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I heard of a Tibetan legend, of the founding of the Tibetan people came when a monkey met an ogress. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/teaching

by hosh 7y ago

I heard of a Tibetan legend, of the founding of the Tibetan people came when a monkey met an ogress. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/teaching-evolution-to-tibetan-monks/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/teaching-e... Perhaps there is a seed of truth to that after all.

ip26 7y ago
How long can legend persist, though? Denisovans are speculated to have existed no more recently than 15,000 years ago- in New Guinea, at that. That's at minimum 700 generations ago. This jaw find is 8,000 or more generations ago.
- DrBazza 7y ago
  The Australian Aboriginal oral histories are believed to be potentially accurate to 7000 years or so. There are a lot of links. This is the one I'm referencing: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-16/research-gives-merit-to-accuracy-of-aboriginal-storytelling/6861614 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-16/research-gives-merit-...
- davidw 7y ago
  Here in Oregon, there are native legends that reference the eruption of Mt Mazama (which is now Crater Lake), some 7500 years ago.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    Suppose a group has 1000 random legends. What are the odds that one of them might sort of match a distant event? It could be like those headlines "Psychic Predicted The Last 3 Elections".
    - hosh 7y ago
      The Tibetan origin legend is not random, has been around for a long time, and is an important part of the Buddhist and Bon traditions within Tibet. The “monkey” is referencing the same race of hominid as the legendary Hanuman in Hindu myths. The idea here passed down in the Tibetan tradition is that the wild race of “ogres” have been civilized by noble influences. So while random legends might be that, there may be other characteristics of legends that are not being accounted for with a purely random selection.
      - WalterBright 7y ago
        People used a similar argument to say that the eye could not have evolved from random mutations. Perhaps you underestimate the time scale involved here?
        hosh 7y ago
        I am not using the same argument. I am not arguing that something must be true by disproving something. I think you misundersand what I am suggesting here. I am suggesting that there may be a legend that was somehow carried from the days that the Denisovians (ogress) mated with Homo Sapiens (monkey), so that that the modern-day Tibetans carried those genes for living in high altitudes. That mechanism for passing on those genes are exactly what the the article is suggesting. At no point am I saying that these legends were somehow the cause. I am not sure how you got to that idea.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  > How long can legend persist, though? This isn't the right question. There's nothing stopping a legend from persisting indefinitely. But the information about where a legend came from or how old it might be will become unrecoverable. As a minor digression, consider the related question "how long can a word persist in a language?". We can trace languages back several thousand years. Many words don't go back that far. Many words do go back that far, but have changed significantly in form, meaning, or both. Some words have, by coincidence, been preserved almost exactly in both form and meaning -- in at least one descendant language. There's no reason not to expect the same pattern to hold at larger timescales... but we can't reconstruct ancestor languages at those larger timescales, so there's no way to evaluate the claim directly. Back in the realm of legends, we know that the proto-Indo-Europeans had a legend of a warrior who kills his own son. The Irish reflex of this legend is the story of Cuchulainn, and the Greek reflex is the story of Hercules. These two stories have some suggestive similarities, but in isolation it is not obvious that they are the same story. In particular, the manner in which each kills his own son is totally different. We are nevertheless confident of the relationship between the legends because we can see the same legend occurring in other Indo-European traditions. So in summary: 1. A cultural feature may persist for pretty much any length of time. 2. However, after a while it becomes impossible to determine how long the feature has been in place for. 3. And very old features are likely to have mutated in some ways; without points of comparison, it is not possible to tell which aspects of something are old and which are new.
- neffy 7y ago
  Multiple cultures have legends of great floods wiping out civilisation... for which one candidate common ur-event is the sudden sea rises at the end of the last glacial period. Which if true would put legend persistence at at least 12,000 years.

by hosh 7y ago

ip26 7y ago

How long can legend persist, though? Denisovans are speculated to have existed no more recently than 15,000 years ago- in New Guinea, at that. That's at minimum 700 generations ago. This jaw find is 8,000 or more generations ago.

DrBazza 7y ago
The Australian Aboriginal oral histories are believed to be potentially accurate to 7000 years or so. There are a lot of links. This is the one I'm referencing: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-16/research-gives-merit-to-accuracy-of-aboriginal-storytelling/6861614 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-16/research-gives-merit-...
davidw 7y ago
Here in Oregon, there are native legends that reference the eruption of Mt Mazama (which is now Crater Lake), some 7500 years ago.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  Suppose a group has 1000 random legends. What are the odds that one of them might sort of match a distant event? It could be like those headlines "Psychic Predicted The Last 3 Elections".
  - hosh 7y ago
    The Tibetan origin legend is not random, has been around for a long time, and is an important part of the Buddhist and Bon traditions within Tibet. The “monkey” is referencing the same race of hominid as the legendary Hanuman in Hindu myths. The idea here passed down in the Tibetan tradition is that the wild race of “ogres” have been civilized by noble influences. So while random legends might be that, there may be other characteristics of legends that are not being accounted for with a purely random selection.
    - WalterBright 7y ago
      People used a similar argument to say that the eye could not have evolved from random mutations. Perhaps you underestimate the time scale involved here?
      - hosh 7y ago
        I am not using the same argument. I am not arguing that something must be true by disproving something. I think you misundersand what I am suggesting here. I am suggesting that there may be a legend that was somehow carried from the days that the Denisovians (ogress) mated with Homo Sapiens (monkey), so that that the modern-day Tibetans carried those genes for living in high altitudes. That mechanism for passing on those genes are exactly what the the article is suggesting. At no point am I saying that these legends were somehow the cause. I am not sure how you got to that idea.
thaumasiotes 7y ago
> How long can legend persist, though? This isn't the right question. There's nothing stopping a legend from persisting indefinitely. But the information about where a legend came from or how old it might be will become unrecoverable. As a minor digression, consider the related question "how long can a word persist in a language?". We can trace languages back several thousand years. Many words don't go back that far. Many words do go back that far, but have changed significantly in form, meaning, or both. Some words have, by coincidence, been preserved almost exactly in both form and meaning -- in at least one descendant language. There's no reason not to expect the same pattern to hold at larger timescales... but we can't reconstruct ancestor languages at those larger timescales, so there's no way to evaluate the claim directly. Back in the realm of legends, we know that the proto-Indo-Europeans had a legend of a warrior who kills his own son. The Irish reflex of this legend is the story of Cuchulainn, and the Greek reflex is the story of Hercules. These two stories have some suggestive similarities, but in isolation it is not obvious that they are the same story. In particular, the manner in which each kills his own son is totally different. We are nevertheless confident of the relationship between the legends because we can see the same legend occurring in other Indo-European traditions. So in summary: 1. A cultural feature may persist for pretty much any length of time. 2. However, after a while it becomes impossible to determine how long the feature has been in place for. 3. And very old features are likely to have mutated in some ways; without points of comparison, it is not possible to tell which aspects of something are old and which are new.
neffy 7y ago
Multiple cultures have legends of great floods wiping out civilisation... for which one candidate common ur-event is the sudden sea rises at the end of the last glacial period. Which if true would put legend persistence at at least 12,000 years.