The human story, at its base, holds a fairly simple framework.
An ape-ancestor, both a puzzle-solver and obsessed with time, stumbles over persistence hunting and ends up inventing both a great way to catch dinner and the curious social technology of telling a story.
A few million years or so later, this results in a flowering of the human tree, one of the branches being homo sapiens. Homo sapiens uses this amazing tool to get into the heads of the landscape: both animals (its original purpose) and energetic flow patterns (winds, plants, landscape features).
Somewhere along the line, they meet up with cousins from another continent, wolves, and the two co-evolve for a time, resulting in wolves around the planet and humans using pack technologies to form tribes.
This dynamic set up a repeating meme, where a group of lonely, curious or shunned humans would enter a new landscape and then completely adapt themselves to it, becoming pretty much literally an extension of the land itself.
In turn, barring a major disaster (super-volcano explosion, meteor strike, invasions of Triffids from Beyond the Stars), the tribe could self-perpetuate its presence in the landscape in perpetuity.
Putting it in a slightly different light, seeds moved in and used behaviors to affect themselves physically between generations to fully become the People of the Land. Time would then begin, stories would flow. All would be well.
Seeds went out, adapted to the environment, became the world.