The intellectual context for nineteenth-century scholars was profoundly shaped by emerging ideas

about evolution. These ideas included the recognition that many Eurasian languages—and therefore,
conceivably, stories—were all descended from a lost common ancestor (the Indo-European language)
which could rationally be reconstructed through the comparison of its descendant languages. They also
included the idea that cultures might evolve in ways comparable to species.[87] In general, 19th-century
theories framed myth as a failed or obsolete mode of thought, often by interpreting myth as the
primitive counterpart of modern science within a unilineal framework that imagined that human
cultures are travelling, at different speeds, along a linear path of cultural development.[88]

Nature mythology

One of the dominant mythological theories of the latter 19th century was nature mythology, the
foremost exponents of which