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When Orcs Were Real

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Re: When Orcs Were Real

#191

Post by wolverine876 »

jgilias wrote: post #182
moate wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh. The vast majority of people subscribed to some religion or another and all the major religions say don't do rape or murder. I think it's reasonable to point out the moral failings of the past relative to their own morality. Seems perfectly reasonable to say "these people did bad things". If you want to then go a step further and say "they did bad things because reasons" that's fine, but the bad things were still…

We have literally no idea what kind of a morality the vast majority of people who have ever lived subscribed to. I mean, even today there are still cultures around where literally kidnapping a teenage girl and keeping her hostage is the virtuous traditional way of getting married. What I was trying to allude to is that it's easy to sit on our high horses and bash people from bygone times about how stupid they were fo…

> We have literally no idea what kind of a morality the vast majority of people who have ever lived subscribed to.

Human beings have consistent morality, in many ways, across space and time. As the GP pointed out, look at all the religions and cultural rules against the same things and encouraging the same things, such as not harming others and respecting your parents. There are differences also, but the extreme relativism is plainly false.

Re: When Orcs Were Real

#192

Post by whakim »

You_All_R_Cunts wrote: post #166
whakim wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fur thing just isn't compelling. Hominims lost their fur prior to developing tools in order to develop sweat glands all over their body, allowing them to expel heat better than their prey (and so hunt by literally chasing an animal until it got hyperthermia). Neanderthals may have been hairier to help in colder climates, but it's pretty remiss of the article to not mention that losing fur was one of the key devel…

Meaning fur was lost before we split from neanderthals, so they would have had to lose their sweat pores and regrown that hair? Seems like a large mutation to take place.

Yes - hominims lost their fur before homo neanderthalis/homo sapiens. (Also it's probably more than a single mutation - more like a series of them.)

Re: When Orcs Were Real

#193

Post by [deleted] »

moate wrote: post #161
jgilias wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should be careful not to chastise people from the past from the viewpoint of our comfy and safe lives. It's easy to sneer at our ability to divide people into 'us' versus 'them' over meaningless differences, when it's not you worrying about a night raid where you get scalped and your wife raped.

Meh. The vast majority of people subscribed to some religion or another and all the major religions say don't do rape or murder. I think it's reasonable to point out the moral failings of the past relative to their own morality. Seems perfectly reasonable to say "these people did bad things". If you want to then go a step further and say "they did bad things because reasons" that's fine, but the bad things were still…

[deleted]

Re: When Orcs Were Real

#194

Post by wolverine876 »

akomtu wrote: post #11
fogihujy wrote: post #4

I'm not sure about the descriptions of Neanderthals presented in this article, but the idea that old tales of orcs and elves originated many millennia ago as descriptions of other human species or other primates isn't that far-fetched.

Pretty much all our mythology and fairy tales, including the Tolkien's world, Harry Potter and many movies are based on what I'd call the "occult records". Those records were made partially public at least two centuries before Tolkien was born, so it can't be a coincidence that so many elements of his world match 1:1 with those records. Whether those records are true is a separate question. Using occult chronology, T…

Tolkien, in addition to being the great fantasy writer of the 20th century, he was also an Oxford professor and the century's great scholar of Old English. And in his domain were the myths of northern and central Europe.

He needed no popular book of the occult; he had read all the original myths in their original ancient languages. There is plenty of scholarly work describing his sources, and he wrote his own essay on it, though it's more conceptual than about primary sources: On Fairy-stories.

Re: When Orcs Were Real

#195

Post by wwtrv »

wolverine876 wrote: post #191
jgilias wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have literally no idea what kind of a morality the vast majority of people who have ever lived subscribed to. I mean, even today there are still cultures around where literally kidnapping a teenage girl and keeping her hostage is the virtuous traditional way of getting married. What I was trying to allude to is that it's easy to sit on our high horses and bash people from bygone times about how stupid they were fo…

> We have literally no idea what kind of a morality the vast majority of people who have ever lived subscribed to. Human beings have consistent morality, in many ways, across space and time. As the GP pointed out, look at all the religions and cultural rules against the same things and encouraging the same things, such as not harming others and respecting your parents. There are differences also, but the extreme rela…

I think outright religious bans on murdering, raping or enslaving people outside of your community are fairly recent developments. Even the old testament is fairly ambiguous on this.

