4 ms·

What's fascinating is that it's apparent from these stories that Aboriginal Australians never figured how seeds work, or the link between pregnancy and sex.

defrost 3y ago
By all means do please expand on your reasoning here. It's by no means apparent to all how you arrived at your conclusion, particularly in light of evidence to the contrary.
- jojobas 3y ago
  What evidence to the contrary? There's no counterpart to the Genesis myth, nothing like "A went in unto B and she conceived". Children were brought by Rainbow Serpent or some such. Native Australians were on the brink of hunger a lot of the time, so they were only fertile during the seasons of abundant food. All known Aboriginal practices of growing food involving moving/planting entire plants, not seeds.
  - Perenti 3y ago
    CPY people in central Australia practice subincision as a manhood ritual. In order to concieve they tie the penis together with their wives' hair. They only did/do this in times of plenty though. Otherwise the subincision means semen just dribbles down the scrotum, and not into the wife. Seems they knew what went where. The spirit of a new embryo came from a waterhole, with the help of the Rainbow Serpent. But they knew where babies came from. Spitting/throwing seeds of fruit on the ground is a lot like planting them. I know of no evidence that Indigenous Australians were so hungry that they were only sporadically fertile. Source?
    - jojobas 3y ago
      For one, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12337490/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12337490/. There's plenty of research on mythology of various tribes regarding the matter. Some had various suspicions and practices such as above, none had a consistent viewpoint of fatherhood, semen, conception etc comparable to that of people who observed domesticated animals.
      - defrost 3y ago
        Interesting that you link to one of Gillian's papers, I met her in the 1980s. From the full paper of the link you gave, regarding traditional method of abortion in Southern Arnhem Land women: Voluntary controls are of course an important issue in any discussion of overall fertility. A detailed survey of the available information on contraception, abortion and infanticide among Aborigines has revealed that Aboriginal women saw children as a contingent good (Cowlishaw 1979). First there were widespread attempts at contraception by taking medicine, performing rituals and avoiding coitus. Which poses the question, why avoid coitus if there is (as you claim) no understanding of fatherhood and conception.
      - Perenti 3y ago
        Hmmm... only read the abstract, but the idea that indigenous australians _in general_ were starving pre-colonisation is demonstrably false, just consider the eel farms and factories in Victoria
        defrost 3y ago
        I wonder if they read the paper either, it talks of many things, diet, work levels, nutritional levels, etc. It does include the extract: It is the accepted view that huntergatherers in general and Australian Aborigines in particular were neither undernourished nor overworked. But it is necessary to know more of the balance between work expenditure and nourishment, and the particular qualities of the diet that may have some bearing on fertility. (Robson, 1975:51)
        jojobas 3y ago
        How do you think living in balance with the environment looks? It's essentially food equilibrium, as everywhere else in nature. Dry year = death. Also they were eel traps, not farms or factories, were only available to a miniscule fraction of the tribes and they still were in equilibrium with eel supply. Agricultural Revolution is not called revolution for nothing, that's basically when human population started growing after millennia of stability caused by equilibrium with food supply (aka hunger).
  - defrost 3y ago
    All known? That's a broad sweeping statement you'd be hard pressed to prove. On the flip side you could watch old episodes of, say, Bush Tucker Man and pay attention to the parts in which aboriginal women talk about seeds and putting them back to grow more plants. You might also hit up the archives for old Malcolm Douglas epiosodes. There are numerous articles such as, https://www.science.org/content/article/indigenous-people-shaped-australias-curious-geography-plants https://www.science.org/content/article/indigenous-people-sh..., that talk about seeds and aboriginal travels. Or you could go direct to the source and talk to people that never lost connection to the land such as the Birriliburu Rangers, the last of the Pintupi Nine, or any number of communities in the Kimberley. You come across as very ill informed.
