[HN Gopher] A tsunami wiped out ancient communities in the Ataca...
___________________________________________________________________
A tsunami wiped out ancient communities in the Atacama Desert 3,800
years ago
Author : pseudolus
Score : 128 points
Date : 2022-04-08 10:27 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| teh_klev wrote:
| Link to actual source material:
|
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abm2996
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Know about the nearby civilization of Carel? They built Pyramids
| in the Atacama in 2600BC. Mind blowing.
| i_like_waiting wrote:
| I find it utterly fascinating how long were humans capable of
| passing the information just by word of mouth. If I understood it
| correctly, in this case people were wary for 2000 years, so for
| around 100 generations.
| hemreldop wrote:
| Pretty sure all the Vedas were passed down for millennia as
| word of mouth. The aborigines seem to have stories of floods
| from 10,000 years ago.
| alophawen wrote:
| Not sure what you mean here. The article explains how this was
| uncovered by archaeological studies.
| i_like_waiting wrote:
| "Archaeological evidence reveals that people abandoned the
| coast for centuries after the disaster."
|
| "The sea has always been vital to life in the Atacama, but
| it's clear that, for centuries, no one wanted to live too
| close."
|
| But no idea how I came to 2000yrs number
| 34679 wrote:
| "Life in the Atacama took 2,000 years to return to normal."
|
| Just beneath the title.
| afterburner wrote:
| Recovery can be slow without debt financing...
| vmception wrote:
| another way to wind up underwater
| mazsa wrote:
| My favorite word of mouth story is about a tsunami as well:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20120322110734/http://mdn.mainic...
|
| edit: No. This is the real word of mouth story:
|
| "Some 50 generations later, on March 11, 2011, the Murohama
| tsunami warning tower -- which was supposed to sound an alarm
| -- was silent, toppled by the temblor. Still, without the
| benefit of an official warning system supported by modern
| science, the locals relied on the lesson that had been
| transmitted generation to generation for 1,000 years. "We all
| know the story about the two tsunami waves that collided at the
| shrine," I was told.
|
| Instead of taking refuge on the closest hill, the one with the
| shrine, they took the time to get to high ground farther away.
| From the safety of their vantage point they saw two tsunami
| waves colliding at the hill with the shrine, as they did long
| ago. Tragically, not everyone made the right choice; I was told
| of at least one person who died."
| https://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-xpm-2012-mar-11-la-oe-hol...
| awb wrote:
| Japan also has tsunami stones in some coastal communities:
|
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/century-old-
| warnin...
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| I'm doubtful. While individuals may respond to stories,
| cultures and settlement grow vegetatively. Communities would
| have grown back, and to my untutored mind in less than a
| century.
|
| Unless the ecosystem was upset, which it was. Small camps that
| returned after the tsunami show a narrower diet, which is a red
| flag? I imagine folks didn't return because the food chain was
| disrupted, and they couldn't return.
| layer8 wrote:
| Maybe it could be explained by each new generation asking their
| parents why nobody is dwelling near the coast. Meaning, the
| information is passed down because it is necessary to explain
| the current situation. The passed-down explanation may even
| mutate significantly, as long as it still keeps people away
| from the coast.
| toss1 wrote:
| Exactly - quite impressive.
|
| Our modern society has vastly better data, unimaginable
| completeness in scale, scope, detail, and accuracy.
|
| Yet we are consistently making insanely worse decisions than
| the ones that returned 2000 years after the disaster.
|
| That hundred-generation perspective makes the Native American's
| 'Consider the Seventh Generation' ethos seem myopic.
|
| Worse yet is our society's obsession on quarterly profits and
| this month's competitive positioning -- makes the attention
| span of a cloud of coked-up gnats seem positively sagacious
|
| >>And of course, people returned to the shoreline eventually,
| as people in tsunami zones around the world inevitably do and
| apparently always have done. "Knowledge of these giant events
| and their consequences seems to wane over the passage of time,
| a common occurrence throughout the Pacific region . . . Most of
| the hazard assessments for coastal northern Chile are based on
| historical data that goes back just a few centuries, but the
| fault system in the region runs on a much larger temporal
| scale. Data about ancient quakes and tsunamis like the one that
| reshaped society here 3,800 years ago could offer a longer-term
| perspective to hazard planners."
| Spooky23 wrote:
| There are many examples of this sort of thing. In Western
| societies many of the "universal" myths may be correlated to
| events 10,000+ years ago, yet persist!
