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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

#191

Post by xienze »

utkarsh858 wrote: post #100

In India, there is a custom of passing ancient knowledge through poetic verses. Every poetic verses is sung in a specific 'meter'. If there is a discrepancy in recitation then remembering and passing knowledge 'letter by letter' can not succeed. Many of the verses are thousands of years old. I read some describing an ancient extinct river ~7000 years ago, later rediscovered through satellite imagery (don't know the r…

That’s clever and all, but how can you actually be sure the message was completely unchanged over 7000 years without an original written record? I get that special recitation tricks can make it harder to mess up, but I don’t think you can definitively say the information never once changed.

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

#192

Post by fsckboy »

brabel wrote: post #164
poulpy123 wrote: post #104

It's not the first time that I read hypothesis of Aboriginal oral traditions that stayed for much longer than anywhere else in the world. I wonder why it would be the case there and not elsewhere

Probably because they were some of the only ones to remain almost entirely isolated from the rest of the world while civilization was happening elsewhere. They never developed writing. The rest of the word was quite likely very similar to them before writing. The article mentions that because we have invented writing, passing down oral traditions became much less important to us, and hence our societies have "lost" s…

>Probably because they were some of the only ones to remain almost entirely isolated from the rest of the world while civilization was happening elsewhere.

and, migrating farthest from Africa (can tell by red-shift :) they git the oldest branch of our oldest stories

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

#193

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

ars wrote: post #179
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The similarities between the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Genesis flood story are far too extensive to be due to chance. For example, compare the following passages, describing how Noah / Utnapishtim let out birds to search for dry land, after their boats get grounded on a tall mountain. Genesis 8:6-12: After forty days Noah opened a window he had made in the ark and sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and forth u…

> Historically, much of Genesis was likely written during the Babylonian exile. That's very very unlikely, there's too much other stuff linked with it that is older than that. You might be able to claim that when it was set to paper, but there's no way Genesis itself is only from then. According to Genesis Abraham lived at the time that Gilgamesh was recorded, with Noah living a little before then. It's quote possibl…

There are many linguistic and historical hints that the early chapters of Genesis were written during or after the Babylonian captivity: things like mentions of "great" cities that only became great during that era, borrowed Babylonian phrases, various stories borrowed from the Babylonians, etc.

There were certainly earlier stories that were included in Genesis, but the actual writing occurred long after those stories supposedly took place.

> It's quote possible Gilgamesh was written down from their stories, rather than the other way around.

The Epic of Gilgamesh was written down long before there was even a Hebrew language. It's one of the most ancient written works.

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

#194

Post by yencabulator »

sandworm101 wrote: post #80
the-smug-one wrote: post #6

Very cool :-). I don't know that much about the natives of Australia and their history, I wonder how many of these oral traditions have been written down. An immediate google gave me this document, seems interesting at a glance: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/159354575.pdf

When I lived on the west coast a native friend of mine spoke of how some elders no longer wanted stories to be written down. They have seen how their oral stories get documented, effectively transforming them from a living secret into a fixed text in a dead book. The book then goes on a shelf, fodder for the endless stream of anthropology classes taught ay universities in distant cities. More people read the story in…

I live near the Navajo Nation, but claim no true understanding of native american culture. Here's what I've heard about their attitudes toward e.g. video recording their rituals:

They welcome you, or any respectful individual, to participate and to "live their rituals" with them. The local college even hosts such events, to help the neighboring communities understand each other better. Any elders will likely tell you many stories, once they see you're actually interested and not just in it for a cheap tourist thrill[1].

They discourage trying to record or explain it to people who did not participate. They consider the first-hand experience to be transformative, and that you fundamentally cannot understand them without it.

[1]: I understand there are some things they're not supposed to mention much, roughly in the sense of "speak of the Devil" in Christian societies, or naming Bloody Mary three times. Those stories you might only hear on special occasions.

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

#195

Post by rhelz »

teddyh wrote: post #155
rhelz wrote: post #108

Kinda sad that the ritual was a way to curse somebody. 12,000 years of hurting each other. Side Node: computer programing is kinda cool. It is a set of incantations which actually does work. EDIT: Hello, all you down-voters and people who say I should read the article before commenting :-) I to, don't like it when people just start commenting without reading the article. I also don't like it when people take what a p…

Computer programs do nothing . It’s computers , i.e. actual hardware, which work. We forget this at our peril.

chuckle computer programs are the incantations we do to make computers do what we want. Quite a bit like shamans did incantations to get the world to do what they want. Only ours actually works. Or, it does if we can debug them.

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

#196

Post by rhelz »

greenhearth wrote: post #165
rhelz wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the original Nature article, not the one written by an underpaid and overworked english major who wrote the popular article.

Then maybe you cite it? And what a shitty assumption to make of the writer, btw. And also, what the fuck kind of a condescending attitude to have for the English major? Maybe if you were an English major we wouldn't be posting all this nonsense right now.

Mr./Ms. greenheart, whoever you are, life is too short to have hostile conversations.

As far as a condescending attitude---I did say they were underpaid and overworked, didn't I? When you are overworked don't you start to make mistakes as well? I sure do.

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

#197

Post by mistermann »

bowsamic wrote: post #82
mistermann wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience Pseudoscience consists of statements, beliefs, or practices that claim to be both scientific and factual but are incompatible with the scientific method .

Yes

Yes, to what question/proposition?

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

#198

Post by rhelz »

cess11 wrote: post #128
rhelz wrote: post #108

Kinda sad that the ritual was a way to curse somebody. 12,000 years of hurting each other. Side Node: computer programing is kinda cool. It is a set of incantations which actually does work. EDIT: Hello, all you down-voters and people who say I should read the article before commenting :-) I to, don't like it when people just start commenting without reading the article. I also don't like it when people take what a p…

Curses are what you do instead of beating someone with a stick. It's an outsourcing of justice to nature or spirits rather than taking it into your own hands.

This is a very profound point. I suppose it's kind of like what the olympics are supposed to do: how about we all fight each other in a ritualized game, instead of with sticks and stones, strikes and drones.

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

#199

Post by mistermann »

walterbell wrote: post #189
mistermann wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Evaluate", on what scale?

Donald Trump can tell a story (which is what all humans run on) adequate to motivate thousands of people up to no good to descend upon the nation's capital, do you think LLM's (science, etc) can compete in that specific arena/domain, at that level? (To be fair though, the Normies have been motivated to do more than a few silly things themselves by their trainers. Donald is good, but he ain't the best.)

There are readings of brain activity, and then there is brain activity that causes humans to do particular things with their bodies. One of these is more powerful than the other.

(Pardon for the vitriol, no offense intended.)

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

#200

Post by rnhmjoj »

jamiek88 wrote: post #161
endofreach wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“A dog walks into a bar and says, ‘I cannot see a thing. I’ll open this one.’”

The old Sumerian joke? I love reading the posited explanations for that joke in academia and when it’s posted randomly people usually have a stab at it too.

IIRC it's a pun on the "not seeing" verb being literally "having one's eyes closed".
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