[HN Gopher] Aboriginal ritual passed down over 12,000 years, cav...
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Aboriginal ritual passed down over 12,000 years, cave find shows
Author : speckx
Score : 270 points
Date : 2024-07-02 18:48 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| rhplus wrote:
| I'm surprised by how tenuous the link is between the cave find
| and the archival find. Is the bar really that low for claims in
| archaeological papers or am I missing something? It's a
| compelling story, but surely Occam's razor would conclude that
| poking sticks into dead animals and fire pits is just what people
| have done for thousands of years? Where's the evidence that there
| was chanting and a healing ceremony?
|
| Edit: full paper is freely available on Nature here:
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01912-w
| gerdesj wrote:
| "Each one was found in a separate fireplace around the size of
| the palm of a hand--far too small to have been used for heat or
| cooking meat.
|
| The slightly charred ends of the sticks had been cut specially
| to stick into the fire, and both were coated in human or animal
| fat."
|
| That's rather more than circumstantial evidence. Granted the
| ritual might have changed a bit over 12,000 odd years but where
| else have you seen people poke sticks into tiny hearth's?
| bena wrote:
| It's all circumstantial evidence because that's all we get.
|
| Circumstantial evidence is not "weak evidence", it is
| evidence concerning the circumstances.
|
| For instance, DNA is circumstantial evidence. It's evidence
| that can imply a connection between events, but it is not
| proof of such a connection. Fingerprints: circumstantial.
| Call logs: often circumstantial.
|
| The opposite of circumstantial evidence is direct evidence.
| Direct evidence is rarer and often not as useful. Direct
| evidence would be an actual witness to the event. To call
| back to prior examples:
|
| Fingerprints are direct evidence someone touched something.
| But they are circumstantial evidence they then used that
| object in commission of a crime.
|
| Here, the direct evidence is that things were burned and
| sticks were sharpened. The circumstances in which they were
| found implies the rest.
| ertgbnm wrote:
| Archaeology is almost exclusively circumstantial evidence...
| tengwar2 wrote:
| It varies a lot. Later European archaeology is generally
| quite well-founded as it ties in to a historical record.
| While I don't have any familiarity with the Colosseum, I
| have heard that there are records of payments to sailors
| for manipulating the shades.
|
| If you get further away from historical records, it does
| get more tenuous, but there is often a solid basis of
| scientific or technical evidence. My own doctorate is in
| use of physics for dating by thermoluminescence and
| optically stimulated luminescence, which together cover a
| lot of ground for stuff that cannot be dated by C14. There
| are several quantitative techniques like that, for instance
| for isotopic analysis which can be used for deducing trade
| routes. There are also many qualitative and semi-
| quantitative techniques, varying from traditional trenches
| and ground penetrating radar to pollen analysis (which
| gives you information on climate and ground cover).
|
| However all of this has to be tied together in to a picture
| of human culture. That necessarily has a large element of
| interpretation. This is not unique - you can see the same
| pattern in fields like astronomy. Generally I think
| archaeologists are reasonably good at knowing when they are
| on uncertain ground. If I may give an example: in Scotland,
| mainly on the north west coasts, there are the remains of
| pre-historic buildings called brochs. The biggest stands
| 40' high, and it is possible to walk up through the stairs
| between the double walls to the top. We know roughly when
| they were built, but not why. There are several theories,
| but I find it interesting that there is an absence of
| dogmatic assertion that one particular interpretation is
| true, and it is still possible to have a sensible
| discussion about a "fringe" theory (my own idea is that
| some of them may have been for excarnation) which will
| centre on what evidence you might need to search for (bone
| fragments in this case).
| gwern wrote:
| If they had been doing the ritual regularly enough to
| preserve it for over 12,000 years in a relatively small
| range, it seems surprising that the excavations didn't turn
| up way more instances than it did. They can find 2 perfect
| instances within centuries of each other 12kya in the same
| excavation, then it just teleports without a trace to the
| 1880s?
|
| This sounds more like a birthday paradox. There are _so_ many
| rituals and superstitions in indigenous peoples over the
| millennia that it would be shocking if you could never find
| cases of things that looked vaguely similar when reduced to
| an archaeological residue and you cast a net as wide as
| 'anything which anyone has ever described which sounds
| similar no matter how many millennia'.
|
| (I would also note that 'fat smeared on stuff and involving
| fires' is not nearly as rare as it might sound. Fat is
| important and used in many sacrifices or medicines - eg
| Homer, with all that fat wrapped on or stacked on top of
| bones in a holocaust to the gods.)
| mistermann wrote:
| Have you ever watched US State Department press briefings, _and
| paid close attention to how they use language_ (ie: "X is
| _linked to_ Y ")? Or, heard the public subsequently discussing
| what was said in them (say, right here on HN)?
|
| Humans are a story based species...always have been always will
| be. Stories are our weak spot, the ultimate attack/control
| vector.
| walterbell wrote:
| _> Stories are our weak spot, the ultimate attack /control
| vector._
|
| Stories (and LLM 'story models') can be fine tuned and A/B
| tested against humans with live neural monitoring to evaluate
| narrative effectiveness.
| mistermann wrote:
| "Evaluate", on what scale?
|
| Donald Trump can tell a story (which is what all humans run
| on) adequate to motivate thousands of people up to no good
| to descend upon the nation's capital, do you think LLM's
| (science, etc) can compete in that _specific_ arena
| /domain, at that level? (To be fair though, the Normies
| have been motivated to do more than a few silly things
| themselves by their trainers. Donald is good, _but he ain
| 't the best_.)
|
| There are readings of brain activity, and then there is
| brain activity that causes humans to do particular things
| with their bodies. One of these is more powerful than the
| other.
|
| (Pardon for the vitriol, no offense intended.)
| walterbell wrote:
| 12 years ago, https://www.motherjones.com/criminal-
| justice/2012/04/departm...
|
| _> FY2012 budget states a plan to "initiate
| investigations into the relationship
| between...neurotransmitters such as oxytocin, emotion-
| cognition interactions, and narrative structures."_
|
| What has transpired since then is left as an exercise for
| the reader.
| busterarm wrote:
| Have to agree here. Also just kind of doesn't pass the common
| sense test. We all learn the "game of telephone" as a kid and
| how information can change even just being passed once.
|
| In fact I've heard archaeologists in the past specifically say
| that no oral tradition can survive intact more than 100 years.
| Usually this statement is in reference to certain creation
| myths being relatively modern inventions.
|
| A claim of 12000 years needs strong evidence. Given what I've
| seen from the field lately I have a counter-theory, but I'm not
| really comfortable sharing.
| cess11 wrote:
| Where I grew up "game of telephone" didn't include repetition
| over and over and over again. It also didn't include meter or
| rhymes.
| busterarm wrote:
| Okay. Take Shakespeare then.
| https://thegreatthinkers.org/shakespeare-and-
| politics/biblio...
| cess11 wrote:
| Confirms what I'm hinting at, through tradition a version
| is consolidated that becomes the consensus and can reach
| a very long-lived stability.
| alfiopuglisi wrote:
| Please do share! Often those are the most interesting ones :)
| danans wrote:
| > In fact I've heard archaeologists in the past specifically
| say that no oral tradition can survive intact more than 100
| years. Usually this statement is in reference to certain
| creation myths being relatively modern inventions.
|
| Maybe you meant 1000 years?
|
| If you really meant 100 years, there's an obvious
| counterexample: The "Happy Birthday Song", published in 1893.
| Arguably no one learns it by reading the words and notes from
| a page.
|
| Furthermore, considering that until pretty recently in
| history most people were illiterate, the stories they learned
| were transmitted to them orally (even if read from a book).
| busterarm wrote:
| You are aware that the Happy Birthday Song has dozens upon
| dozens of variations (and not just the parody ones), right?
|
| The Happy Birthday Song isn't even the Happy Birthday Song!
| It's Good Morning To All! Happy Birthday lyrics didn't even
| make it into print until 1912 and that's not even the
| version that we use today. That version was first published
| in 1924 by Robert Coleman. The copyrighted version that
| even credited the Hill sisters with the melody (from Good
| Morning to All, in 1893) didn't come around till 1935.
