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'The Invention of Prehistory' Review: Facing Deep Time
- ugur2nd 2y agoThis reminded me of the French movie "la guerre de feu" about the people who found fire in the cave period. The interesting part of the movie was not in French. It's not in English either. There are no words in the movie. You should watch it.
- ysofunny 2y agoi just saw this video yesterday: "The Magic Of 80s Fantasy Movies Before The Lord of the Rings | Top 10 Most Underrated Fantasy Movies" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLarGiXN864 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLarGiXN864 the movie you speak of is the first on the list: Quest for Fire (1981)
- urubu 2y agoThe English title is 'Quest for Fire'. There are actually two distinct languages (a kind of Proto-Proto-Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Proto-Proto-Uralic) spoken in the movie, created by Anthony Burgess. He later wrote an essay (the title of which escapes me ATM) about the thinking behind it. Some background: https://www.anthonyburgess.org/quest-for-fire/about-quest-for-fire/ https://www.anthonyburgess.org/quest-for-fire/about-quest-fo...
- eespark 2y agoThis might possibly be the essay you refer to: https://archive.is/20240311220449/https://www.nytimes.com/1981/11/15/magazine/creating-a-language-for-primitive-man.html https://archive.is/20240311220449/https://www.nytimes.com/19...
- 082349872349872 2y ago> a kind of ancient taboo on certain words, like fire, that they are not spoken directly but instead connected with other, similar sources; it is like calling the toilet or jakes the bathroom I find it amusing that we can reconstruct that PIE speakers had a verb for "to get high", but we can't reconstruct their noun for "bear", because it was taboo: speaking of the bear was like speaking of the devil, and so all we know are all the different ways the different languages chose to talk about the bear without saying its name.
- nobodyandproud 2y agoOn prehistory: It’s strange and a bit sad to me that we have zero cultural memory of neanderthals. All we have left is modern speculation and imagination.
- goatlover 2y agoHow far back do you think human cultural memory extends? The earliest writings would be preserving stories known at the time, but how far back did those stories go in prehuman history? I'm guessing most of prehistory was forgotten even before you get to neanderthals.
- jbotz 2y agoProbably, but there is some evidence that Australian aboriginal oral traditions have preserved information for at least 16,000 years or so, i.e. well into the last ice age. IIRC there are two specific instances, one involving astronomical observations that can be dated to about that long ago, and another involving geography, where the stories speak of an area of land as it would have appeared when sea levels where much lower during the ice age.
- flir 2y agohttps://www.science.org/content/article/aboriginal-tale-ancient-volcano-oldest-story-ever-told https://www.science.org/content/article/aboriginal-tale-anci... Notable because it's so old, but it gives you an upper bound.
- helpfulmandrill 2y agoI have sometimes wondered if ideas about dwarves, gnomes, trolls or other vaguely human-shaped mythical creatures might have originated in encounters with other, now-extinct human species.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 2y agoThe same is true of greek gods. Some of them, like Zeus, were probably real people that existed a long time ago
- BillSaysThis 2y agoUngated: https://archive.is/PdX5d https://archive.is/PdX5d