That said, it has been tens of millennia since a seventh star could be distinguished. People today count six, but it is described as seven most places.
And, the story of the husband who visits the land of the dead and fails to retrieve his wife really was carried all the way to North America. That is probably "only" 15,000 years, from one of the later waves of migration.
In Europe that's Orpheus and Eurydice, do you have a pointer to the north american story and perhaps a source for the claim that it's really the same story (background)?
> When Dixon finally managed to meet Bennett, he began his study of the language by eliciting a few basic nouns; among the first of these was the word for "dog". Bennett supplied the Mbabaram translation, dog. Dixon suspected that Bennett had not understood the question, or that Bennett's knowledge of Mbabaram had been tainted by decades of using English. But it turned out that the Mbabaram word for "dog" was in fact dúg,[2] pronounced almost identically to the Australian English word (compare true cognates such as Yidiny gudaga, Dyirbal guda, Djabugay gurraa and Guugu Yimidhirr gudaa, for example[3]). The similarity is a complete coincidence [...].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbabaram_language#Word_for_%22...
> The similarity is a complete coincidence: the English and Mbabaram languages developed on opposite sides of the planet over the course of tens of thousands of years. This and other false cognates have been cited by typological linguist Bernard Comrie as a caution against deciding that languages are related based on a small number of lexical comparisons.
Given enough languages spoken by enough people, seems inevitable that at least a few words will be coincidentally the same. Kodos and Kang, on the other hand...