|
| As for peoples' literacy, yes, that's the point. That
| history is often unreliable. We even have disputes between
| early _written_ historians writing about the same events
| and have to compare them and also evaluate whether they
| were alive at the time of the events and what their sources
| were. Often we can discount what those people wrote today
| based on what we've learned from the past.
|
| I said 100 years and I meant it. If you really think about
| it deeply, it should be obvious. Hell, I don't know who my
| father is and my own mother couldn't manage to stay
| consistent between tellings of that story...
|
| You expect a complicated tradition to stay the same for
| 12000 years? I went to Catholic Church my whole childhood
| and I couldn't even tell you beat-for-beat what happens at
| mass if you put a gun to my head.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| Several cultures have developed techniques to error-correct
| and prevent these kinds of transmission errors.
| ars wrote:
| I came to post the same thing. You have a stick from 12,000
| years ago, and a story from 100 years ago, and they link them
| because of a similarity "there is fat at the end of the stick".
|
| You could get fat on a stick by roasting a small mouse (so a
| small hearth), or tons of other ways. This really isn't enough
| evidence, not without a ton more findings of the same thing at
| various dates over the timeperiod.
| griffzhowl wrote:
| If tiny hearths with fat-covered sticks were common
| elsewhere, this would be a valid objection. But as it is,
| this seems to be a distinctive practice that is present at
| the same location separated by 12k years, and the ancient one
| was buried and so not observed for most of that time. What's
| the alternative explanation except a common root in a
| cultural practice?
| griffzhowl wrote:
| It's actually not that far-fetched when you consider the long
| view of human history. Hominins have been capable of cultural
| transmission for millions of years, and during most of that
| time it made most sense to repeat what the previous generation
| had done as closely as possible, since they had by definition
| survived and reproduced well enough to make a new generation.
| Among all those practices of toolmaking, hunting strategies,
| herbal knowledge, and whatever we call 'ritual', it wouldn't
| have been clear to the practitioners which were actually
| effective at increasing survival and which not, so everything
| gets repreated over generations (with occasional modifications
| catching on and producing cultural evolution ofc)
| the-smug-one wrote:
| Very cool :-). I don't know that much about the natives of
| Australia and their history, I wonder how many of these oral
| traditions have been written down. An immediate google gave me
| this document, seems interesting at a glance:
| https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/159354575.pdf
| sandworm101 wrote:
| When I lived on the west coast a native friend of mine spoke of
| how some elders no longer wanted stories to be written down.
| They have seen how their oral stories get documented,
| effectively transforming them from a living secret into a fixed
| text in a dead book. The book then goes on a shelf, fodder for
| the endless stream of anthropology classes taught ay
| universities in distant cities. More people read the story in
| the book than ever come to listen to the story in person. After
| a few decades of this pattern, young anthologists are now
| hearing stories and asking questions about why the story today
| is possibly slightly different than what was written down a
| decade prior. There is an old stereotype of western Indians
| believing that cameras could capture one's soul. That is
| something to think about when we "document" an oral tradition.
| parasti wrote:
| I come from a background with a strong folk singing
| tradition, and this reminds me of the two camps of folk
| singers within it: the purists who want to preserve the
| "original" tempo, lyrics, melody as it was recorded and
| documented a century ago and who frown upon deviation from
| that, and the modernists who adapt, improvise and reinterpret
| folk songs as they see fit.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Interesting. I do like the documentation for immortality but
| with stories there is an obsession with "the actual" or "the
| original" and many people equate legibility with originality.
| "Source? The original documented here is blah blah".
|
| Sampling a continuous process once and describing it as the
| process.
|
| "The original value of sin(t) is sqrt(3)/2."
| yencabulator wrote:
| I live near the Navajo Nation, but claim no true
| understanding of native american culture. Here's what I've
| heard about their attitudes toward e.g. video recording their
| rituals:
|
| They welcome you, or any respectful individual, to
| participate and to "live their rituals" with them. The local
| college even hosts such events, to help the neighboring
| communities understand each other better. Any elders will
| likely tell you many stories, once they see you're actually
| interested and not just in it for a cheap tourist thrill[1].
|
| They discourage trying to record or explain it to people who
| did not participate. They consider the first-hand experience
| to be transformative, and that you fundamentally cannot
| understand them without it.
|
| [1]: I understand there are some things they're not supposed
| to mention much, roughly in the sense of "speak of the Devil"
| in Christian societies, or naming Bloody Mary three times.
| Those stories you might only hear on special occasions.
| namanaggarwal wrote:
| Fascinating.
|
| Growing up in a Hindu household, a lot of our festivals involve
| listening to origin stories of the customs. A lot of those have
| of course been glorified to add an element of holiness, but it's
| possible they are actually derived from some small incident
| happened in the past.
|
| Like a butterfly effect, a small insignificant event leading to a
| major celebration for billion people continued over centuries
| bl4ckm0r3 wrote:
| I think you just found out the roots of every religion.
| mistermann wrote:
| Every _ideology_ would be a more accurate story, though
| perhaps less satisfying.
| liquidpele wrote:
| Uh.. no?
| swatcoder wrote:
| An ideology can be seen as a collection of rituals in
| action, reasoning, and rhetoric situated among core
| beliefs about what life is, what the world is, and what's
| important to them.
|
| And each ideology has a specific history of events,
| founders, and later elaborators that shape what these
| rituals and beliefs are.
|
| Many ideologies reject deities or are at least ambivalent
| about them, but they're not really operationally
| different than religions.
|
| So for as much as little bits of history linger in
| relgious rituals, both blurred and resharpened in later
| years, the same is absolutely true for ideologies.
|
| The capitalism or feminism or humanism or atheism or
| whatever else you point to today is similar to the one
| sharing its name in the past, or in some other region,
| but is not the same, and these differences are all
| vestiges of little seed events that happened here or
| there.
| ajkjk wrote:
| I don't think anybody else would describe an ideology as
| a collection of rituals.
| swatcoder wrote:
| FWIW, that's incorrect. It's not at all unusual for
| ideology to get modeled and analyzed that way in
| sociology, anthropology, etc
| ajkjk wrote:
| Do you have an example? It sounds like a complete
| category error. That or you're using the word very
| differently than most people do..?
|
| An adherent of an ideology might, like, _have_ rituals.
| But the ideology isn 't the rituals.
|
| Here are some ideologies off the top of my head:
| democracy, marxism, environmentalism, libertarianism,
| atheism, the moral basis of Christianity but not the
| religion itself, utitarianism, humanism, empiricism.
|
| None of those have, as far as I can tell, a single ritual
| inherently associated with them.
| swatcoder wrote:
| If you categorically define an ideology to be a system of
| pure concepts, independent of any practice of thought,
| speech, or action by a professed adherent, then you will
| inevitably see it as a category error, yes.
|
| (You'll also have a hard time enumerating those concepts
| in a complete and consistent way)
|
| But if you're even a wee bit of a subjectivist, as many
| (not all) social scientists and social philosphers are,
| then a definition like that isn't interesting or
| productive. From that perspective, ideologies are
| something that people profess adherence to and express
| statements about and behave in self-identified accordance
| to.
|
| They gather in elections, they discuss power through the
| lens of capital and labor, they recycle or avoid eating
| meat, they recoil at government overreach, they expose
| fraud in purported miralces, they pray, they trade
| trolley problem memes unironically, they protest against
| inequality, etc
|
| If these don't make sense to you as "rituals of
| ideologies" for people doing cross-cultural studies,
| that's fine, but then I have a sense that a lot of cross-
| cultural studies just feels like hogwash to you anyway. I
| doubt I could change your mind here. :)
| ajkjk wrote:
| Well, you're right about that. I suppose I don't see the
| point in calling what you're describing an ideology. Just
| call it something else so ideology can mean what it means
| to everyone else..? I see all your examples as like,
| social behaviors that happen to presently align with the
| ideologies. But in the past or future they won't, while
| the ideologies will persist, cause they live in 'idea
| space'.
