Some rather smart Ancient Mediterranean myth experts (and also me) were joking around recently about the comparative similarities of their mythological gods. I cracked a joke/comment about "And they're all derived from long lost Indo-European gods from 15,000 years ago." (Not entirely unseriously, as there's a theory backed by proof of that re: Comparative Mythology)
But it got me a-pondering: What I've read of Comparative Mythology has focused a lot on similar themes and archetypal gods in Indo-European cultures, but I'm not as familiar with similar work on largely Sub-Saharan African mythologies. Along those lines, Comparative Mythology, along with linguistics and archaeology and paleontology has long supported the idea that much of the Indo-European world has a shared base culture. So how does that compare to Africa and Asia mythology. And how collectively similar are all human mythologies?
"Along those lines, Comparative Mythology, along with linguistics and archaeology and paleontology has long supported the idea that much of the Indo-European world has a shared base culture."
What does this mean? Did you mean to write that much of the Euro-Afro-Asiatic world in general might share a basic culture, ie a lost Paleolithic or Neolithic base? Because as written, the answer is yes, all Indo-European societies share a common "mythic mama," which is sometimes obvious (Thor and Zeus) and sometimes not so obvious. We can reconstruct "early" IE divinity to a certain degree, and also some rough sketches of what early IE "religion" looked like, but that's as far as we can go. The evidence is overwhelmingly historical linguistics in nature, and summarized amazingly well by Mallory and Adams 2006. It is a very important entry into Indo-European scholarship and also very accessible for the layman, for the most part, though sometimes the linguistics can get you in the weeds very quickly if you aren't versed in the jargon. Chapter 23 is all about PIE religion, such as we know.
As for Neolithic "religion" or earlier: it is very very very difficult. We can assign basics, but many interpretations of individual sites or objects are hopelessly entangled in anachronistic evidence and individual anthropologist' interpretations (like calling burnt flat stones "altars" or assuming female figurines are "fertility goddesses" and such). We can't even talk in a very sophisticated way about Celtic or Germanic Iron Age "religion," millennia later.