If you go around the world myth by myth, you find yourself reading the same basic story over and over again. How did it come to be that the myth of the hero is a recognizable pattern in every human culture from the Pleistocene to the Global Village? What the song is to the songbird, the myth of the hero is to the human being. Human hunter-foragers did not create the myth of the hero as a spontaneous act of artistry; they carried it with them at every stage of their evolution out of animality. Orion's Guiding Stars traces the roots of human storytelling in biology and evolutionary history as much as in the artistic imagination.