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As a native to south-western australia, this all reads pretty accurate. The animal certainly is alive and strong in hearts and minds, if not real life. There's

As a native to south-western australia, this all reads pretty accurate. The animal certainly is alive and strong in hearts and minds, if not real life. There's all the usual local country-town big-creature legends, and a bit of 50-year-old evidence helps as well. The idea of 'monsters' of all kinds have always fascinated me. As the article mentions, it's only in the extremely recent past (last couple of hundred years) that extinction was recognised as even something that was possible. We normally think of extinct megafauna as something that existed in prehistoric times - literally, before we invented writing, but the word here is often by the layman used to mean "before we invented conscious thought". Many Aboriginal Dreamtime stories (so, within the last 80k years) are thought to involve now-extinct megafauna, other large creatures are known to have gone extinct only in the last 2-3000 years, untold small species have disappeared in the last ~200 years... it's hardly surprising that humans are such a superstitious bunch, considering we're only ~8 generations away from huddling in a village, frightened of the wolves and anything else that goes bump in the night. >Tasmania, which is sometimes said to hang beneath Australia like a green jewel ...we don't say that. I don't think even Tasmanians say that. They're too busy trying to convince everyone not avoid the place so they can enjoy it.

jacobush 8y ago
Dreamtime stories are awesome. Some apparently (was on HN a while back) describe maps of areas which are now under sea. That reliably dates the stories millennia back in time. Unchanged. Talk about error resistant coding.
- danieltillett 8y ago
  I am not too sure about this. Every "dreamtime" story I have investigated has turned out to be so vague it could be anything or was "discovered" in very recent times. More fundamentally there is no reason to think that Australian Aboriginal oral history is anymore reliable than it is anywhere else in the world (i.e. not at all after a few generations).
  - jacobush 8y ago
    I don't know but it sounded convincing to me. Maybe there is more to stories in other parts of the world too, but they couldn't be cross referenced yet. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/sep/16/indigenous-australian-storytelling-records-sea-level-rises-over-millenia https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/sep/16/indig...
    - danieltillett 8y ago
      This is not exactly convincing. They admit that everywhere else in the world this doesn't happen, but somehow it happens in Australia. Given all these stories have appeared in recent time I am not convinced. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
      - Sevrene 8y ago
        Aboriginals passed down their history and culture orally, so you can't really expect them to provide evidence other than their retelling. I don't think anyone is saying that the Dreamtime stories are 100% true, but it was probably influenced by something. The question is how much is story, and how much is fact? The tree sisters story [1] (which was actually taught in schools) is apparently completely fake and the modern highway network apparently resembles the way aboriginals navigated Australia too [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(Australia)#Aboriginal_Legend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(Australia)#Abor... [2] https://theconversation.com/how-ancient-aboriginal-star-maps-have-shaped-australias-highway-network-55952 https://theconversation.com/how-ancient-aboriginal-star-maps...
        danieltillett 8y ago
        They are just stories like every other culture in the world has and are as unreliable as a form of history as everyone else's oral histories (myths). Aboriginal people are just people and they don't have some magically ability that allows information to be passed down via oral transmission through 300 generations. Edit. The huge diversity of Aboriginal languages is proof that information was not transmitted accurately. If you can't even preserve the word for "foot" (just an example) down 300 generations how can it be expected that a story of even less practical utility and far greater complexity would be maintained accurately. The whole idea is ludicrous.
LeifCarrotson 8y ago
> Considering we're only 8 generations away from huddling in a village, frightened of the wolves and anything that goes bump in the night. I think you severely underestimate our predecessors. They were not feral beasts, they were almost exactly the same animals as you and I, minus some education and technology. 8 generations ago (25? 30 years each?), the Age of Exploration in which western European powers sent huge sailing ships, (more than a hundred feet long with dozens or hundreds of cannons) around the world to map and claim unknown lands was drawing to a close, because they were running out of unknown lands. London was a city of more than half a million people, importing goods from the furthest corners of the empire, with huge textile mills and blast furnaces and other factories ramping up,the industrial revolution. They weren't huddling in the mud and dark, they were sitting around candles and oil lamps, near streets lit with oil from whales they killed. Even 80 generations or more ago the Romans, Greeks, Babylonians and Egyptians were dealing with problems of empire governance not wolf packs. (To say nothing of the Chinese, Japanese, or Mayan civilizations which I know less about.) They may have been superstitious, but they were definitely homo sapiens.
- drb91 8y ago
  Well I'm still terrified of wolves, so I don't get your point. Did you misread the parent comment? Fear isn't dictated by technology. We still fear things that can't really hurt us easily.
simonrobb 8y ago
>Tasmania, which is sometimes said to hang beneath Australia like a green jewel Tasmanian here - I have never heard this either, and have most definitely never said it.