    - ungamedplayer 3y ago
      You just reminded me that Malcom had passed away. Put a melancholy tint on my day. Both of these personalities were the bread and butter of my teenage tv time.
    - jojobas 3y ago
      Next you bring up some Bruce Pascoe stories about fields of grain and permanent dwellings. Regarding the black bean trees, if this was true, early European explorers would have seen vast orchards of said trees, along with many food-producing ones. What they saw instead was complete refusal to help farm wheat that Aboriginals quickly learned to appreciate, even in the face of famine. There's no shame in being a hunter gatherer who hasn't yet discovered a lot about nature. We've all been there.
      - defrost 3y ago
        Next you'll be quoting Quadrant as authorative. FWiW I've never read or met Pascoe. The part you've skipped over and not addressed is direct video recording of aboriginal people living traditional lifestyles talking about propagating and spreading plants. Especially Bush Tucker Man which was a public facing documentary series running alongside the Australian Army recording traditional food practices and sources for the purposes of keeping soldiers alive in the northern territories of Australia. This directly contradicts your position that aboriginal people didn't know what seeds did. How you make such a statement about people that spent several tens of thousands of years in a place watching plants and animals and shaping the environment about them suggest you've not thought this through and likely never lived in aboriginal communities.
  - h0l0cube 3y ago
    It's worth giving Dark Emu a (critical) read. It gathers numerous primary sources from early explorers which describe practices of cooperative harvesting, cultivation, and land management between indigenous tribes in Australia. They also had totemic moieties which governed who could conceive together within and between tribes, ostensibly to avoid in-breeding. The agricultural revolution that spawned from the Indus valley civilisations were dependent on beasts of burden which were lacking in Australia. Though maybe with time something similar might have happened in Australia to, as it did in the Incan empire before it was destroyed by the conquistadors
    - jojobas 3y ago
      Dark Emu was caught misrepresenting these primary sources. Pascoe is a conman.
      - h0l0cube 3y ago
        The book has garnered some criticism from experts, which is expected for conjectures where most of the evidence has been destroyed, but I don't believe there's been a complete refutation of his ideas > Pascoe is a conman. As per this thread, you've made a lot of claims without sufficient back up, seem somewhat intransigent, and hold very one-sided beliefs. I think a little self-reflection is warranted, especially if your motivation is to convince people you have beyond a superficial understanding on these matters.
        jojobas 3y ago
        For a lot of Pascoe's claim there's direct contradicting evidence, see Keen, Walshe and Sutton. He deliberately forged a lot of his evidence, such as trying to pass Torres Strait huts for mainland Australian, all to boost his name recognition and his Aboriginal food-themed business, therefore conman.
        h0l0cube 3y ago
        > see Keen, Walshe and Sutton Have you seen them? I won't pretend to have read Walshe and Sutton, but from my cursory understanding of their criticism it's that Pascoe has conflated all indigenous tribes across the continent (not all engage directly in planting), and they used means of cultivating the land that were lower effort (harnessing fire and self-seeding) but still effective (which is much in sympathy with Pascoe's thesis). It certainly doesn't provide evidence that indigenous people didn't understand seeds
  - helpfulContrib 3y ago
    [dead]
LeonB 3y ago
“ German folklore held that storks found babies in caves or marshes and brought them to households in a basket on their backs or held in their beaks. These caves contained adebarsteine or "stork stones". The babies would then be given to the mother or dropped down the chimney. Households would notify when they wanted children by placing sweets for the stork on the window sill” Lacking any further evidence, we must conclude that German people must not know the link between sex and reproduction. (To be clear — your statement is a very outdated belief)
ignoranimus323 3y ago
[flagged]