|
| (nor would I call any of those rituals, either, but I
| guess words don't mean what they normally mean in those
| fields)
| swatcoder wrote:
| I figured!
|
| If you earnestly wished to "see the point", you're
| tripping yourself with by taking for granted "what it
| means to everyone else.." and things like "living in idea
| space"
|
| There are traditions of study/thought that use ideology
| the way you mean, and traditions that don't. The variety
| of use is well-represented and has been since the word
| came into use. Likewise, "idea space" is a specific
| concept that some people accept as sensible and others
| don't. Again, the variety of relationships to it is well-
| represented (and stretches back millennia, on that one).
|
| You can actually see an example of this kind of
| differing-perspectives-in-wide-use in the way use used
| "the moral basis of Christianity but not the religion
| itself" in your own comment above. While Platonic ideas
| predate Christianity and have much influence on its shape
| and study in the West, the that statement would strike
| most traditional and many modern Christian thinkers as
| non-sensical. To them, there is no sensible separation of
| Christianity's "moral basis" from its Church/people and
| trying to make some distinction is as alien and
| "pointless" to them as different senses of ideology are
| to you.
|
| _And yet_ , of course it's interesting to think about
| Christianity's "moral basis" as an ideology existing in
| "idea space" because it lets you relate that part of
| Christianity to other things that you feel are comparable
| using techniques that you know how to work with and have
| confidence in. That's pretty much exactly what's going on
| with social scientists/philosophers who think about
| ideology in the way I've been describing above.
| vkou wrote:
| Democracy has rituals that its disciplines believe that
| if adhered to correctly and reverently they will bring
| prosperity to their tribe.
|
| Some, but not all of those rituals even stand up to basic
| scrutiny. Others, not so much.
| ajkjk wrote:
| I personally don't associate those rituals with the idea
| of democracy itself, rather just its particular
| instantiation in modernish society.
| mistermann wrote:
| I certainly would (not as a _comprehensive_ explanation
| though of course). The range of forms of
| conceptualization any one individual is capable of (or
| not) is strongly influenced by the ideology to which they
| subscribe (or are captured by).
|
| If you simply consider how the human mind works, this
| "should" be fairly obvious. But one's ability or
| likelihood to think about such things is once again a
| function of the norms and accepted practices of one's
| ideology. That which is not known of, essentially does
| not exist.
| kstenerud wrote:
| Yup. The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 18th century BC) caused quite
| a lot of controversy when it was translated in 1870 due to
| its striking similarity to many parts of the Hebrew Bible
| (which was written MUCH later).
|
| Similar controversies erupted over the stories of Osiris (c.
| 25th century BC).
|
| By the 10th century BC, almost all of the story themes that
| we ascribe to more modern authorship had already been
| written.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| The similarity between the EoG and Genesis flood stories
| can probably be laid to the fact that the first major human
| societies were built around flood plains of rivers in
| regions that have otherwise stable climates. When your
| society spends centuries in that situation, floods are the
| single most important natural event that happens to you. If
| would be shocking if they didn't feature prominently in
| your stories.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| There are other similarities between the epic of
| gilgamesh and genesis beyond just the flood, it's a very
| interesting subject imo. Ultimately both were originally
| oral traditions long before they were written anywhere,
| both emerging out of the ancient east mediterranean/west
| asian cultural milieu.
|
| IIRC the current scholarly consensus is that the shared
| parts represent two surviving variants of an even earlier
| story that was widely told across cultures in that
| region.
| mqefjh wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flood_myths
|
| https://www.livius.org/articles/misc/great-
| flood/flood6-para...
|
| I established this comparison table with ChatGPT:
|
| https://markdownpastebin.com/?id=a97c76a889aa42038b877bf2
| 5bd...
| whatwhaaaaat wrote:
| Why do we think peoples of the past would be unable to
| distinguish between a normal river flooding and a "world
| ending" flood? What about the ~450 feet of sea level rise
| in the last 15k years?
| rcxdude wrote:
| They almost certainly could, but also they would also
| almost certainly be prone to the same kind of
| embellishments of such stories as they are passed on.
| neffy wrote:
| The other quite reasonable hypothesis is that these are
| tales of the fairly rapid sea level rises that
| accompanied the end of the last ice age as the breaking
| of ice dams in the north released massive glacial floods
| into the North Atlantic and Pacific.
| TeaBrain wrote:
| These people's "world" would have been a relatively small
| area.
| mistercheph wrote:
| The whole premise of our present civilization is that
| every one before us was a nose picking drooler, and that
| we have more to say to the past then the past has to tell
| us about ourselves.
|
| We lack the collective self consciousness to see
| ourselves through the eyes of the people of other times,
| thinking through what it means to be understood through
| artifact, and the distortions it produces.
|
| The closest we come is prophesying that future
| generations will blame us for the destruction of the
| natural world and climate of earth. That is a thin mask
| for our age's narcissistic fixation with producing myths
| of its own apocalyptic world-ending power.
|
| The people of the future probably won't think of us as
| bad, evil doers, that destroyed the natural world for
| future generations with no care but for ourselves and our
| consumption, if they are anything like us, they will more
| likely think of us as having one hand digging for gold
| where the sun don't shine while the other stuffs hot,
| fresh cheeseburgers into mouth, unibrow freshly dripping
| with sweat.
| lawlessone wrote:
| Theres a lot to unpack here...
| jcranmer wrote:
| At the most accelerated rate of sea level rise, meltwater
| pulse 1A, sea levels rose at about 1-2 inches per year
| (about 10 times current sea-level rise rates, FWIW).
|
| While it's commonly used as an explanation for the
| prevalence of flood myths throughout the world, I just
| don't buy it. That level of sea level rise just isn't
| going to come across as world-ending flood; it's going to
| be noticeable over time, but even sedentary cultures
| along the coastlines who are the most impacted by the
| rise are going to easily capable of dealing with it.
|
| To me, the more parsimonious explanation is... it's just
| extending the metaphor of a flash flood. There's already
| a pretty consistent metaphor of ritual cleansing among
| multiple cultures. Flash floods are pretty common in many
| climates, and especially in an alluvial flood plain, the
| utter devastation of a major flood is readily apparent.
| Combine the two of them with a metaphorical story of the
| world being so wrong that everybody needs to be swept
| away and... why _not_ use a flood to explain the
| destruction of the entire world? What other disaster
| would you choose instead?
| kibwen wrote:
| _> That level of sea level rise just isn 't going to come
| across as world-ending flood_
|
| I'm entirely open to being skeptical about meltwater
| pulse 1A being responsible for the universal flood myth,
| but I don't agree with this refutation.
|
| Many of our stories do not exist to relate literal
| events, they exist to explain natural phenomenons. And
| there are many ways for humans to frame these
| explanations, but for whatever reason the human brain
| seems hardwired to prefer stories, so the explanations
| that survived to be transmitted through the ages were the
| ones that happened to take the form of stories.
|
| So rather than saying "the pulse event wasn't rapid
| enough, therefore it can't explain the story" is IMO too
| hasty. Consider a sedentary people living on the coast,
| where a child asks her grandmother where their ancestors
| are buried, to which the grandmother responds by
| gesturing out at the Persian Gulf where, 60 miles from
| shore, their village once clung to the coast 500 years
| ago. It only takes one curious child asking "why?" and
| one bored grandmother willing to come up with a story to
| get the ball rolling on a tale that still gets told
| 10,000 years later (a tale that, indeed, would likely
| also have been informed by the experience of annual river
| flooding).
