Tales told around the bonfire in stone-age villages, about that one time Uncle Steve took down a wooly mammoth all on his own, or the mystic forest your great-g

Tales told around the bonfire in stone-age villages, about that one time Uncle Steve took down a wooly mammoth all on his own, or the mystic forest your great-grandfather came across when he was lost in the snowstorm but couldn't find again when he looked for it the following summer. Generations pass. Steve the Mammoth Slayer becomes a legendary warrior, and the mystic forest is now inhabited by gods. Travelers from other villages bring their own tales of gods and warriors, love and adventure. People start arguing over which hero is stronger, which monster is scarier, whose goddess is sexier. War and conquest would have settled most of those disputes by the time you reached civilization, so that people like Homer could compile the stories that were passed down to them into a more or less consistent mythology.