defrost 3y ago

By all means do please expand on your reasoning here. It's by no means apparent to all how you arrived at your conclusion, particularly in light of evidence to the contrary.

jojobas 3y ago
What evidence to the contrary? There's no counterpart to the Genesis myth, nothing like "A went in unto B and she conceived". Children were brought by Rainbow Serpent or some such. Native Australians were on the brink of hunger a lot of the time, so they were only fertile during the seasons of abundant food. All known Aboriginal practices of growing food involving moving/planting entire plants, not seeds.
- Perenti 3y ago
  CPY people in central Australia practice subincision as a manhood ritual. In order to concieve they tie the penis together with their wives' hair. They only did/do this in times of plenty though. Otherwise the subincision means semen just dribbles down the scrotum, and not into the wife. Seems they knew what went where. The spirit of a new embryo came from a waterhole, with the help of the Rainbow Serpent. But they knew where babies came from. Spitting/throwing seeds of fruit on the ground is a lot like planting them. I know of no evidence that Indigenous Australians were so hungry that they were only sporadically fertile. Source?
  - jojobas 3y ago
    For one, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12337490/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12337490/. There's plenty of research on mythology of various tribes regarding the matter. Some had various suspicions and practices such as above, none had a consistent viewpoint of fatherhood, semen, conception etc comparable to that of people who observed domesticated animals.
    - defrost 3y ago
      Interesting that you link to one of Gillian's papers, I met her in the 1980s. From the full paper of the link you gave, regarding traditional method of abortion in Southern Arnhem Land women: Voluntary controls are of course an important issue in any discussion of overall fertility. A detailed survey of the available information on contraception, abortion and infanticide among Aborigines has revealed that Aboriginal women saw children as a contingent good (Cowlishaw 1979). First there were widespread attempts at contraception by taking medicine, performing rituals and avoiding coitus. Which poses the question, why avoid coitus if there is (as you claim) no understanding of fatherhood and conception.
    - Perenti 3y ago
      Hmmm... only read the abstract, but the idea that indigenous australians _in general_ were starving pre-colonisation is demonstrably false, just consider the eel farms and factories in Victoria
      - defrost 3y ago
        I wonder if they read the paper either, it talks of many things, diet, work levels, nutritional levels, etc. It does include the extract: It is the accepted view that huntergatherers in general and Australian Aborigines in particular were neither undernourished nor overworked. But it is necessary to know more of the balance between work expenditure and nourishment, and the particular qualities of the diet that may have some bearing on fertility. (Robson, 1975:51)
      - jojobas 3y ago
        How do you think living in balance with the environment looks? It's essentially food equilibrium, as everywhere else in nature. Dry year = death. Also they were eel traps, not farms or factories, were only available to a miniscule fraction of the tribes and they still were in equilibrium with eel supply. Agricultural Revolution is not called revolution for nothing, that's basically when human population started growing after millennia of stability caused by equilibrium with food supply (aka hunger).
- defrost 3y ago
  All known? That's a broad sweeping statement you'd be hard pressed to prove. On the flip side you could watch old episodes of, say, Bush Tucker Man and pay attention to the parts in which aboriginal women talk about seeds and putting them back to grow more plants. You might also hit up the archives for old Malcolm Douglas epiosodes. There are numerous articles such as, https://www.science.org/content/article/indigenous-people-shaped-australias-curious-geography-plants https://www.science.org/content/article/indigenous-people-sh..., that talk about seeds and aboriginal travels. Or you could go direct to the source and talk to people that never lost connection to the land such as the Birriliburu Rangers, the last of the Pintupi Nine, or any number of communities in the Kimberley. You come across as very ill informed.
  - ungamedplayer 3y ago
    You just reminded me that Malcom had passed away. Put a melancholy tint on my day. Both of these personalities were the bread and butter of my teenage tv time.
  - jojobas 3y ago
    Next you bring up some Bruce Pascoe stories about fields of grain and permanent dwellings. Regarding the black bean trees, if this was true, early European explorers would have seen vast orchards of said trees, along with many food-producing ones. What they saw instead was complete refusal to help farm wheat that Aboriginals quickly learned to appreciate, even in the face of famine. There's no shame in being a hunter gatherer who hasn't yet discovered a lot about nature. We've all been there.
    - defrost 3y ago
      Next you'll be quoting Quadrant as authorative. FWiW I've never read or met Pascoe. The part you've skipped over and not addressed is direct video recording of aboriginal people living traditional lifestyles talking about propagating and spreading plants. Especially Bush Tucker Man which was a public facing documentary series running alongside the Australian Army recording traditional food practices and sources for the purposes of keeping soldiers alive in the northern territories of Australia. This directly contradicts your position that aboriginal people didn't know what seeds did. How you make such a statement about people that spent several tens of thousands of years in a place watching plants and animals and shaping the environment about them suggest you've not thought this through and likely never lived in aboriginal communities.
- h0l0cube 3y ago
  It's worth giving Dark Emu a (critical) read. It gathers numerous primary sources from early explorers which describe practices of cooperative harvesting, cultivation, and land management between indigenous tribes in Australia. They also had totemic moieties which governed who could conceive together within and between tribes, ostensibly to avoid in-breeding. The agricultural revolution that spawned from the Indus valley civilisations were dependent on beasts of burden which were lacking in Australia. Though maybe with time something similar might have happened in Australia to, as it did in the Incan empire before it was destroyed by the conquistadors
  - jojobas 3y ago
    Dark Emu was caught misrepresenting these primary sources. Pascoe is a conman.
    - h0l0cube 3y ago
      The book has garnered some criticism from experts, which is expected for conjectures where most of the evidence has been destroyed, but I don't believe there's been a complete refutation of his ideas > Pascoe is a conman. As per this thread, you've made a lot of claims without sufficient back up, seem somewhat intransigent, and hold very one-sided beliefs. I think a little self-reflection is warranted, especially if your motivation is to convince people you have beyond a superficial understanding on these matters.
      - jojobas 3y ago
        For a lot of Pascoe's claim there's direct contradicting evidence, see Keen, Walshe and Sutton. He deliberately forged a lot of his evidence, such as trying to pass Torres Strait huts for mainland Australian, all to boost his name recognition and his Aboriginal food-themed business, therefore conman.
        h0l0cube 3y ago
        > see Keen, Walshe and Sutton Have you seen them? I won't pretend to have read Walshe and Sutton, but from my cursory understanding of their criticism it's that Pascoe has conflated all indigenous tribes across the continent (not all engage directly in planting), and they used means of cultivating the land that were lower effort (harnessing fire and self-seeding) but still effective (which is much in sympathy with Pascoe's thesis). It certainly doesn't provide evidence that indigenous people didn't understand seeds
- helpfulContrib 3y ago
  [dead]

LeonB 3y ago

“ German folklore held that storks found babies in caves or marshes and brought them to households in a basket on their backs or held in their beaks. These caves contained adebarsteine or "stork stones". The babies would then be given to the mother or dropped down the chimney. Households would notify when they wanted children by placing sweets for the stork on the window sill” Lacking any further evidence, we must conclude that German people must not know the link between sex and reproduction. (To be clear — your statement is a very outdated belief)

ignoranimus323 3y ago

[flagged]