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Aboriginal ritual passed down over 12,000 years, cave find shows

phys.org

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Re: Aboriginal ritual passed down over 12,000 years, cave find shows

#51

Post by delichon »

I'm from a Jewish family that has been unable to pass down its rituals over the past few generations. My great-grandparents were observant on both sides. I have no religion or inherited rituals to speak of.

So how does a ritual get successfully passed down for something like 500 generations? What must the observer get from it that motivated them so strongly to pass it along with the necessary vigor? Was it something in the ritual itself, perhaps an altered state drug experience? Or was the motivation just cultural?

Is there anything in our culture that could possibly have such staying power, or is our cultural temperature so high that nothing can survive for long?

Re: Aboriginal ritual passed down over 12,000 years, cave find shows

#53

Post by kstenerud »

bl4ckm0r3 wrote: post #35
namanaggarwal wrote: post #7

Fascinating. Growing up in a Hindu household, a lot of our festivals involve listening to origin stories of the customs. A lot of those have of course been glorified to add an element of holiness, but it's possible they are actually derived from some small incident happened in the past. Like a butterfly effect, a small insignificant event leading to a major celebration for billion people continued over centuries

I think you just found out the roots of every religion.

Yup. The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 18th century BC) caused quite a lot of controversy when it was translated in 1870 due to its striking similarity to many parts of the Hebrew Bible (which was written MUCH later).

Similar controversies erupted over the stories of Osiris (c. 25th century BC).

By the 10th century BC, almost all of the story themes that we ascribe to more modern authorship had already been written.

Re: Aboriginal ritual passed down over 12,000 years, cave find shows

#54

Post by empath75 »

> "Australia kept the memory of its first peoples alive thanks to a powerful oral tradition that enabled it to be passed on," Delannoy said.

> "However in our societies, memory has changed since we switched to the written word, and we have lost this sense."

I sort of think that this is a "what's water?" thing, because a lot of our ancient prehistorical traditions and practices that continued into the historical era and beyond are so embedded with how we see how ourselves and act and behave that it's impossible for us to even notice them. There's a lot that we have looked at in ancient sites and have just known what the purpose was for because we still do the same thing now, or at least we had recorded uses for it from historical texts, it's just said to be "obvious" and not really worth commenting about how interesting it is that we preserved these oral traditions.

There's a kind of exoticism/noble savage thing going on here, I think.

Re: Aboriginal ritual passed down over 12,000 years, cave find shows

#55

Post by spacecadet »

Its always awesome to read about finding early human tools and techniques. But, could the sticks have been 12,000 years old, but the event far less?

Lots of people asking how they had human fat... you poke someone's wound with a hot stick, there is probably fat on it after. So they may have been using cauterization.

They may also have been cooking small animals while trying to avoid the light, smell, and smoke plume a larger fire creates. Which would attract predators.

Re: Aboriginal ritual passed down over 12,000 years, cave find shows

#56

Post by Hizonner »

scotty79 wrote: post #26
wincy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now now we aren’t allowed to assert that our culture is better or worse than any other, that is an inviolable cardinal sin for our pristine progressive rationalist minds. We have all of modern pharmacology and they have tiny sticks poked into burning animals in the fireplace. Different healing rituals for different folks.

They more or less survived 12000 years healing themselves like that. Let's check back in 12000 years of what medicine that actually works leads to.

They survived 12000 years doing something that did not in fact heal anybody.

Re: Aboriginal ritual passed down over 12,000 years, cave find shows

#57

Post by [deleted] »

delichon wrote: post #51

I'm from a Jewish family that has been unable to pass down its rituals over the past few generations. My great-grandparents were observant on both sides. I have no religion or inherited rituals to speak of. So how does a ritual get successfully passed down for something like 500 generations? What must the observer get from it that motivated them so strongly to pass it along with the necessary vigor? Was it something…

[deleted]

Re: Aboriginal ritual passed down over 12,000 years, cave find shows

#58

Post by troupo »

delichon wrote: post #51

I'm from a Jewish family that has been unable to pass down its rituals over the past few generations. My great-grandparents were observant on both sides. I have no religion or inherited rituals to speak of. So how does a ritual get successfully passed down for something like 500 generations? What must the observer get from it that motivated them so strongly to pass it along with the necessary vigor? Was it something…

> So how does a ritual get successfully passed down for something like 500 generations?

There's literally nothing else but this.

> motivated them so strongly to pass it along with the necessary vigor?

There's no vigor. There are almost no outside influences. There's almost no rebellious thought. You're raised into this life, and you know the rituals by heart from a young age.

> Is there anything in our culture that could possibly have such staying power,

Any isolated/primitive culture with no outside influences. Throughout the 20th century ethnographers collected thousands of such rituals before they disappeared after contact with the outside world.

Re: Aboriginal ritual passed down over 12,000 years, cave find shows

#59

Post by pvg »

delichon wrote: post #51

I'm from a Jewish family that has been unable to pass down its rituals over the past few generations. My great-grandparents were observant on both sides. I have no religion or inherited rituals to speak of. So how does a ritual get successfully passed down for something like 500 generations? What must the observer get from it that motivated them so strongly to pass it along with the necessary vigor? Was it something…

You can still go to or host, say, a Seder, no? That kind of cultural transmission doesn't rely on individual families but in the case of the rituals of Judaism and lots of other religions it seems to have been fairly effective.
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