Comment by sieve

One is not like the other.

We have no idea when the Rāmāyaṇa was composed or who composed it. We traditionally attribute it to Vālmīki and call him the ādikavi and the work the ādikāvyam -- first poet and first piece of poetry respectively. The entire set up presents it as the story of a man named Rāma.

The poet specifically says in the fifth sarga of the Bālakāṇḍa:

तदिदं वर्तयिष्यामि सर्वं निखिलमादितः।

धर्मकामार्थसहितं श्रोतव्यमनसूयया॥ ४

"Now I shall recite the entire thing from start to end. As it relates to dharma, kāma and artha, it should be heard without complaint/malice/envy/etc."

The neo-Western standard of written or epigraphic evidence being the only real evidence was not really that relevant in the ancient world. Hinduism itself is based on the concept of time as a cycle instead of the linearity that is common in Western religions.

So, the story could have received its present form some time in the past 3-4K years, and has been fiddled with by grammar-obsessed scribes across the country over the past 2K years, but it could encode memories from a time long before that. The story has many fantastical elements like the tale of Sagara and his 60K sons and the descent of the river Gaṅgā from the heavens, but it is much more reserved in other aspects. The etymology of the term vānara itself is debatable. Has it been derived from narō vā (is it a man/human)? Or vanam + naraḥ (forest + man = forest dweller)?