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I don't find this at all surprising. Oral histories are, after all, just a multi-generational game of telephone and many must, necessarily, contain a kernel of

• dalke 11y ago
  But what is the kernel? Is the Mesopotamian flood myth, which lead to the myth of Noah's flood, really from the Black Sea deluge? Or from one of the other proposed sources listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_myth#Claims_of_historicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_myth#Claims_of_historici... ? What is the kernel in the Zuni creation myth, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuni_mythology#Creation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuni_mythology#Creation ? It describes true things, like that trees grow from seeds, but that's a rather low bar.
  • autokad 11y ago
    a huge kernel in fact. a very large portion of what we know today was passed down by oral language, eventually making it to written language, and eventually making it into science books. also, science gets a lot of credit for 'discoveries' it had no part in. most of the time, science is just proving what everyone already knew. the other major portion of the time, discoveries were made by tinkerers, which are often looked down upon by scientists even though they make up a large portion of break throughs. granted, our history over 5,000 years ago oral accounts, or myths as you like to call them, do not do a particularly good job after such a time at telling us what happened. but quite often, there is a large amount of truth to be found if you are willing to listen.
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    • JupiterMoon 11y ago
      This is an interesting theory. Do you have any evidence to back this up? EDIT I have some cases to counteract your theory: - Flat Earth - Earth as centre of Universe - Quantum mechanics - Relativity - Thermodynamics - Newton's laws - Evolution - God(s) - Bible stories in general Basically scientific progress has been a story of overcoming verbal traditions and received wisdom.
      • graemep 11y ago
        The discovery that the earth was round pre-dates the development of the scientific method by two millenia - the ancient Greeks found the evidence a few centuries BC. God: science has contributed no new knowledge. Bible stories: How? For example the creation account in Genesis was regarded as metaphorical at least as far back as St Augustine's time, 1600 years ago (Augustine supports what he calls a literal interpretation, but that means that each thing in genesis has a specific real life counterpart - so each of seven days corresponds to some kind of undefined epoch). Revelations is clearly metaphorical if you read up on the obvious contemporary references it contains. American Evangelical style biblical literalism is a heresy of the modern era - hardly a sign that scientific knowledge is encouraging progress. That said, I do not think the idea that science incorporates a lot of knowledge from oral sources is false. It is based on ideas developed from pre-scientific ideas - ancient greek philosophy, the Christian idea of a universe that follows laws etc. - but that is hardly surprising as ideas rarely appear from nowhere.
        • JupiterMoon 11y ago
          > God: science has contributed no new knowledge. God is a myth/legend. There is no knowledge. > Bible stories: How? For example the creation account in Genesis was regarded as metaphorical at least as far back as St Augustine's time, 1600 years ago (Augustine supports what he calls a literal interpretation, but that means that each thing in genesis has a specific real life counterpart - so each of seven days corresponds to some kind of undefined epoch). Revelations is clearly metaphorical if you read up on the obvious contemporary references it contains. American Evangelical style biblical literalism is a heresy of the modern era - hardly a sign that scientific knowledge is encouraging progress. Agreed that Evangelical literalism is ridiculous. However, even taken allegorically the genesis myth adds nothing to what we know about the Universe. Furthermore what we know about the Universe is in spite of this myth not following from it. > ancient greek philosophy Could be regarded as a pre-cursor to modern science (not directly but in terms of the process of a species learning about thinking). > Christian idea of a universe that follows laws Sorry how does this contribute to science? Also what laws? The laws of some God myth?
    • dalke 11y ago
      'a huge kernel in fact' Could you clarify? What is the huge kernel of truth in the Zuni creation myth? How do we distinguish those kernels from the non-true elements of the myth? Did humans once live "in total darkness in a place deep in the earth known as the fourth world" and have "horns and tails, but no mouths or anuses"? Certainly elements of that creation myth are not reconcilable with other creation myths, so some of them must be incorrect. How do you tell which are incorrect?
      • autokad 11y ago
        your reply is filled with ignorance and arrogance that it's hardly worth anyone's time. creationism is a mere few pages in a very large book. its not worth anyone's time to bother because you are both not worth it nor willing to listen.
        • dalke 11y ago
          There are many stories of creation. The creation myths of Ancient Egypt, Norse, Greece, India, Zuni, Babylon, etc. cover far more than "a mere few pages". As "creationism" is a term most often associated with a specific interpretation of Christian faith, it sounds like you are thinking only of Biblical creation, and not the general category of creation myths. For purposes of discussion, I'll leave the Bible out entirely. The statement was that most myths contain a kernel of truth. If that is meaningful, then shouldn't many of the creation myths also contain a kernel of truth? If so, what is the kernel in all of those creation myths? One kernel is "people want a story to explain how they came to be." I'm actually fine with that. But then it's not really a story of oral history, but of human desires. Another is to keep looking through the myth until something works. This seems rather haphazard in that all stories have at least something which is true. For example, Loki is the son of Fárbauti. Loki is of course either a god or jötunn, and neither of those exist, but some people are sons of other people. Is it really useful to say that this is a kernel of truth?
