A tsunami wiped out ancient communities in the Atacama Desert 3,800 years ago
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Re: A tsunami wiped out ancient communities in the Atacama Desert 3,800 years ago
#2I find it utterly fascinating how long were humans capable of passing the information just by word of mouth. If I understood it correctly, in this case people were wary for 2000 years, so for around 100 generations.
Re: A tsunami wiped out ancient communities in the Atacama Desert 3,800 years ago
#3I find it utterly fascinating how long were humans capable of passing the information just by word of mouth. If I understood it correctly, in this case people were wary for 2000 years, so for around 100 generations.
Not sure what you mean here. The article explains how this was uncovered by archaeological studies.
Re: A tsunami wiped out ancient communities in the Atacama Desert 3,800 years ago
#4I find it utterly fascinating how long were humans capable of passing the information just by word of mouth. If I understood it correctly, in this case people were wary for 2000 years, so for around 100 generations.
My favorite word of mouth story is about a tsunami as well: https://web.archive.org/web/20120322110734/http://mdn.mainic...
edit: No. This is the real word of mouth story:
"Some 50 generations later, on March 11, 2011, the Murohama tsunami warning tower — which was supposed to sound an alarm — was silent, toppled by the temblor. Still, without the benefit of an official warning system supported by modern science, the locals relied on the lesson that had been transmitted generation to generation for 1,000 years. “We all know the story about the two tsunami waves that collided at the shrine,” I was told.
Instead of taking refuge on the closest hill, the one with the shrine, they took the time to get to high ground farther away. From the safety of their vantage point they saw two tsunami waves colliding at the hill with the shrine, as they did long ago. Tragically, not everyone made the right choice; I was told of at least one person who died." https://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-xpm-2012-mar-11-la-oe-hol...
Re: A tsunami wiped out ancient communities in the Atacama Desert 3,800 years ago
#5I find it utterly fascinating how long were humans capable of passing the information just by word of mouth. If I understood it correctly, in this case people were wary for 2000 years, so for around 100 generations.
Exactly - quite impressive.
Our modern society has vastly better data, unimaginable completeness in scale, scope, detail, and accuracy.
Yet we are consistently making insanely worse decisions than the ones that returned 2000 years after the disaster.
That hundred-generation perspective makes the Native American's 'Consider the Seventh Generation' ethos seem myopic.
Worse yet is our society's obsession on quarterly profits and this month's competitive positioning — makes the attention span of a cloud of coked-up gnats seem positively sagacious
>>And of course, people returned to the shoreline eventually, as people in tsunami zones around the world inevitably do and apparently always have done. "Knowledge of these giant events and their consequences seems to wane over the passage of time, a common occurrence throughout the Pacific region . . . Most of the hazard assessments for coastal northern Chile are based on historical data that goes back just a few centuries, but the fault system in the region runs on a much larger temporal scale. Data about ancient quakes and tsunamis like the one that reshaped society here 3,800 years ago could offer a longer-term perspective to hazard planners."
Re: A tsunami wiped out ancient communities in the Atacama Desert 3,800 years ago
#6I find it utterly fascinating how long were humans capable of passing the information just by word of mouth. If I understood it correctly, in this case people were wary for 2000 years, so for around 100 generations.
Not sure what you mean here. The article explains how this was uncovered by archaeological studies.
"Archaeological evidence reveals that people abandoned the coast for centuries after the disaster."
"The sea has always been vital to life in the Atacama, but it's clear that, for centuries, no one wanted to live too close."
But no idea how I came to 2000yrs number
Re: A tsunami wiped out ancient communities in the Atacama Desert 3,800 years ago
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure what you mean here. The article explains how this was uncovered by archaeological studies.
"Archaeological evidence reveals that people abandoned the coast for centuries after the disaster." "The sea has always been vital to life in the Atacama, but it's clear that, for centuries, no one wanted to live too close." But no idea how I came to 2000yrs number
"Life in the Atacama took 2,000 years to return to normal."
Just beneath the title.
Re: A tsunami wiped out ancient communities in the Atacama Desert 3,800 years ago
#8I find it utterly fascinating how long were humans capable of passing the information just by word of mouth. If I understood it correctly, in this case people were wary for 2000 years, so for around 100 generations.
My favorite word of mouth story is about a tsunami as well: https://web.archive.org/web/20120322110734/http://mdn.mainic... edit: No. This is the real word of mouth story: "Some 50 generations later, on March 11, 2011, the Murohama tsunami warning tower — which was supposed to sound an alarm — was silent, toppled by the temblor. Still, without the benefit of an official warning system supported by modern science, the…
Japan also has tsunami stones in some coastal communities:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/century-old-warnin...
Re: A tsunami wiped out ancient communities in the Atacama Desert 3,800 years ago
#9I find it utterly fascinating how long were humans capable of passing the information just by word of mouth. If I understood it correctly, in this case people were wary for 2000 years, so for around 100 generations.
I'm doubtful. While individuals may respond to stories, cultures and settlement grow vegetatively. Communities would have grown back, and to my untutored mind in less than a century.
Unless the ecosystem was upset, which it was. Small camps that returned after the tsunami show a narrower diet, which is a red flag? I imagine folks didn't return because the food chain was disrupted, and they couldn't return.
Re: A tsunami wiped out ancient communities in the Atacama Desert 3,800 years ago
#10I find it utterly fascinating how long were humans capable of passing the information just by word of mouth. If I understood it correctly, in this case people were wary for 2000 years, so for around 100 generations.
There are many examples of this sort of thing. In Western societies many of the “universal” myths may be correlated to events 10,000+ years ago, yet persist!