation myth

At the beginning of time there were two brothers, one named Man and the other named Yemo ("Twin"). They traveled through the cosmos accompanied by the primordial cow. Eventually Man and Twin decided to create the world we now inhabit. To do this, Man had to sacrifice the cow. From the parts of this sacrificed body, with the help of the council of heavenly gods (Sky Father, his sons the Divine Twins, and the Storm God), Man made the wind, the sun, the moon, the sea, earth, fire, and finally all the various kinds of people. Man became the first priest. He was the creator of the ritual of sacrifice that was the root of world order.

The warrior myth

Some time after the world was made, the heavenly council gave cattle to Trito (the "Third Man"). But his cattle were stolen by the treacherous snake Negwhi. Trito prayed to the storm god to help him retrieve the stolen cattle. Together Trito and the storm god went to the cave of the serpent, killed it, and freed the stolen cattle. Trito thus became the first warrior. He recovered the wealth of his people. He gave a sacrifice to the priests, and so ensured that the heavenly council received their share in the rising smoke of sacrificial fires. This began the cycle of giving between gods and humans that has continued to this day.

Thus these two myths establish the hierarchy of mankind: the priests who commune with the gods, the warriors who defend the land and herds, and the shepherds who tend to the flocks.

The myth of the afterlife

These people had a third myth, one that involved the passage of souls through the afterlife. This myth is older than the Proto-Indo-Europeans; it may well be as far as twelve thousand years old, indeed may be the oldest human myth still on record. But that's a story for another post. It is a myth closely related to the domestication of dogs, just as the myths above are closely related to the domestication of cattle.