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

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

#181

Post by bongodongobob »

fsckboy wrote: post #109
llamaimperative wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Play is a semi-structured way of learning important skills! Evolution really just has to make it engaging enough for you to learn the skills, not much of a reason for it to persist after that.

> not much of a reason for it to persist after that for working out and keeping fit!... oh, hmmm, I guess that's glaring evidence that working out and keeping fit are not beneficial after all

Well that's not the point of play to begin with, it's learning motor skills, so your logic doesn't make any sense.

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

#182

Post by ars »

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…

The main thing is you need to live near other people with the same rituals.

I suspect your grandparents moved to the US after the holocaust and settled somewhere far from other Jews. Judaism can not be practiced in isolation, it was not setup that way.

Also, nothing stopping you from finding a Chabad near you and reclaiming at least a portion of your heritage.

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

#183

Post by busterarm »

cess11 wrote: post #126
busterarm wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have to agree here. Also just kind of doesn't pass the common sense test. We all learn the "game of telephone" as a kid and how information can change even just being passed once. In fact I've heard archaeologists in the past specifically say that no oral tradition can survive intact more than 100 years. Usually this statement is in reference to certain creation myths being relatively modern inventions. A claim of 12…

Where I grew up "game of telephone" didn't include repetition over and over and over again. It also didn't include meter or rhymes.

Okay. Take Shakespeare then. https://thegreatthinkers.org/shakespeare-and-politics/biblio...

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

#184

Post by ars »

rhplus wrote: post #4

I’m surprised by how tenuous the link is between the cave find and the archival find. Is the bar really that low for claims in archaeological papers or am I missing something? It’s a compelling story, but surely Occam’s razor would conclude that poking sticks into dead animals and fire pits is just what people have done for thousands of years? Where’s the evidence that there was chanting and a healing ceremony? Edit:…

I came to post the same thing. You have a stick from 12,000 years ago, and a story from 100 years ago, and they link them because of a similarity "there is fat at the end of the stick".

You could get fat on a stick by roasting a small mouse (so a small hearth), or tons of other ways. This really isn't enough evidence, not without a ton more findings of the same thing at various dates over the timeperiod.

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

#186

Post by jcranmer »

whatwhaaaaat wrote: post #97
InitialLastName wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The similarity between the EoG and Genesis flood stories can probably be laid to the fact that the first major human societies were built around flood plains of rivers in regions that have otherwise stable climates. When your society spends centuries in that situation, floods are the single most important natural event that happens to you. If would be shocking if they didn't feature prominently in your stories.

Why do we think peoples of the past would be unable to distinguish between a normal river flooding and a “world ending” flood? What about the ~450 feet of sea level rise in the last 15k years?

At the most accelerated rate of sea level rise, meltwater pulse 1A, sea levels rose at about 1-2 inches per year (about 10 times current sea-level rise rates, FWIW).

While it's commonly used as an explanation for the prevalence of flood myths throughout the world, I just don't buy it. That level of sea level rise just isn't going to come across as world-ending flood; it's going to be noticeable over time, but even sedentary cultures along the coastlines who are the most impacted by the rise are going to easily capable of dealing with it.

To me, the more parsimonious explanation is... it's just extending the metaphor of a flash flood. There's already a pretty consistent metaphor of ritual cleansing among multiple cultures. Flash floods are pretty common in many climates, and especially in an alluvial flood plain, the utter devastation of a major flood is readily apparent. Combine the two of them with a metaphorical story of the world being so wrong that everybody needs to be swept away and... why not use a flood to explain the destruction of the entire world? What other disaster would you choose instead?

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

#187

Post by qingcharles »

Anon84 wrote: post #110
openrisk wrote: post #70

Its impossible to tell, but the sense of passage of time must have been dramatically different in earlier periods of human development. Persistent rituals passed on from elders to youngsters, oral transmission of huge poems and other such "low tech" information tools must have given some structure to what otherwise might have felt as an eternal reboot.

I read somewhere (don't recall exactly where) that your sense of the passage of time is directly related to how much things change because that impacts how many memories you form. Essentially, when every day is the same, not many new memories are created, so you don't notice time passing (New Years was just a few weeks ago, how can it be July already!), but when things are constantly changing, time passes much more s…

Having been to jail, here's what they say, "the days pass like years, and the years pass like days." Which is a hugely accurate interpretation of what happens. Nothing happens all day, and every day is the same, so the days drag on in the most mind-numbingly tedious fashion. But then you wake up and you notice six months have passed without you being able to name a single thing that happened.

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

#188

Post by Cthulhu_ »

mrmetanoia wrote: post #170
golergka wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that how ancient Greek texts (that are attributed to mythical Homer) have been passed down too?

yes, many cultures had/have oral traditions that include poetics. The Finnish "Kalevala," is another epic written down from an oral poem/song.

I'm 99% confident (I have no sources because I'm lazy) the written versions of the various bible books were originally orally passed-down stories as well. Weren't the stories about Jesus written down ~70 years after his passing?

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

#189

Post by walterbell »

mistermann wrote: post #33
rhplus wrote: post #4

I’m surprised by how tenuous the link is between the cave find and the archival find. Is the bar really that low for claims in archaeological papers or am I missing something? It’s a compelling story, but surely Occam’s razor would conclude that poking sticks into dead animals and fire pits is just what people have done for thousands of years? Where’s the evidence that there was chanting and a healing ceremony? Edit:…

Have you ever watched US State Department press briefings, and paid close attention to how they use language (ie: "X is linked to Y")? Or, heard the public subsequently discussing what was said in them (say, right here on HN)? Humans are a story based species...always have been always will be. Stories are our weak spot, the ultimate attack/control vector.

> Stories are our weak spot, the ultimate attack/control vector.

Stories (and LLM 'story models') can be fine tuned and A/B tested against humans with live neural monitoring to evaluate narrative effectiveness.

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