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| The similarities between the Epic of Gilgamesh and the
| Genesis flood story are far too extensive to be due to
| chance.
|
| For example, compare the following passages, describing
| how Noah / Utnapishtim let out birds to search for dry
| land, after their boats get grounded on a tall mountain.
|
| Genesis 8:6-12:
|
| After forty days Noah opened a window he had made in the
| ark and sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and
| forth until the water had dried up from the earth. Then
| he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from
| the surface of the ground. But the dove could find
| nowhere to perch because there was water over all the
| surface of the earth; so it returned to Noah in the ark.
| He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it
| back to himself in the ark. He waited seven more days and
| again sent out the dove from the ark. When the dove
| returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a
| freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water
| had receded from the earth. He waited seven more days and
| sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return
| to him.
|
| Epic of Gilgamesh:
|
| > When the seventh day dawned I loosed a dove and let her
| go. She flew away, but finding no resting-place she
| returned. Then I loosed a swallow, and she flew away but
| finding no resting-place she returned. I loosed a raven,
| she saw that the waters had retreated, she ate, she flew
| around, she cawed, and she did not come back.
|
| Historically, much of Genesis was likely written during
| the Babylonian exile. It's not surprising at all that the
| authors of Genesis borrowed a story that was extremely
| well known in Babylon.
| ars wrote:
| > Historically, much of Genesis was likely written during
| the Babylonian exile.
|
| That's very very unlikely, there's too much other stuff
| linked with it that is older than that. You might be able
| to claim that when it was set to paper, but there's no
| way Genesis itself is only from then.
|
| According to Genesis Abraham lived at the time that
| Gilgamesh was recorded, with Noah living a little before
| then. It's quote possible Gilgamesh was written down from
| their stories, rather than the other way around. Genesis
| records how Abraham traveled widely telling his story,
| including to kings.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| There are many linguistic and historical hints that the
| early chapters of Genesis were written during or after
| the Babylonian captivity: things like mentions of "great"
| cities that only became great during that era, borrowed
| Babylonian phrases, various stories borrowed from the
| Babylonians, etc.
|
| There were certainly earlier stories that were included
| in Genesis, but the actual writing occurred long after
| those stories supposedly took place.
|
| > It's quote possible Gilgamesh was written down from
| their stories, rather than the other way around.
|
| The Epic of Gilgamesh was written down long before there
| was even a Hebrew language. It's one of the most ancient
| written works.
| Amezarak wrote:
| At least portions of the Pentateuch certainly date prior
| to the Exile, because we have direct archeological
| evidence in the form of dated, physical scrolls.
|
| At any rate both the Babylonians and the ancient
| Israelites were Semitic peoples, so obviously they had a
| shared background long before the Exile.
|
| There are also many references in early Genesis that do
| suggest it originates in traditions much older, including
| references to great cities and powers that were long,
| long gone by the Exile. This actually sent me quite
| recently down some rabbit holes.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| But if the floods are a yearly phenomenon, why would you
| necessarily write about a single big flood?
| anthk wrote:
| Hint: end of the Ice Age.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| For the same reason people in places where it snows every
| year still remember the really big blizzards: some floods
| are worse than others. Any given generation will have a
| flood they recall that set the (ahem) high water mark for
| comparison to future floods.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| I don't know, if I know it floods every year, and there
| is a really big flood, I don't think I would act like the
| flood was something completely out of the blue. I would
| probably mention how it was much bigger than the normal
| floods.
|
| For that reason, I think an event completely different
| from the yearly flooding is more likely, for example the
| Minoan eruption or Black Sea deluge hypothesis.
| lebuffon wrote:
| I have often wondered if these flood stories document
| something much larger that might have occurred as the
| major ice sheets collapsed and raised the sea levels to
| unseen heights.
|
| But the one that is most intriguing IMHO is the
| mediterranean sea event that happened but it is 6M years
| ago. Could ancestors of genus Homo have passed that story
| long for all that time even across speciation???
|
| https://www.uu.nl/en/news/first-direct-proof-of-mega-
| flood-i...
| griffzhowl wrote:
| If it's based on a real flood, they presumably follow a
| power law distribution, where you have relatively
| frequent "normal" floods, and progressively larger floods
| are rarer and rarer, till you get an occasional
| gargantuan one.
|
| My guess though is it's probably a plot device where the
| storyteller takes a known phenomenon and just exaggerates
| it to magical-mythical proportions, which may contribute
| to the story being repeated as it strikes the balance
| between the relatability of the real phenomenon and the
| attention-grabbing otherworldliness of its exaggerated
| version.
| brightball wrote:
| You'd love watching Ancient Apocalypse on Netflix. It
| essentially tracks this experience globally.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| And is completely made up nonsense pseudoscience
| willy_k wrote:
| The show itself sure, but Graham Hancock just happens to
| be the loudest proponent of this theory, there is solid
| evidence to support it, from Randall Carlson and a few
| other people I'm not remembering atm.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypo
| the...
|
| "Although initially sceptical, Wallace Broecker--the
| scientist who proposed the conveyor shutdown hypothesis--
| eventually agreed with the idea of an extraterrestrial
| impact at the Younger Dryas boundary, and thought that it
| had acted as a trigger on top of a system that was
| already approaching instability."
| ars wrote:
| You would be interested to know that Abraham lived at the
| time of the Gilgamesh epic, and he traveled widely telling
| his story.
|
| I'm aware there is no direct archeological evidence of
| Abraham, except for Gilgamesh, so now you need to decide
| which direction the knowledge flowed.
| kstenerud wrote:
| > You would be interested to know that Abraham lived at
| the time of the Gilgamesh epic, and he traveled widely
| telling his story.
|
| Did he, though? There is archeological and contemporary
| written historical evidence of an actual Gilgamesh. Not
| so with Abraham.
|
| The Abrahamic tradition was orally transmitted by a
| people who for generations lived in Babylonian captivity
| (1300 years after the earliest surviving copy of the Epic
| of Gilgamesh in Old Balylonian, with the earliest partial
| texts appearing 1600 years before), and was finally
| written down 3 generations after they left Babylon.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| King Arthur was probably an actual Welsh guy, who fought the
| Romans (and/or maybe Saxons).
|
| Few hundred years later they give him a magic sword and a
| round table. Same idea, but with other cultures, religions,
| etc.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| Not at all. Islam can be verifiably traced back to a single
| source, and mainstream Islam belief today is the same as it
| was 1400 years ago.
| cschmidt wrote:
| Another article on the same topic:
|
| https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/archaeology/indigenous-au...
| discordance wrote:
| Hopefully Rio Tinto don't blow it up:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/may/26/rio-t...
| RoboTeddy wrote:
| > slightly charred ends of the sticks had been cut specially to
| stick into the fire, and both were coated in human or animal fat.
|
| Wait, what? Where did they get human fat from...?
| 4star3star wrote:
| I also found this concerning.
| alecst wrote:
| In two books I've read recently ( _Conquistador_ about Hernan
| Cortes, and _Civilized to Death_ which contrasts the lives of
| modern humans with ancient ones) the authors mention how fat
| was often poached from the dead -- animals and people alike. It
| was used like a grease for all sorts of things, including
| filling wounds to prevent infection. Pretty interesting stuff.
| hbossy wrote:
| Australians practiced ritualized cannibalism and infanticide as
| late as XIX century.
| delichon wrote:
| I'm from a Jewish family that has been unable to pass down its
| rituals over the past few generations. My great-grandparents were
| observant on both sides. I have no religion or inherited rituals
| to speak of.
|
| So how does a ritual get successfully passed down for something
| like 500 generations? What must the observer get from it that
| motivated them so strongly to pass it along with the necessary
| vigor? Was it something in the ritual itself, perhaps an altered
| state drug experience? Or was the motivation just cultural?
|
| Is there anything in our culture that could possibly have such
| staying power, or is our cultural temperature so high that
| nothing can survive for long?
| troupo wrote:
| > So how does a ritual get successfully passed down for
| something like 500 generations?
|
| There's literally nothing else but this.
|
| > motivated them so strongly to pass it along with the
| necessary vigor?
|
| There's no vigor. There are almost no outside influences.
| There's almost no rebellious thought. You're raised into this
| life, and you know the rituals by heart from a young age.
|
| > Is there anything in our culture that could possibly have
| such staying power,
|
| Any isolated/primitive culture with no outside influences.
| Throughout the 20th century ethnographers collected thousands
| of such rituals before they disappeared after contact with the
| outside world.
| pvg wrote:
| You can still go to or host, say, a Seder, no? That kind of
| cultural transmission doesn't rely on individual families but
| in the case of the rituals of Judaism and lots of other
| religions it seems to have been fairly effective.
