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A tsunami wiped out ancient communities in the Atacama Desert 3,800 years ago

arstechnica.com

11–20 of 37 posts

Re: A tsunami wiped out ancient communities in the Atacama Desert 3,800 years ago

#11

I 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.

Maybe it could be explained by each new generation asking their parents why nobody is dwelling near the coast. Meaning, the information is passed down because it is necessary to explain the current situation. The passed-down explanation may even mutate significantly, as long as it still keeps people away from the coast.

Re: A tsunami wiped out ancient communities in the Atacama Desert 3,800 years ago

#13
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Recovery can be slow without debt financing...

Re: A tsunami wiped out ancient communities in the Atacama Desert 3,800 years ago

#15

I 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!

Which ones? I thought the oldest oral stories were from Aboriginal Australians, like "Aboriginal Memories of Inundation of the Australian Coast Dating from More than 7000 Years Ago" - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00049182.2015.10... .

The Black Sea deluge hypothesis for the flood myth was only 7,600 years ago and Lake Agassiz 8,200 year ago.

Re: A tsunami wiped out ancient communities in the Atacama Desert 3,800 years ago

#16

Same time frame as the biblical flood

Not necessarily. The biblical flood and a majority of flood myths around the world, go back much farther than that. Many seem to have been inspired by events during the Younger Dryas period, around 12,000 years ago. There's a "black mat" layer in soil all over the world, suspected to be the result of some sort of cosmic impact - a comet or asteroid hit North American ice, resulting in cataclysmic flooding and a radical reshaping of the geology. The fires from the resulting storms pumped so much ash into the sky that we now have a visually distinctive indicator. Anything above the black mat layer is younger than 12,000 years.

North American megafauna disappeared at this time, which is a pretty serious crack in the assertion that overhunting by people caused their extinction.

Storms from this event left evidence of massive flooding in the years following the impact all over the world. I have no doubt that there are cultural myths that stem from not recent flood events but the younger Dryas impact is likely the source for the oldest myths, as the destruction seemed to be so profound that it would have wiped out any coastal settlements all over the world, leaving us with evidence of the survivors and nothing of what they lost. Various sites and clues around the world hint that even 12,000 years ago there may have been relatively advanced cultures that built in stone and wood, planted crops, likely had advanced shipbuilding, math, astronomy, and navigation.

There are petroglyphs at sites all over the world resembling stick figure men that seem to be inspired by massive plasma discharge patterns in the sky, and the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis provides an explanation for storms powerful enough to produce such patterns.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0800560105

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesi...

Re: A tsunami wiped out ancient communities in the Atacama Desert 3,800 years ago

#17

I 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!

All kinds. In the Western world there are 2,000 year old myths that persist to this day and are part of mainstream cultural knowledge. People think you’re crazy if you don’t know them.

Re: A tsunami wiped out ancient communities in the Atacama Desert 3,800 years ago

#18
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

All kinds. In the Western world there are 2,000 year old myths that persist to this day and are part of mainstream cultural knowledge. People think you’re crazy if you don’t know them.

True, but we have been a literate society throughout that timespan, and the institution that was responsible for maintaining the knowledge of such myths, the Church, was often the only source of literacy around.

A lot of the ancient secular stuff was forgotten and had to be reconstructed later from written sources.

Re: A tsunami wiped out ancient communities in the Atacama Desert 3,800 years ago

#19
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Life in the Atacama took 2,000 years to return to normal." Just beneath the title.

Recovery can be slow without debt financing...

another way to wind up underwater

Re: A tsunami wiped out ancient communities in the Atacama Desert 3,800 years ago

#20

I 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.

Pretty sure all the Vedas were passed down for millennia as word of mouth. The aborigines seem to have stories of floods from 10,000 years ago.
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