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I wonder if we can trace any ancient myths to this stuff. It's easy to picture an ancient person taking some back to their village and showing off the "hair of

I wonder if we can trace any ancient myths to this stuff. It's easy to picture an ancient person taking some back to their village and showing off the "hair of a god" that is "impervious to fire" and then selling it for a few drachma. Not too much more on Wikipedia except that it occurs naturally worldwide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pele%27s_hair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pele%27s_hair

erulabs 4y ago
Is there a name for that field of study? I was reading about taking newly discovered comet orbit timings and correlating them to thousand-year-old Chinese astrology documents - fascinating. The entire idea of relating myths to geological/astrological events is obviously quite polluted (perhaps rightly so) by the biblical flood stuff, but even for the extremely critical there are a lot of fascinating links between newly discovered comets / supernovae / geological processes and ancient human mythology.
- kjkjadksj 4y ago
  The flood story is older than the bible
  - reaperducer 4y ago
    And, interestingly, exists in many cultures that had no knowledge of the Bible until (relatively) modern times. The Navajo, for example.
    - eloff 4y ago
      There were some epic floods at the end of the last ice age, pretty recently in human history. I wonder how many flood myths have their origin from that. Plus sea level rose 120 meters (~400ft). Humans like to live near the coast, imagine how many villages were flooded and abandoned. Civilization "started" pretty soon right after the last ice age - my theory is that's when it actually restarted after earlier attempts at civilization were washed away.
      - jl6 4y ago
        Washed away… or waiting underwater a few hundred meters off the modern coastline. Paleolithic fishing villages preserved just out of easy reach.
        eloff 4y ago
        There must be a wealth of fascinating sites, buried under sediment in 120 meters of water.
      - saalweachter 4y ago
        So in the cosmology of the Wheel of Time, people always find themselves in the Third Age. This is because there's always one Age before the current one, the Second Age, the Age of Legends, that is remembered as distorted legends of the truth of what happened. And then there's the Age before the Age of Legends, the First Age, which is the remnants of the legends the people in the Second Age told about what happened before them, which have now fade to myth that is almost unrecognizable from anything that happened in truth. Atlantis and the Garden of Eden would be examples of the latter -- stories that people in our distant past told about their distant past.
      - jjtheblunt 4y ago
        Not sure if you're familiar with the journalist Graham Hancock, who has been writing about this since the mid 90s, with similar conjecture. It's interesting. He's often maligned by various scientists, but repeatedly says he's just a journalist chasing pieces of a puzzle about what was forgotten back then with all the ice age transition climate changes.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    Just like societies so far apart all making pyramids. Aliens! is the only explanation of why such disparate societies all have such similarities. Anything you might think as rational to counter Aliens! is going to fall on deaf ears, at least once I stick my fingers in them ;-)
  - ASalazarMX 4y ago
    And so are trinities, heavenly parents/mothers, virgin birth, and of course, being the Son Of God. Once you learn about enough religions, you realize how cliché their tropes are. There are some interesting concepts in milder religions like Buddhism or Shinto, who are less about punishment and more about peace and harmony.
    - Eleison23 4y ago
      But moderns are jaded and blasé about stuff that's recycled. When the Gospels were written, the known world was fascinated and captivated with what was being preached. Because it was familiar, logical, and somewhat inevitable to them. To Jews it was revolutionary, and to Greeks it was transcendent. The inspired authors of the New Testament tugged on every heart string, checked every name, and copied every dank meme that mattered. This stuff is fulfillment of every prophecy. Of course it's cliché; that's a good thing!
      - tsol 4y ago
        We live in a society entirely molded by Abrahamic thought, so to a lot of people those lines of thinking feel obvious and natural when they were in actuality a progression of human thought. I've always thought it was funny when people say then don't need religion to know morality-- well yes that's true because the morality of the Abrahamic faiths has become the morality of our times(broad strokes ways). People take for granted that we don't follow the moral rules of Carthage, or ancient Greece. Or else we'd allow child sacrifice in the case of Carthage, or pederasty in the case of Greece.
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  Yes, it all falls under the fuzzily defined umbrellas of history/archaeology/anthropology. What you're talking about would fall under archaeoastronomy, a subfield of archaeology.

