Just because something has happened before, or just because it's been said to have happened before, doesn't disprove it.

But the Joesph Campbell suggestion, passed on by the O'Meara, makes a lot of sense. The fact that certain elements recur in the kind of stories people have told to explain the world implies that there is something in those stories that resonates, to use a word that came up very appositely in a recent discussion about songs.