| ozmodiar wrote:
| I assume by unable you mean they had to stop due to
| persecution? It sounds from this article that this practice
| that had survived so long also hit an abrupt stop when faced
| with persecution from colonizers (at least that's why I'm
| assuming they have to go by records from 1880 and not just ask
| the current practitioners). I think this says more about the
| ability for persecution to shut down a cultural practice more
| than any quality that practice has to have to survive.
| Publius_Enigma wrote:
| Australian Aboriginal people, have very advanced social and
| cultural structure. Australia is comprised of several thousand
| different aboriginal groups and territories. Acceptance into
| another community relied on endorsement from the elders of the
| community you were leaving. Family bonds and ties are extremely
| strong.
|
| Hence, one explanation may be that participation was
| essentially mandatory to be considered part of the community at
| all, and to be recognised as an adult.
| bitcoin_anon wrote:
| Hmm, I'd say this is a problem that Jesus, the Rastafarians,
| the Amish and your own tradition grappled with.
|
| Jesus was in the world, but not of the world.
|
| Rastafarians step one foot at a time out of Babylon.
|
| The Amish have removed themselves for the most part, but they
| are still somewhat free riders on the greater society.
|
| Jews celebrate the sabbath. In this way, 6 days a week they are
| of the world, and can share in its prosperity, but one day is
| reserved for keeping the traditions.
| Qem wrote:
| > So how does a ritual get successfully passed down for
| something like 500 generations?
|
| Probably some combination of of a large pool of rituals in
| traditional societies (so the probability of any of them
| carrying over 500 generations is greater than that of a single
| given one), high fertility (so if you don't feel inclined to
| carry it, some of your siblings/cousins do) and utility (some
| rituals may increase surviving odds of people that follow
| them). This particular ritual don't seem very useful, but maybe
| it has some unexpected benefical side effect, say, the plant
| they traditionally picked the sticks from, when burned, could
| shoo away insects that were potential vectors for disease
| (completely made up example, just to make the point clearer).
| swatcoder wrote:
| > What must the observer get from it
|
| The compulsion to raise and seek answers for questions like
| this has a lot to do with it.
|
| Over the last couple centuries, increasingly much of the world
| has been inducted into a culture that looks at life from the
| perspective of an individual, looks at that individual's life
| through the lens of economy and benefit, and invites the
| individual to approach that life as some engineer seeking
| optimization.
|
| For many, this way of seeing the world as economic individuals
| is even projected onto the people of elsewhere and elsewhen,
| taking for granted that they must have been doing the same
| thing whether they knew it or not.
|
| A different perspective sees ritual and tradition as the blood
| and flesh of a community or legacy, and sees the community and
| legacy that lives for hundreds or thousands of years as the far
| more important thing than the individual that arrives and
| leaves over the pittance of just a few decades.
|
| For a community, carrying forward a ritual is like breathing,
| and an individual who fully understands themselves as a
| fleeting little lung cell in this long-lasting community
| implicitly fulfills their role of perpetuating the community's
| life by practicing the ritual.
|
| But what's interesting is that asking questions framed like
| yours is itself a kind of ritual, perpetuating a different (and
| much more recently birthed) community, and there are countless
| other rituals of "modernity" that we implicitly peform. These
| rituals are so natural to us that we barely even recognize them
| as something outside of us... the same, most likely, your
| great-grandparents with theirs.
| hbossy wrote:
| The story of Pleiades might be as old as 100 000 years.
| ekidd wrote:
| > _So how does a ritual get successfully passed down for
| something like 500 generations? What must the observer get from
| it that motivated them so strongly to pass it along with the
| necessary vigor?_
|
| I think small, pre-literate societies on the edge of survival
| rely heavily on "traditional" knowledge, and for very good
| reasons.
|
| One of my anthropology professors told me a story about a
| village (I forget his source for this, but it sounded like he
| had one). They had an old woman, probably in her 80s,
| toothless, partly blind, and mostly immobile. She only survived
| because of a significant ongoing effort of the village.
|
| Then the village had a bad year, a famine. And the old woman
| said, "This happened when I was a child. What you need to do is
| take the leaves of such-and-such a plant. They're poisonous.
| But if you beat them with rocks, soak them, and let them age a
| bit, then they're disgusting but edible." And so the village
| remained fed. The old woman was contributing to the village's
| survival, because she was a source of mostly-forgotten
| knowledge.
|
| Similarly, we know that modern hunter-gatherers might be able
| to find and identify 47 species of edible mushrooms in their
| local climate. This knowledge base can easily be the equivalent
| of a college education focused just on finding food.
|
| Now, inland Australia is famously one of the most inhospitable
| places in earth. Early European explorers noticed just how
| difficult it was to survive there. But the locals someone
| managed just fine. They knew all the tricks.
|
| So my guess is that the kind of society which can remember how
| to find and prepare 47 kinds of edible mushrooms, or which can
| survive a famine that occurs every 75 years, or which can
| survive inland Australia, is a society with significant respect
| for ancestral knowledge. Learning the rituals may often be a
| matter of life and death.
|
| The modern world is different because we have books, and
| science, and high division of labor. If we forget how to do our
| grandparents' jobs, someone else will still learn. Or the
| nature of work will change so much that a new generation needs
| to learn a new way of working.
| ars wrote:
| The main thing is you need to live near other people with the
| same rituals.
|
| I suspect your grandparents moved to the US after the holocaust
| and settled somewhere far from other Jews. Judaism can not be
| practiced in isolation, it was not setup that way.
|
| Also, nothing stopping you from finding a Chabad near you and
| reclaiming at least a portion of your heritage.
| empath75 wrote:
| > "Australia kept the memory of its first peoples alive thanks to
| a powerful oral tradition that enabled it to be passed on,"
| Delannoy said.
|
| > "However in our societies, memory has changed since we switched
| to the written word, and we have lost this sense."
|
| I sort of think that this is a "what's water?" thing, because a
| lot of our ancient prehistorical traditions and practices that
| continued into the historical era and beyond are so embedded with
| how we see how ourselves and act and behave that it's impossible
| for us to even notice them. There's a lot that we have looked at
| in ancient sites and have just known what the purpose was for
| because we still do the same thing now, or at least we had
| recorded uses for it from historical texts, it's just said to be
| "obvious" and not really worth commenting about how interesting
| it is that we preserved these oral traditions.
|
| There's a kind of exoticism/noble savage thing going on here, I
| think.
| tivert wrote:
| Yeah. I can think of one ritual that's probably even older:
| burying the dead.
|
| However what interesting about this tradition is the degree of
| specificity that was preserved with this ritual (e.g. stick of
| same type of wood, coated with fat, put in a small fire to
| break), none of which has any real practical purpose.
| spacecadet wrote:
| Its always awesome to read about finding early human tools and
| techniques. But, could the sticks have been 12,000 years old, but
| the event far less?
|
| Lots of people asking how they had human fat... you poke
| someone's wound with a hot stick, there is probably fat on it
| after. So they may have been using cauterization.
|
| They may also have been cooking small animals while trying to
| avoid the light, smell, and smoke plume a larger fire creates.
| Which would attract predators.