Re: When Orcs Were Real

#196

Post by orcasushi »

I think many comments (and also researchers in the comment articles) are rejecting the idea of an troll like neanderthal too fast. Yes, some details are rather fantasy then based on real research, but the overall idea makes sense.

Controversy around why the neanderthal went extinct exists for a while now. I think it is very unlikely that a successful human-like species goes extinct without a fight. They where stronger and bigger then homo sapiens. If it is true that they replaced homo sapiens as the dominant species for a while then maybe they are not the friendly giants they are thought to be. Even homo sapiens cannibalize, so that some physically stronger Neanderthals would also do this seems not unlikely.

The last neanderthals might have lived in relic populations in north eurasia until several thousand years ago without leaving much archeological evidence. Also oral traditions might survive for very very long. But yeah, maybe it is not so politically correct to 'talk bad' about a race that fell victim to genocide. We rather focus on the positive things about them.

Re: When Orcs Were Real

#197

Post by poisonarena »

shakow wrote: post #172
poisonarena wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are missing the point entirely, I am saying that there is a thing called collective military knowledge, The Spanish had experience in fighting wars for many years. This knowledge of tactics and techniques is passed on through training.

And I'm saying that virtually every country on Earth has some military knowledge. You really think that France/the German principalities/England/the Ottoman Empire/the PL Commonwealth/the Kievan Rus'/... just forgot everything after a war, and that Spain, miraculously, was the only country to understand that experience is a thing? And do you believe that the Southern American populations religiously waited for the Wh…

I think you may be putting words in my mouth and getting pretty worked up, because I didn't say what you are implying. I am just stating(for the third time now) that Spain was at the cutting edge in 15th century warfare. Regarding your last paragraph, which is on some other tangent, but since you brought it up, it is known that the Aztecs and Mexica had a very different view on the purpose of warfare.

Re: When Orcs Were Real

#198

Post by [deleted] »

username90 wrote: post #179
gpm wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting that there isn't an unbroken chain of oral tradition? That for some generations in the middle every child didn't talk to their parents or other members of the older generation? It's a game of broken telephone no doubt, but I don't see how that chain could not exist.

50k years would be ~2500 generations. I doubt any traces of oral traditions are left after thousands of generations.

[deleted]

Re: When Orcs Were Real

#199

Post by rebuilder »

wolverine876 wrote: post #189
rebuilder wrote: post #10

Why do we have to posit non-human monsters as explanations for these myths? After all, there were (and still are) real monsters out there that would kill, rape, kidnap and torture people - people from other communities. Strange danger was serious business back in the day, why could that not evolve into all kinds of boogeymen?

One interpretation of the origin of such monsters, from Beowulf: That bloodshed, for that Cain slew Abel, the Eternal Lord avenged: no joy had he of that violent deed, but God drove him for that crime far from mankind. Of him all evil broods were born, ogres and goblins and haunting shapes of hell, and the giants too, that long time warred with God - for that he gave them their reward. The original Old English text r…

I'm saying that people historically sometimes act like monsters when they meet people from other communities. Enslavement. Pillaging. Murder. Rape. Salting the fields. Etc. etc. etc.

Re: When Orcs Were Real

#200

Post by [deleted] »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #70

A nice fairytale. And like all fairytales it doesn't need to be falsifiable to be worth telling. >> If early Greek, Roman, Norse, and Chinese mythologies are anything to go by, the legends spun by early humans centre around an heroic human (almost always a man) who is pitted against an ugly, evil cruel monster with superhuman strength… As a PoGO (Person of Greek Origin) my impression of our ancients' myths and legend…

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