“Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years” is one of the coolest books I’ve ever read, and so I was thrilled to find that Elizabeth Wayland Barber has just come out with a new book (coauthored with her husband, Paul Barber), “When They Severed Earth from Sky : How the Human Mind Shapes Myth”. This one’s also fascinating. The topic this time is myths or, more generally, stories passed along orally, sometimes for thousands of years. No statistical content here (unless you want to think of statistics very generally as an “information science”; there is in fact some discussion about the ways in which information can be encoded in a way that can be remembered in stories), so it’s hard for me to evaluate their claims, but it all seems reasonable to me.

Having read this book, I have a much better sense of the sense in which these stories can be informative without being literally true (in fact, without referring to any real persons in many cases).