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| It had kangaroo fat too, leading me to infer that they were
| trying to create a super-race of human-kangaroo hybrids.
| sambeau wrote:
| It occurred to me recently that tig/tag has probably been passed
| down through oral tradition from child to child for millennia.
| It's possible that it's older than homo-sapiens, older than the
| taming of fire. Millions of years of tradition.
|
| And it still being passed on orally, child-to-child.
| psychoslave wrote:
| What is tig/tag?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| My parents failed me too on that!
| popol12 wrote:
| I guess https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_(game)
| angstrom wrote:
| My three-year-old daughter plays this with cat. It's a
| cross-species thing that is possibly part of mammalian
| brain development in origin.
|
| The cat is less than one year old. Our 17 year old cat does
| not engage in this at all and hisses at the kitten for even
| trying to start a game of tag. This makes me wonder if that
| origin is more related to predator/prey.
| ViktorRay wrote:
| In regards to your 17 year old cat...
|
| All mammalian species have something in common.
|
| When mammals are young we all love playing. This is true
| for humans, dogs, elephants, primates, cats and so on.
|
| But play ends up disappearing as the mammal gets older.
| Compare a playful baby elephant to an adult elephant. The
| baby elephant loves playing. Not just with other
| elephants but with humans and dogs and so on. But older
| elephants are more likely to watch and less likely to
| play.
|
| This is why your 1 year old cat loves playing while your
| 17 year old cat doesn't.
|
| It's a very interesting phenomenon
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Play is a semi-structured way of learning important
| skills! Evolution really just has to make it engaging
| enough for you to learn the skills, not much of a reason
| for it to persist after that.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _not much of a reason for it to persist after that_
|
| for working out and keeping fit!... oh, hmmm, I guess
| that's glaring evidence that working out and keeping fit
| are not beneficial after all
| llamaimperative wrote:
| I am clearly speaking from the perspective of
| evolutionary pressures. And you're right, there's very
| little evolutionary pressure on working out, staying fit,
| staying happy, etc. etc. beyond the bare minimum required
| to ensure propagation.
| ViktorRay wrote:
| You don't need to play to stay fit.
|
| Adult lions don't play like baby lions yet adult lions
| are still fit.
| ajuc wrote:
| Once you can't reproduce and can't help with reproduction
| evolution doesn't care if you stay fit.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Well that's not the point of play to begin with, it's
| learning motor skills, so your logic doesn't make any
| sense.
| triceratops wrote:
| Dogs seem to want to play until they're physically unable
| to.
| danans wrote:
| There's a theory that the domestication of dogs selected
| for the retention of juvenile behavioral traits into
| adulthood (non-suspiciousness, playfulness), vs wolves
| who do not retain those traits.
|
| It's even thought that the first domesticated dogs pre-
| domesticated themselves to an extent because the less
| suspicious wolves were able to use human settlements'
| trash middens as a food source.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| It's just knees.
| slibhb wrote:
| Young squirrels also play tag.
| astrange wrote:
| The cat might not want to move as much anymore if it has
| arthritis.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Predator vs prey i thought too
| tivert wrote:
| The game tag, as in "Tag! You're it!"
| sambeau wrote:
| In parts of the UK it's often called 'tig'
| dark-star wrote:
| never heard of it as well. Maybe he means the game of "tag"?
| walthamstow wrote:
| A name so regional that it featured on the NY Times' UK &
| Ireland accent/dialect quiz
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/15/upshot/britis.
| ..
| lawlessone wrote:
| >What is tig/tag?
|
| the chain is broken..
| grimgrin wrote:
| The chain never grows without a "tag you're it"
| fsckboy wrote:
| yes it does: tig, you're it!
| qingcharles wrote:
| We just repaired the link :)
| sambeau wrote:
| In parts of the UK it's often called 'tig' in the US and
| other parts of the UK it's called 'tag'
| mauvehaus wrote:
| Fittingly, it was a Yorkshireman who discovered you could
| use inert gasses other than argon for gas-tungsten arc
| welding.
| notarobot123 wrote:
| Not quite as old but another example of an enduring child-to-
| child cultural transmission is the daring right of passage that
| is Chappy/Knicky-Knocky Nine Doors/Ding dong ditch[0].
|
| [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knock,_knock,_ginger
| briankelly wrote:
| Ring around the roses as well:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_a_Ring_o%27_Roses
| openrisk wrote:
| Its impossible to tell, but the sense of passage of time must
| have been dramatically different in earlier periods of human
| development.
|
| Persistent rituals passed on from elders to youngsters, oral
| transmission of huge poems and other such "low tech" information
| tools must have given some structure to what otherwise might have
| felt as an eternal reboot.
| tolerance wrote:
| The persistency that you're describing is key. I'd like to
| think that previous generations were far more content with time
| and what is associated with it. The mundane of the day-by-day,
| aging, death, etc.
| Anon84 wrote:
| I read somewhere (don't recall exactly where) that your sense
| of the passage of time is directly related to how much things
| change because that impacts how many memories you form.
| Essentially, when every day is the same, not many new memories
| are created, so you don't notice time passing (New Years was
| just a few weeks ago, how can it be July already!), but when
| things are constantly changing, time passes much more slowly.
| When you're a child and non-stop learning and exploring, 3
| months seems like an eternity.
|
| I wonder if technology development has a similar effect. When
| the world essentially remains unchanged for your entire life,
| things must seem much faster with days blending together.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Having been to jail, here's what they say, "the days pass
| like years, and the years pass like days." Which is a hugely
| accurate interpretation of what happens. Nothing happens all
| day, and every day is the same, so the days drag on in the
| most mind-numbingly tedious fashion. But then you wake up and
| you notice six months have passed without you being able to
| name a single thing that happened.
| biztos wrote:
| Herzog talks about this a bit in his cave-painting movie[0].
| It's fascinating to think that for thousands of years, our
| ancestors lived without any significant change to their world.
| I like to imagine that they were pretty happy with that
| (subject to the normal animal stresses of survival) -- but as
| you say, it's impossible to tell.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_Forgotten_Dreams
|
| Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmMUlNeLApU
| mritchie712 wrote:
| this ritual likely had a real effect on the person (similar to
| placebo effect). They probably wouldn't have kept it up for 12k
| years if they weren't getting some tangible improvement.
| xdennis wrote:
| Multiple religions are thousands of years old and they can't
| all be true.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Placebo effect absolutely can yield effects for all
| religions. That's pretty much what's interesting about it: it
| doesn't matter much what stimulus is producing the effect.
| adrianN wrote:
| They don't have to be true to have an effect on people.
| tgv wrote:
| I think it argues against the claim that it must have had a
| (real) healing effect for it to be passed along.
|
| People are quick to call in the placebo effect, as a
| scientific sounding explanation, but is nobody reminded of
| faith healing? People get up out of wheel chairs, cast away
| their crutches and say they've been healed.
| krapp wrote:
| >but is nobody reminded of faith healing? People get up
| out of wheel chairs, cast away their crutches and say
| they've been healed.
|
| That's just common fakery.
| greenhearth wrote:
| It doesn't sound like anything pure religious, but more of a
| psychotherapeutic technique, probably coupled with some folk
| medicine too.
| utkarsh858 wrote:
| In India, there is a custom of passing ancient knowledge through
| poetic verses. Every poetic verses is sung in a specific 'meter'.
| If there is a discrepancy in recitation then remembering and
| passing knowledge 'letter by letter' can not succeed. Many of the
| verses are thousands of years old. I read some describing an
| ancient extinct river ~7000 years ago, later rediscovered through
| satellite imagery (don't know the right term).
| dyauspitr wrote:
| The river is the Sarasvati.
| RandomCitizen12 wrote:
| That's an interesting way to do a checksum
| nsenifty wrote:
| The metre is a basic checksum, but there are more elaborated
| systems (pathas) of chanting verses that aids in correct
| learning and memorization.
|
| Some of it is described here -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedic_chant#Oral_transmission
|
| An example in action -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLdq15ptqUs
| swatcoder wrote:
| Yeah, in language that suits HN, formal poetic structure
| amounts to error correction in oral tradition.
|
| It dramatically narrows the possibilities of what idea or word
| or sound or whatever could fit in any particular place in the
| verse, making it easier to memorize and accurately recite.
| Clever (and some blundering) poets and changes in language
| still set up these recitations to evolve away from whatever
| they originally were, but the original seeds linger a long,
| long time.
| verisimi wrote:
| Yes poetry is a sort of decent checksum.
|
| However I think parables are an even better checksum, as they
| can be translated also, but if the meaning is altered the
| story fails to be coherent. Parables are imo, the best form
| of information transference across time, imo.
| Hypomixolydian wrote:
| This is what Manly P. Hall described as "acroamatic cipher"
| in his book "The Secret Teachings Of All Ages" [chapter
| "The Cryptogram as a factor in Symbolic Philosophy"]
| roughly wrote:
| Meaning is culturally contingent, though - the appropriate
| "moral" of a parable can change as culture changes around
| it, which can lead to changes to the parable itself.