  • fit2rule 11y ago
    Szukalski describes the reappearance of the flood myth across disparate, physically disconnected cultures, as being a result of a kind of cultural memory - that there was one major cataclysm which nearly wiped out the entire species, that the survivors were broadly dispersed around the planet, and that they then proceed to immediately attempt to warn future generations not to forget the cataclysm through various common ways - temples, memorials, literal icons in the stone, all constructed through those post-apocalyptic ages using a common - but rapidly deteriorating - 'common tongue of the survivors' .. which then becomes the base for a lot of branching cultures, religions, sects, etc. So there was a race before, we humans, and we all spoke the same language then. Then, the flood came. The language faded and cultures re-appeared with a 'memory' of previous times, and those common memories can be extrapolated from various common forms of ancient art found to be broadly dispersed, but yet strangely related ..
    • dalke 11y ago
      The problem is, the physical evidence shows that there was no such singular major cataclysm. Could such evidence exist? Certainly. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuruppak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuruppak mentions that "At the end of the Uruk period [around 3100 BC] there was an archaeologically attested river flood in Shuruppak". This marks the end of the antediluvian rulers of the Sumerian King List. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_King_List#Antediluvian_rulers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_King_List#Antediluvia... .) Therefore, there are physical remnants of a local flood from 5,000 years ago, which correspond to historical records. If there were a global flood then it too would leave physical traces. Floods are not uncommon events. In some areas they occur yearly, in others they occur once a decade or one a generation. There are myths around the world which refer to the sun, to the moon, to storms, and to other natural events that were not singular in nature. Floods should fall in that local category. You hypothesize that 'we all spoke the same language' before this event. The Chinese flood myth concerns events that took place about 2200 BCE, and emphasizes how human efforts were able to mitigate its effects. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_%28China%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_%28China%29 .) This is 1,000 years after the flood in Shuruppak. We have written records of Egyptian, Sumerian, and Eblaite, dating from before 2300 BC. Indeed, the Early Dynastic Period of Egypt started about 1,000 years before the Chinese flood. Therefore, the Chinese flood myth cannot be about an event which occurred when all humanity shared a common language. Therefore it cannot be the case that all great flood myths refer to the same singular event at you describe. Which means we cannot look to the comment element - a large flood - in order to make an inference that there was a singular event. We would have to use other common elements, and there are no other world-wide common elements.
  • piceas 11y ago
    A recent example that rises the bar is the investigation of Australian Aboriginal stories which have been shown to aid and the investigation of the region's natural history. https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/fire-sky https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/fire-sky
    • dalke 11y ago
      Yes, and the stories of Homer helped Schliemann rediscover the location of Troy. The Inuit of northwestern Greenland had a myth that the three pieces of the Cape York meteorite were a woman, her dog, and her tent that had been 'hurled from the sky by the evil spirit, Tornarsuk.' (https://books.google.com/books?id=6saFpP5aticC&lpg=PA212&ots=tijOslJQDP&dq=Cape%20York%20meteorite%20mythology&hl=sv&pg=PA218#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=6saFpP5aticC&lpg=PA212&ots... ). We know that everything about that is wrong, except for the 'from the sky' part. My question is, given a myth, how can we identify the kernel of truth? Did humans in early Zuni culture live "crowded tightly together in total darkness in a place deep in the earth known as the fourth world"? Or is there something else we should consider that kernel? If we are not careful, then we can look to a modern myth, like the 'myth of Superman', and posit that the breakup of Krypton explains why there are meteorites.
      • piceas 11y ago
        The specific claims from the myths which are testable are the kernels of truth of interest. In the Australian example those claims have been shown to be credible and are worthy of investigation despite being from an oral tradition. Claims from myths that can not be tested are of little scientific interest and do not merit effort. Modern myths must also stand the same scrutiny which is why we should be careful but not alarmed or dismissive without testing.
        • dalke 11y ago
          Many of the statements in myths are testable. Some claims are credible. Most testable claims not true. Some of the things that are true are trivially true, as the example I gave where a tree can indeed grow from a seed. If one creation myth says that humans came from "the nethermost of the four cave-wombs of the world", another creation myth say that humans come from logs given spirit and life, and a third says that people come from the tears of Khepri, then we know that at least two of them, if not all three, are incorrect - even if we cannot test them directly. (In any case, we can test them - none of those myths are compatible with the physical evidence of human evolution.) The original statement was that "many [myths] must, necessarily, contain a kernel of truth". My question was, how do we tell which is the kernel of truth? That trees grow from seeds? Or that humans come from cave-dwelling creatures? Or that the Zuni people tried to make sense of the petrified bones and landscape forms by creating a post-hoc story to explain things? At some point the suggestion that there is a 'kernel of truth' become useless, as there is a kernel of truth in nearly everything that humans do. Your statement, that myths could be used to understand history, is not controversial. I gave examples from the 1800s and 1900s as previous examples, and there are certainly many more.