erulabs 4y ago

Is there a name for that field of study? I was reading about taking newly discovered comet orbit timings and correlating them to thousand-year-old Chinese astrology documents - fascinating. The entire idea of relating myths to geological/astrological events is obviously quite polluted (perhaps rightly so) by the biblical flood stuff, but even for the extremely critical there are a lot of fascinating links between newly discovered comets / supernovae / geological processes and ancient human mythology.

kjkjadksj 4y ago
The flood story is older than the bible
- reaperducer 4y ago
  And, interestingly, exists in many cultures that had no knowledge of the Bible until (relatively) modern times. The Navajo, for example.
  - eloff 4y ago
    There were some epic floods at the end of the last ice age, pretty recently in human history. I wonder how many flood myths have their origin from that. Plus sea level rose 120 meters (~400ft). Humans like to live near the coast, imagine how many villages were flooded and abandoned. Civilization "started" pretty soon right after the last ice age - my theory is that's when it actually restarted after earlier attempts at civilization were washed away.
    - jl6 4y ago
      Washed away… or waiting underwater a few hundred meters off the modern coastline. Paleolithic fishing villages preserved just out of easy reach.
      - eloff 4y ago
        There must be a wealth of fascinating sites, buried under sediment in 120 meters of water.
    - saalweachter 4y ago
      So in the cosmology of the Wheel of Time, people always find themselves in the Third Age. This is because there's always one Age before the current one, the Second Age, the Age of Legends, that is remembered as distorted legends of the truth of what happened. And then there's the Age before the Age of Legends, the First Age, which is the remnants of the legends the people in the Second Age told about what happened before them, which have now fade to myth that is almost unrecognizable from anything that happened in truth. Atlantis and the Garden of Eden would be examples of the latter -- stories that people in our distant past told about their distant past.
    - jjtheblunt 4y ago
      Not sure if you're familiar with the journalist Graham Hancock, who has been writing about this since the mid 90s, with similar conjecture. It's interesting. He's often maligned by various scientists, but repeatedly says he's just a journalist chasing pieces of a puzzle about what was forgotten back then with all the ice age transition climate changes.
- dylan604 4y ago
  Just like societies so far apart all making pyramids. Aliens! is the only explanation of why such disparate societies all have such similarities. Anything you might think as rational to counter Aliens! is going to fall on deaf ears, at least once I stick my fingers in them ;-)
- ASalazarMX 4y ago
  And so are trinities, heavenly parents/mothers, virgin birth, and of course, being the Son Of God. Once you learn about enough religions, you realize how cliché their tropes are. There are some interesting concepts in milder religions like Buddhism or Shinto, who are less about punishment and more about peace and harmony.
  - Eleison23 4y ago
    But moderns are jaded and blasé about stuff that's recycled. When the Gospels were written, the known world was fascinated and captivated with what was being preached. Because it was familiar, logical, and somewhat inevitable to them. To Jews it was revolutionary, and to Greeks it was transcendent. The inspired authors of the New Testament tugged on every heart string, checked every name, and copied every dank meme that mattered. This stuff is fulfillment of every prophecy. Of course it's cliché; that's a good thing!
    - tsol 4y ago
      We live in a society entirely molded by Abrahamic thought, so to a lot of people those lines of thinking feel obvious and natural when they were in actuality a progression of human thought. I've always thought it was funny when people say then don't need religion to know morality-- well yes that's true because the morality of the Abrahamic faiths has become the morality of our times(broad strokes ways). People take for granted that we don't follow the moral rules of Carthage, or ancient Greece. Or else we'd allow child sacrifice in the case of Carthage, or pederasty in the case of Greece.
AlotOfReading 4y ago
Yes, it all falls under the fuzzily defined umbrellas of history/archaeology/anthropology. What you're talking about would fall under archaeoastronomy, a subfield of archaeology.