|
| For a contrived example, 100 years ago, the idea that one
| would defy one's parents and pursue one's own dreams would
| have been frowned upon, and any parables referencing that
| action would clearly contain the moral that one should
| listen to one's parents. Today, that would be an almost
| unthinkable moral - discard your dreams and stick to
| whatever hidebound business your parents were in? Surely we
| got something wrong in the translation here.
|
| Written in meter, though, clearly the only word that fits
| here is "shan't", not "must".
| verisimi wrote:
| I bet you've not seen a mustard seed, but you still get
| what is being said, in the parable of the mustard seed.
|
| If the parable is talking to a foundational reality,
| rather than cultural situations, I think it can endure.
|
| I get what you are saying, but even parables don't have
| 'the truth'. I would imagine that there may even be
| parables that argue the opposite position. And both,
| opposing positions could be right, depending on the
| context.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| Poetic structure is such a strong framework that linguists
| have been able to recover information about the dialect and
| pronunciation of English in the time of Shakespeare, from
| Shakespearean works.
| mcguire wrote:
| Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the
| night; What immortal hand or eye, Could
| frame thy fearful symmetry?
| kelipso wrote:
| If you're alluding to the pronunciation of symmetry, I'm
| pretty sure eye and symmetry was specifically meant not
| to rhyme in order to throw off the reader slightly. Guess
| that hints at how difficult recovery of pronunciation can
| be.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| But language itself and pronunciation of that language shifts
| over time. Probably better than hand transcription, but 7000
| years is a long time.
| endofreach wrote:
| "A dog walks into a bar and says, 'I cannot see a thing.
| I'll open this one.'"
| jamiek88 wrote:
| The old Sumerian joke?
|
| I love reading the posited explanations for that joke in
| academia and when it's posted randomly people usually
| have a stab at it too.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Hmm. Blind people called dogs, because they have to use
| their nose instead of their eyes?
|
| Not sure how that's funny though.
|
| Makes me wonder, dogs supposedly have evolved to be
| better companions of humans, and lateral gene transfer is
| a thing. I wonder of they had much poorer sight 7k years
| ago, or perhaps, a popular local breed did.
|
| (Naturally, to support my blind hypothesis, and walking
| into a bar instead of seeing it)
| rnhmjoj wrote:
| IIRC it's a pun on the "not seeing" verb being literally
| "having one's eyes closed".
| greenhearth wrote:
| An example of this may be the healing spells found in the
| Merseburg charms, which probably came from a common Indo-
| European origin somewhere in the Eurasian steppes.
| golergka wrote:
| Isn't that how ancient Greek texts (that are attributed to
| mythical Homer) have been passed down too?
| mrmetanoia wrote:
| yes, many cultures had/have oral traditions that include
| poetics. The Finnish "Kalevala," is another epic written down
| from an oral poem/song.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I'm 99% confident (I have no sources because I'm lazy) the
| written versions of the various bible books were originally
| orally passed-down stories as well. Weren't the stories
| about Jesus written down ~70 years after his passing?
| xienze wrote:
| That's clever and all, but how can you actually be sure the
| message was completely unchanged over 7000 years without an
| original written record? I get that special recitation tricks
| can make it harder to mess up, but I don't think you can
| definitively say the information never once changed.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| The Saraswati description in the RgVeda is not 7000 years old.
| The text itself is believed to be only around 3500 years old
| poulpy123 wrote:
| It's not the first time that I read hypothesis of Aboriginal oral
| traditions that stayed for much longer than anywhere else in the
| world. I wonder why it would be the case there and not elsewhere
| brabel wrote:
| Probably because they were some of the only ones to remain
| almost entirely isolated from the rest of the world while
| civilization was happening elsewhere. They never developed
| writing. The rest of the word was quite likely very similar to
| them before writing.
|
| The article mentions that because we have invented writing,
| passing down oral traditions became much less important to us,
| and hence our societies have "lost" some of the old tales,
| paradoxically. That's because while people write down things
| they think is important, they couldn't have known that unlike
| oral information (which adapts as language evolves, imperfectly
| but enough to keep the basic structure of the original), the
| means on which they write decay rapidly, and due to the speed
| at which language evolves (without modern technology, a few
| hundred years is enough for isolated regions to develop their
| own language branches), much of what was written in the distant
| past would become unintelligible even to people living in the
| area, even if it managed to survive (though modern techniques
| using computers seem to have made it easier to do so). Not to
| mention that in much of the world, civilizations were
| constantly being replaced by newer ones or migrating to
| different areas as their neighbors expanded and faded. Much of
| the ancient texts in any given area would make no sense to the
| new inhabitants, who would have no qualms about destroying
| everything (in fact, they probably burned everything down as
| soon as they conquered a new area).
|
| Basically, the written word turned out to be much less
| resilient than people probably believed it would be. I think we
| are making the same mistake with digital information. It may
| look "eternal" but try to find websites from the early
| internet, for example. Almost everything is disappearing
| quickly.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _Probably because they were some of the only ones to remain
| almost entirely isolated from the rest of the world while
| civilization was happening elsewhere._
|
| and, migrating farthest from Africa (can tell by red-shift :)
| they git the oldest branch of our oldest stories
| rhelz wrote:
| Kinda sad that the ritual was a way to curse somebody. 12,000
| years of hurting each other.
|
| Side Node: computer programing is kinda cool. It is a set of
| incantations which actually _does_ work.
|
| EDIT: Hello, all you down-voters and people who say I should read
| the article before commenting :-) I to, don't like it when people
| just start commenting without reading the article.
|
| I _also_ don 't like it when people take what a pop-sci writer
| too seriously. In this case, I was interested enough to read the
| original article in Nature, where it says this practice was for
| cursing (see quote at the end)
|
| Don't forget Gell-Man's Amnesia :-)
|
| "Howitt described how magic was employed to harm a victim using a
| ritual fire and a wooden object smeared or attached with a piece
| of human or animal fat (major sources of lipids): "In all these
| tribes a general, I may say almost an universal, prac- tice has
| been to procure some article belonging to the intended victim. A
| piece of his hair, some of his faeces, a bone picked by him and
| dropped, a shred of his opossum rug, or at the present time of
| his clothes, will suffice, or if nothing else can be got he may
| be watched until he is seen to spit, when his saliva is carefully
| picked up with a piece of wood and made use of for his
| destruction..."
| notjtrig wrote:
| >One ritual involved tying something that belonged to a sick
| person to the end of a throwing stick smeared in human or
| kangaroo fat. The stick was thrust into the ground before a
| small fire was lit underneath.
|
| >"The mulla-mullung would then chant the name of the sick
| person, and once the stick fell, the charm was complete," a
| Monash University statement said.
| armoredkitten wrote:
| Where are you getting that from? The article states it was a
| healing ritual -- the ritual was something done to someone who
| was _already_ sick. Presumably...to make them better. I have no
| idea where you got the idea that it was intended as a curse.
| martin293 wrote:
| That's not how I understood it. From the article:
|
| > "The mulla-mullung would then chant the name of the sick
| person, and once the stick fell, the charm was complete,"
|
| Which to me seems like a healing ritual.
| rhelz wrote:
| Alas, the writer of this pop-sci article got it wrong---see
| my edited OP which contains a quote from the original nature
| article.
| PsylentKnight wrote:
| Where did it say it's a curse? The first line says it's a
| healing ritual
| rhelz wrote:
| You have to go look up the Nature article which this po-sci
| article was written from.
| digging wrote:
| Well, I read an article once discussing the social good of
| cursing each other. The essence was this:
|
| Yes, it's an attempt to do harm. You're mad at someone, perhaps
| they wronged you, and you want something bad to happen to them.
| So ask a demon to spoil their grain, or to tear their clothes.
| (In other words, pray that entropy will happen - you can't go
| wrong!) If you didn't have demons you could ask for help and
| you were motivated to do them harm, you'd have to take matters
| into your own hands. By slandering them or harassing them or
| attacking them. Much better for society that we genuinely
| believe we can get our revenge by _not doing anything at all_.
|
| Struggling to find the article now though...
