Myth is the history of cultural values buried in a story of an ideal past. History is the chronology of a society's experience based on physical evidence from the past.
Both serve an important role in the development of a socio-cultural system and for the enculturation of the next generation. Yet individuals and societies must be able to distinguish between the two.
The former, Myth is the glue that holds society together and makes it one. Shared myths determine who is "one of us" and "who isn't". The latter, History is the explanation of how we got to this point. It is, if done scientifically, conservative and scientific based on physical evidence and weighted against a standard of "preponderance" evidence and agreement among those who study the evidence. Both maybe true, both maybe false, and both may contradict one another. This is the human and societal dilemma.
In the scholarly world, myth is the territory of religion and history is the territory of science.
Politics is the battleground on which the various points of view are fought. And Nature (or God) could care less. We are part -- not of Nature's or God's plan -- but their experiment. This is an experiment that began with BIG BANG some 12 billion years ago, while the human race (Homo Sapien species) is only approachmently 100,000 years old. That is 100,000/12,000,000,000 or 1/12,000 of the time Nature has experimented with the BIG BANG or .0000008333 per cent of the time that the universe has been estimated to have been around.
These two human adaptations to our time on Earth have shaped Human existence and human institutions. As modern man left Africa and invaded Europe and Asia Sapiens have encountered related Homo species, mating with and/or conquering them. And adapting to their new environments.
Our adaptation was not the miracles that our mythology tells us about but what our genes and the survival of procreating adults produced.
