The main entry's brief mention of the earth-diver narrative as "among the most widely distributed stories on earth" deserves fuller treatment, since the motif's specific logic, an animal diving beneath a primordial sea to retrieve the material of land, is distinct enough from the general primordial-waters theme to merit its own description.
In the standard form, attested across Siberian, Native American, and Central and Eastern European, particularly Finno-Ugric and Slavic, traditions, the world before creation is entirely covered by water, and a creator sends one or more animals, commonly a loon, duck, muskrat, beaver or turtle depending on the region, diving beneath the water to bring up mud from the bottom, from which the whole habitable earth forms by expansion from that small quantity. Many versions include a competitive or morally weighted element: several animals fail the dive before one succeeds, or two rival creative beings, one benevolent and one deceptive, each send divers, the deceptive one's diver bringing back an inferior portion that becomes the origin of evil or hardship, a pattern well attested in Central Asian and some Native American dualistic cosmogonies.
Folklorists have used the earth-diver motif's unusually detailed distribution, concentrated heavily across northern Eurasia and North America but essentially absent from the Southern Hemisphere, as a test case for reconstructing prehistoric contact, some scholars arguing the distribution tracks plausible routes of ancient human movement across Beringia closely enough to support genuine transmission, a stronger claim for shared origin than can usually be made about widely distributed motifs, most better explained as independent responses to a near-universal experience of water and flood.