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This story has the vibe of a TED talk, it's got scientists with different opinions, a grand scope and scale of tens of thousands of years, plus dogs, which we a
by owyn 10y ago
This story has the vibe of a TED talk, it's got scientists with different opinions, a grand scope and scale of tens of thousands of years, plus dogs, which we all love.
I really do think humans were doing interesting things tens of thousands of years ago. Some of it was written down, and some of it only survives through oral traditions but the ideas and actions of those people in that era still impact us today.
Some of those things are animals like the cat that is trying to sit on my laptop right now.
- trentmb 10y ago> like the cat that is trying to sit on my laptop right now Or the Pitt that informed me it's bed time by sitting on my head :P
- aaron695 10y ago> oral traditions People can't even be orally consistent over 100 years. There's no such thing as oral traditions that are anything more than 100's of years old. We can watch fiction stories that were written down evolve at the 100 year speed.
- agumonkey 10y agoI like to take in account the distortion as a meaningful information. It says things about what people perceived and desired somehow.
- hugh4 10y agoIf you like, but it doesn't tell us anything about what was happening ten thousand years ago, just what has happened in the meantime.
- a_bonobo 10y agoThere are some cool overlaps between Australian aboriginal oral traditions and past events: https://theconversation.com/finding-meteorite-impacts-in-aboriginal-oral-tradition-38052 https://theconversation.com/finding-meteorite-impacts-in-abo...
- hugh4 10y agoMaybe, but I'm not convinced that they're anything other than some lucky coincidences. >He said his people were forbidden from going near the craters, as that was where the fire-devil ran down from the sun and set the land ablaze, killing people and forming the giant holes. Australian Aboriginal mythology attributes every geographical landmark to the action of some kind of spirit in the dreamtime. These rocks are three sisters who ran away from their family and were turned to stone. This river was formed by a giant snake. The vast majority of the stories are, of course, just made-up guesses, so there's a pretty uphill battle to make a convincing case that one isn't. A crater, well, it looks like what you get when you throw a rock into the sand, so that part of the myth is an obvious guess, that it was caused by some big force acting from above.
- owyn 10y agoThere are definitely oral traditions that are very old. Yes stories evolve, but there is a core that makes them unique, which can be traced almost like DNA. There is real evidence that a lot of fairy tales are thousands of years old. http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/01/on-the-origin-of-stories/424629/ http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/01/on-the-or...