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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

#201

Post by red-iron-pine »

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.

King Arthur was probably an actual Welsh guy, who fought the Romans (and/or maybe Saxons).

Few hundred years later they give him a magic sword and a round table. Same idea, but with other cultures, religions, etc.

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

#202

Post by ajkjk »

swatcoder wrote: post #141
ajkjk wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anybody else would describe an ideology as a collection of rituals.

FWIW, that's incorrect. It's not at all unusual for ideology to get modeled and analyzed that way in sociology, anthropology, etc

Do you have an example? It sounds like a complete category error. That or you're using the word very differently than most people do..?

An adherent of an ideology might, like, have rituals. But the ideology isn't the rituals.

Here are some ideologies off the top of my head: democracy, marxism, environmentalism, libertarianism, atheism, the moral basis of Christianity but not the religion itself, utitarianism, humanism, empiricism.

None of those have, as far as I can tell, a single ritual inherently associated with them.

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

#203

Post by notarobot123 »

sambeau wrote: post #63

It occurred to me recently that tig/tag has probably been passed down through oral tradition from child to child for millennia. It's possible that it's older than homo-sapiens, older than the taming of fire. Millions of years of tradition. And it still being passed on orally, child-to-child.

Not quite as old but another example of an enduring child-to-child cultural transmission is the daring right of passage that is Chappy/Knicky-Knocky Nine Doors/Ding dong ditch[0].

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knock,_knock,_ginger

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

#204

Post by dudeinjapan »

swayvil wrote: post #174

When you understand it you call it "science" or "technology". When you don't understand it you call it "religion" or "ritual". These are smart people. Just like us. Time is money for them just like it is for us. They probably had a very good, practical reason to do this "ritual". As surely as tapping keyboards.

Incorrect. "Science" is "science" because it works in a reproducible fashion--same applies to "technology", "modern medicine", etc. We don't have to fully grok a how a medicine works (example: SSRI anti-depressants) understand basically that it does work. We do need a double-blind study however.

"Rituals" need not have any efficacy at all. Surely burning a stick smeared in kangaroo fat does nothing to cure ailments. It's entirely possible the only reason is "this is what our tribe has always done." Certainly rituals create tribe cohesion and can have a placebo effect, but it is a fallacy to equate these things to science-based medicine. "Tapping keyboards" is not a "ritual"--we are not typing to appease the great silicon gods--we are doing it as means of communication and performing economically valuable work.

Rituals which do seem to work, e.g. plant-based medicine, can be used as an "intuition pump" for scientific study. The fact that a plant has been used for thousands of years is a good sign that it may have some effect, but that effect still needs to be verified.

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

#205

Post by helpfulContrib »

krapp wrote: post #162
teddyh wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If computer programs do nothing, why do we need them?

[dead]

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

#206

Post by userabchn »

In Indonesia there are 35k+ year old cave "paintings" of hand imprints, and apparently it is still a custom for some in the area to put their hand imprint on their house. It's probably in the same area where just today they announced finding the oldest cave painting: https://www.reuters.com/science/worlds-oldest-cave-painting-....

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

#207

Post by dudeinjapan »

spacecadet wrote: post #55

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…

It had kangaroo fat too, leading me to infer that they were trying to create a super-race of human-kangaroo hybrids.

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

#208

Post by mcguire »

0_____0 wrote: post #144
swatcoder wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, in language that suits HN, formal poetic structure amounts to error correction in oral tradition. It dramatically narrows the possibilities of what idea or word or sound or whatever could fit in any particular place in the verse, making it easier to memorize and accurately recite. Clever (and some blundering) poets and changes in language still set up these recitations to evolve away from whatever they original…

Poetic structure is such a strong framework that linguists have been able to recover information about the dialect and pronunciation of English in the time of Shakespeare, from Shakespearean works.

    Tyger Tyger, burning bright, 
    In the forests of the night; 
    What immortal hand or eye, 
    Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

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

#210

Post by kstenerud »

ars wrote: post #177
kstenerud wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You would be interested to know that Abraham lived at the time of the Gilgamesh epic, and he traveled widely telling his story. I'm aware there is no direct archeological evidence of Abraham, except for Gilgamesh, so now you need to decide which direction the knowledge flowed.

> You would be interested to know that Abraham lived at the time of the Gilgamesh epic, and he traveled widely telling his story.

Did he, though? There is archeological and contemporary written historical evidence of an actual Gilgamesh. Not so with Abraham.

The Abrahamic tradition was orally transmitted by a people who for generations lived in Babylonian captivity (1300 years after the earliest surviving copy of the Epic of Gilgamesh in Old Balylonian, with the earliest partial texts appearing 1600 years before), and was finally written down 3 generations after they left Babylon.

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