| nkrisc wrote:
| All kinds. In the Western world there are 2,000 year old
| myths that persist to this day and are part of mainstream
| cultural knowledge. People think you're crazy if you don't
| know them.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| True, but we have been a literate society throughout that
| timespan, and the institution that was responsible for
| maintaining the knowledge of such myths, the Church, was
| often the _only_ source of literacy around.
|
| A lot of the ancient secular stuff was forgotten and had to
| be reconstructed later from written sources.
| eesmith wrote:
| Which ones? I thought the oldest oral stories were from
| Aboriginal Australians, like "Aboriginal Memories of
| Inundation of the Australian Coast Dating from More than 7000
| Years Ago" - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0004
| 9182.2015.10... .
|
| The Black Sea deluge hypothesis for the flood myth was only
| 7,600 years ago and Lake Agassiz 8,200 year ago.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Sea level rose continuously from 20,000 until 8000 years
| ago, 120 m in all. Each of 600 generations experienced its
| own deluge as the shore moved inland, often hundreds of
| miles all told.
|
| Local events were often more dramatic, maybe including the
| Black Sea filling in. Then there was the global Younger
| Dryas cataclysm 12,000 years ago. A bolide strike in the
| Persian Gulf maybe 6000 years ago must have been noticed in
| the region, too.
| concerned_4u wrote:
| Same time frame as the biblical flood
| ncmncm wrote:
| The untold secret of the biblical flood is that, after the
| water rose and drowned everything anyone had ever known, it
| _never went back down_. All the water is still there. We just
| call it the sea now.
|
| It didn't happen all in one week, year, or millennium. But,
| starting 20,000 years ago, generation after generation found
| the village its grandparents built washed by waves, and had to
| move higher and build again. Usually other people already lived
| higher up, so conflicts arose. Australian oral history still
| records compacts settling those.
|
| After the rise finally leveled off 8000 years ago, 120 meters
| upslope and often hundreds of miles inland, the tales came
| unmoored from personal experience, and shifted to what we know
| today.
|
| The whole Persian Gulf had filled in, and the South China Sea,
| a million square miles below what are now Indonesian islands
| ("Sundaland") between and around Australia / New Guinea
| ("Sahul"), off India and Japan, and between Ireland, Britannia
| and Europe ("Doggerland") were forever gone.
|
| The oldest civilizations we know are uphill from a few of those
| places, and the oldest rock art we know was painted in the
| mountains offshore of what was, 40,000 years ago, Sundaland.
|
| Possibly what triggered the beginnings of civilization was the
| continuous need to adapt to new circumstances, and habit of
| discovering a new way of life among strangers, generation after
| generation, over the millennia from 20,000 years ago to 8000
| years ago.
|
| The Younger Dryas cataclysm 12,000 years ago that wiped out
| most big animals in North America and darkened the whole world
| for years after must have had some impact. Gobekli Tepe, the
| oldest documented temple, was built after.
|
| But Gunung Padang on Java was in use before the water ever
| started to rise. There were no ice ages there.
| robbedpeter wrote:
| Not necessarily. The biblical flood and a majority of flood
| myths around the world, go back much farther than that. Many
| seem to have been inspired by events during the Younger Dryas
| period, around 12,000 years ago. There's a "black mat" layer in
| soil all over the world, suspected to be the result of some
| sort of cosmic impact - a comet or asteroid hit North American
| ice, resulting in cataclysmic flooding and a radical reshaping
| of the geology. The fires from the resulting storms pumped so
| much ash into the sky that we now have a visually distinctive
| indicator. Anything above the black mat layer is younger than
| 12,000 years.
|
| North American megafauna disappeared at this time, which is a
| pretty serious crack in the assertion that overhunting by
| people caused their extinction.
|
| Storms from this event left evidence of massive flooding in the
| years following the impact all over the world. I have no doubt
| that there are cultural myths that stem from not recent flood
| events but the younger Dryas impact is likely the source for
| the oldest myths, as the destruction seemed to be so profound
| that it would have wiped out any coastal settlements all over
| the world, leaving us with evidence of the survivors and
| nothing of what they lost. Various sites and clues around the
| world hint that even 12,000 years ago there may have been
| relatively advanced cultures that built in stone and wood,
| planted crops, likely had advanced shipbuilding, math,
| astronomy, and navigation.
|
| There are petroglyphs at sites all over the world resembling
| stick figure men that seem to be inspired by massive plasma
| discharge patterns in the sky, and the Younger Dryas impact
| hypothesis provides an explanation for storms powerful enough
| to produce such patterns.
|
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0800560105
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesi...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-04-09 23:01 UTC)