| rhelz wrote:
| This is a very profound point. We have to actually live with
| each other, and even for small groups, frictions arise. As
| the groups get larger and larger, friction intensifies. There
| has to be some way to blow off steam.
|
| Kind of like how instead of cities fighting each other, we
| have their sports teams fight each other in a ritualized,
| ersatz combat.
| mmaniac wrote:
| It's not a surprise to me that computer programs are so widely
| compared to magic spells, from SICP to SMT, but it remains a
| cool observation.
| cess11 wrote:
| Curses are what you do instead of beating someone with a stick.
| It's an outsourcing of justice to nature or spirits rather than
| taking it into your own hands.
| rhelz wrote:
| This is a very profound point. I suppose it's kind of like
| what the olympics are supposed to do: how about we all fight
| each other in a ritualized game, instead of with sticks and
| stones, strikes and drones.
| greenhearth wrote:
| It says nothing about cursing. Please read article first before
| commenting.
| rhelz wrote:
| I read the original Nature article, not the one written by an
| underpaid and overworked english major who wrote the popular
| article.
| greenhearth wrote:
| Then maybe you cite it? And what a shitty assumption to
| make of the writer, btw. And also, what the fuck kind of a
| condescending attitude to have for the English major? Maybe
| if you were an English major we wouldn't be posting all
| this nonsense right now.
| rhelz wrote:
| Mr./Ms. greenheart, whoever you are, life is too short to
| have hostile conversations.
|
| As far as a condescending attitude---I did say they were
| underpaid and overworked, didn't I? When you are
| overworked don't you start to make mistakes as well? I
| sure do.
| teddyh wrote:
| Computer programs do _nothing_. It's _computers_ , i.e. actual
| hardware, which work. We forget this at our peril.
| krapp wrote:
| If computer programs do nothing, why do we need them?
| teddyh wrote:
| A computer can run them, and thereby accomplish things.
| krapp wrote:
| So programs can affect the internal state of the
| computer, thus resulting in useful work being done which
| would otherwise not be done in the absence of said
| program. Which means programs do something, rather than
| nothing.
| teddyh wrote:
| This is like claiming books change the world. In one
| sense they do, but in a a bit more real sense it's
| _people reading books_ who change the world. A crucial
| distinction.
| rhelz wrote:
| _chuckle_ computer programs are the incantations we do to
| make computers do what we want. Quite a bit like shamans did
| incantations to get the world to do what they want. Only ours
| actually works. Or, it does if we can debug them.
| oigursh wrote:
| Interplanetary Generation Ships might have a chance?
| aadhavans wrote:
| Slightly off-topic, but I recently learned that the Aboriginals
| may have had contact with Tamil people from South India.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_bell?useskin=vector
| pradn wrote:
| There are a few examples of oral cultures ensuring perfect
| transmission across a large expanse of time.
|
| One example is the several different recitation styles used to
| memorize Sanskrit verses. These methods give memorizers multiple
| ways to remember a line, and also prevent errors like the
| inadvertent mixing of adjacent words (" euphonic combination").
| The "checksumming schemes" are far more elaborate than you'd
| imagine. [1] The result is perfect transmission of text and its
| pronunciation, including pitch accent.
|
| Another example is a "multi-party verification" scheme in some
| Aboriginal Australian cultures. "... storytelling among
| contemporary Aboriginal people can involve the deliberate
| tracking of teaching responsibilities. For example, a man teaches
| the stories of his country to his children. His son has his
| knowledge of those stories judged by his sister's children--for
| certain kin are explicitly tasked with ensuring that those
| stories are learned and recounted properly--and people take those
| responsibilities seriously. ... the 'owner-manager' relationship,
| requiring a story to be discussed explicitly across three
| generations of a patriline, constitutes a cross-generational
| mechanism which may be particularly successful at maximising
| precision in replication of a story across successive
| generations". [2]
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedic_chant
|
| [2]: "Aboriginal Memories of Inundation of the Australian Coast
| Dating from More than 7000 Years Ago", Patrick D. Nunn,
| https://doi.org/10.1080/00049182.2015.1077539
| abc_lisper wrote:
| I think the harsh conditions in Australia, where there a
| thousand ways to die, put the onus on truth and preservation of
| it in the oral tradition. Unlike most other cultures where it's
| kind of ok to gradually deviate from the truth. It is worth
| paying attention to the aborigine stories.They have also made
| astronomical observations that are pretty accurate to the date.
| https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/australias-indigenous-peopl...
|
| Singing/Ballads are also popular way of preserving information
| fidelity. Homer's works were based on ballads. We don't put
| premium on memory now, but before the invention of printing
| press, memory techniques were widely studied and used.
| kelipso wrote:
| It kind of feels like a local optima situation where they
| relied on memory so much that they didn't feel the need for
| writing. Either that or the fact that there was no writing
| for so long resulted in them specialising in memory
| techniques a lot.
| griffzhowl wrote:
| I've also heard it about the Buddhist tradition, that at least
| three groups of monks would memorize parts of the canon, and
| they would preiodically come together to chant it. If one group
| differed from the other two, they would know that's an error
| (at least to fairly high probability). This seems to have been
| an accurate method of transmission since independently written-
| down versions separated by centuries of oral tradition in
| Gandhara and Sri Lanka are very similar.
| roenxi wrote:
| There are worse schemes, but that is barely comparable to
| Vedic chanting.
|
| 3-pick-2 as a method is quite good but also quite vulnerable
| to a bunch of transmission errors beyond simple memory
| issues. Over long periods of time there is a higher risk of
| group think or status plays leading to wild changes.
|
| Of course the vedas aren't immune, but it is a lot more
| effort to get them wrong than just a few people thinking "we
| want to change the story". A group would have to be hugely
| motivated to successfully change the chant.
| swayvil wrote:
| When you understand it you call it "science" or "technology".
| When you don't understand it you call it "religion" or "ritual".
|
| These are smart people. Just like us. Time is money for them just
| like it is for us. They probably had a very good, practical
| reason to do this "ritual". As surely as tapping keyboards.
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| Incorrect. "Science" is "science" because it works in a
| reproducible fashion--same applies to "technology", "modern
| medicine", etc. We don't have to fully grok a _how_ a medicine
| works (example: SSRI anti-depressants) understand basically
| that it _does_ work. We do need a double-blind study however.
|
| "Rituals" need not have any efficacy at all. Surely burning a
| stick smeared in kangaroo fat does nothing to cure ailments.
| It's entirely possible the only reason is "this is what our
| tribe has always done." Certainly rituals create tribe cohesion
| and can have a placebo effect, but it is a fallacy to equate
| these things to science-based medicine. "Tapping keyboards" is
| not a "ritual"--we are not typing to appease the great silicon
| gods--we are doing it as means of communication and performing
| economically valuable work.
|
| Rituals which do seem to work, e.g. plant-based medicine, can
| be used as an "intuition pump" for scientific study. The fact
| that a plant has been used for thousands of years is a good
| sign that it may have some effect, but that effect still needs
| to be verified.
| dkarl wrote:
| I think you're assuming they're a lot smarter than us, not
| "just like us."
| swayvil wrote:
| Not smarter, just different. People in Germany speak German.
| I can't speak German. That doesn't make them smarter.
| userabchn wrote:
| In Indonesia there are 35k+ year old cave "paintings" of hand
| imprints, and apparently it is still a custom for some in the
| area to put their hand imprint on their house. It's probably in
| the same area where just today they announced finding the oldest
| cave painting: https://www.reuters.com/science/worlds-oldest-
| cave-painting-....
| jnurmine wrote:
| One thing that caught my eye was "both were coated in human or
| animal fat" and "throwing stick smeared in human or kangaroo
| fat".
|
| I mean the "human fat" part, that seemed strange.
|
| Getting human fat non-lethally is probably impossible using
| technology from 12000 years ago. If the fat was obtained from a
| human corpse, it would rule out at least burying the body. But
| still, wouldn't obtaining the fat from a non-buried corpse
| disturb the deceased on some religious-spiritual level?
|
| Or was it common to mutilate dead enemies or something like that?
|
| Edit: Oh, OK, I saw others asking the same question and replies
| which shed light on this.
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