I think this shit can be traced all the way back to the stone-age, but it's a matter of finding all the threads throughout history and various cultures, and maybe with a bit of looking at stories and myths a little differently than usual (the idea that the stories that survived the centuries did so just because they were always popular, and were originally just fan-fic told for fun, not some "sacred story" .. or that stuff told for fun eventually became sacred via twisting over the course of three or four generations or so. They say history "repeats" itself, but I don't think that's accurate - it cycles, like a spiral, rather than a perfect circle.

And one of the patterns I've started seeing recur since starting down this particular rabbit-hole is that population rise/mass migrations and collapse are not new to modern human populations (modern in the evolutionary sense, that is.) And as far as stories go, if you look at certain stories in the right light, they make far more sense than they do if you mistake metaphor for plain-talk (the so-called "wolf" of Gubbio that St Francis "saved" was no non-human. "Wolf" was simply a cross-cultural slang term for "cut-throat bandit/thief/murderer/rapist who hides in the deep dark woods that regrew after the Roman empire fell and populations dependent on them collapsed" for centuries, and it happened again (after a tentative human recovery) when the Black Death hit. Now do you understand who Little Red Riding Hood really met? Anyay, Francis was preaching loudly to bandits who might hear, not to "beasts and birds", that would be something his detractors would mock him with - ie, "he might as well preach to beasts and birds for all the good it'll do."

If you want to understand a people and their psychology, look at the stories they tell, and remember that a story doesn't have to be true to be important.

Edit: What I'm actually suspecting, on the terms of a huge scale, is that H. sapiens itself (and its direct ancestors) are basically a spitefully-mutated chimp, whose genes have been radiating and collapsing for the past 5 million or so years, and the mutations just keep getting more spiteful over the generations/after population "bottlenecks". The most spiteful are the ones who are the "conspirators" behind the conspiracy theories, that is, humans with abnormal psychology who want to normalize themselves as part of, well, evolutionary competition (even though they are the most maladapted individuals of a maladapted species.) Man is the Jerry Smith of animals, and bears a strong resemblance to the fart-sniffing Prius drivers of South Park's Smug Alert episode.