Zuni creation accounts and evolutionary science both trace life to a watery green-algal origin

Evidence

The traditional knowledge of the Zuni people tells that the world began as clouds and water until the marriage of earth and sun bought forth green algae. And from the algae there arose all the forms of life. Scientific knowledge tells us that, before the world was green, the only life was in the water. In shallow bays, waves broke on an empty shore. The sunbaked continent was without a single tree to make a pool of shade. The early atmosphere had no ozone, and the sun’s full intensity beat down on the land, a deadly rain of ultraviolet radiation, damaging the DNA of any living thing that ventured up on the shore. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 112

Categorization

• XREF: Directly braids Indigenous creation story with science in one breath — the exact rhetorical move the reader is hunting as a model for Reading the Landscape and Eco-Justice pedagogy; also the ‘listening to multiple ways of knowing’ thread from earlier in the book. — connects to: Kimmerer frames annual spring breeding as one shared sacred longing across species — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 135
• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source