Beyond the fashioning and emergence motifs described in the main entry, a distinct and widely distributed motif addresses why, having been made, humans do not live forever, and it recurs with striking narrative consistency across traditions with no plausible contact.
The most thoroughly documented instance is the African message that miscarried, attested across a wide range of Bantu, Khoisan and other sub-Saharan traditions in broadly consistent form: a high god sends a slow-moving messenger, commonly a chameleon, with news that humans will live forever, then changes his mind or sends a faster messenger, commonly a lizard or hare, with the contrary message of death, and the second messenger arrives first, so death rather than immortality becomes humanity's condition through an accident of timing rather than fault or punishment. The moral weight of the story falls on bad luck rather than wrongdoing, a different structure from the Genesis narrative discussed elsewhere in this collection, where mortality follows specifically from a human choice.
Comparable "message" or "chance" accounts of mortality appear elsewhere without the same density: some Melanesian and Southeast Asian traditions describe a test involving a stone and a banana, the stone representing durability and the banana perishability, the choice of the banana explaining why humans reproduce and die rather than persist unchanged like stone. Folklorists generally treat the message-miscarried type as one of the clearest cases of a traceable regional motif, concentrated densely enough within one cultural-linguistic zone to support inference about shared origin or contact, unlike the more scattered fashioning-from-clay motif discussed in the main entry.