When I was working as the marketing arm for Dr. Brenda E.F. Beck’s animated series, The Legend of Ponnivala , I was struck by an interesting idea that hadn’t occurred to me before in the legends I had studied: that origin stories very often have their roots in the ancestral shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural society. In the Ponnivala story (which is an English adaptation of the local Tamil legend, Annanmar Kathai , or “The Brothers’ Story”), there is a region of forest that the goddess Parvati wishes to see become fertile and productive, and so she creates nine men who will be the farmers of this land. Now, from the perspective of a people who have farmed the region for many hundreds, if not thousands, of years, this makes sense; taking virgin land and taming it to feed the people is a reasonable expenditure of effort. Except, this is the South Indian jungle we’re talking about. Can there be any doubt that this dense forest was already “fertile and productive” before being cle