jacobush 8y ago

Dreamtime stories are awesome. Some apparently (was on HN a while back) describe maps of areas which are now under sea. That reliably dates the stories millennia back in time. Unchanged. Talk about error resistant coding.

danieltillett 8y ago
I am not too sure about this. Every "dreamtime" story I have investigated has turned out to be so vague it could be anything or was "discovered" in very recent times. More fundamentally there is no reason to think that Australian Aboriginal oral history is anymore reliable than it is anywhere else in the world (i.e. not at all after a few generations).
- jacobush 8y ago
  I don't know but it sounded convincing to me. Maybe there is more to stories in other parts of the world too, but they couldn't be cross referenced yet. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/sep/16/indigenous-australian-storytelling-records-sea-level-rises-over-millenia https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/sep/16/indig...
  - danieltillett 8y ago
    This is not exactly convincing. They admit that everywhere else in the world this doesn't happen, but somehow it happens in Australia. Given all these stories have appeared in recent time I am not convinced. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
    - Sevrene 8y ago
      Aboriginals passed down their history and culture orally, so you can't really expect them to provide evidence other than their retelling. I don't think anyone is saying that the Dreamtime stories are 100% true, but it was probably influenced by something. The question is how much is story, and how much is fact? The tree sisters story [1] (which was actually taught in schools) is apparently completely fake and the modern highway network apparently resembles the way aboriginals navigated Australia too [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(Australia)#Aboriginal_Legend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(Australia)#Abor... [2] https://theconversation.com/how-ancient-aboriginal-star-maps-have-shaped-australias-highway-network-55952 https://theconversation.com/how-ancient-aboriginal-star-maps...
      - danieltillett 8y ago
        They are just stories like every other culture in the world has and are as unreliable as a form of history as everyone else's oral histories (myths). Aboriginal people are just people and they don't have some magically ability that allows information to be passed down via oral transmission through 300 generations. Edit. The huge diversity of Aboriginal languages is proof that information was not transmitted accurately. If you can't even preserve the word for "foot" (just an example) down 300 generations how can it be expected that a story of even less practical utility and far greater complexity would be maintained accurately. The whole idea is ludicrous.

LeifCarrotson 8y ago

> Considering we're only 8 generations away from huddling in a village, frightened of the wolves and anything that goes bump in the night. I think you severely underestimate our predecessors. They were not feral beasts, they were almost exactly the same animals as you and I, minus some education and technology. 8 generations ago (25? 30 years each?), the Age of Exploration in which western European powers sent huge sailing ships, (more than a hundred feet long with dozens or hundreds of cannons) around the world to map and claim unknown lands was drawing to a close, because they were running out of unknown lands. London was a city of more than half a million people, importing goods from the furthest corners of the empire, with huge textile mills and blast furnaces and other factories ramping up,the industrial revolution. They weren't huddling in the mud and dark, they were sitting around candles and oil lamps, near streets lit with oil from whales they killed. Even 80 generations or more ago the Romans, Greeks, Babylonians and Egyptians were dealing with problems of empire governance not wolf packs. (To say nothing of the Chinese, Japanese, or Mayan civilizations which I know less about.) They may have been superstitious, but they were definitely homo sapiens.

drb91 8y ago
Well I'm still terrified of wolves, so I don't get your point. Did you misread the parent comment? Fear isn't dictated by technology. We still fear things that can't really hurt us easily.

simonrobb 8y ago

>Tasmania, which is sometimes said to hang beneath Australia like a green jewel Tasmanian here - I have never heard this either, and have most definitely never said it.