Right, but that would not explain why they are also similar to the actual facts. As an example, from the Stanford article: "... debate raged in the nineteenth

Right, but that would not explain why they are also similar to the actual facts. As an example, from the Stanford article: "... debate raged in the nineteenth century over Native American legends that seemed to contain ancestral memories of mastodons hunted until their extinction in the Ice Age 10,000 years ago. The possibility was supported by twentieth-century archaeological discoveries of mammoth kill sites that matched local tribal lore about elephant-like monsters."