Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

phys.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 301 posts

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

#211

Post by yencabulator »

sophacles wrote: post #98
Ekaros wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait you are telling me they were not for some religious rites? Or had some religious significance? Isn't that the usual reasoning for nearly everything found ever...

It very rarely is. Most things found are known to be tools, dwellings, pottery for storage or cooking, clothing, etc. Wierd stuff, the stuff without a mundane explanation is labeled ritual, and since its wierd - you (presumably non-archaeologist) are more likely to see articles (etc) about "look at this wierd thing we found". It's also worth noting that "ritual" doesn't mean "religious". Yes there are a lot of religi…

Even outside of those secular ceremonial rituals, old "religions" simply don't look like new religions.

In old Finland, they believed you could transfer a sickness from a person to a rock, and then throw that rock away. Was that religious?

They believed you could heal an arrow wound if you chanted the origin story of how arrows came to be, and told the prototypal first arrow it was used wrongly, that it should be ashamed and take back the harm. Was that religious?

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

#212

Post by yencabulator »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #42
mensetmanusman wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is explained by complexity. The more components involved in a field, the less feasible the scientific method is. (E.g. math > physics > chemistry > materials science > cell biology > human biology > psychology > sociology)

Math is not a science. Math is fundamentally opposite of science. In science nothing can be proven. Proof is exclusively the domain of mathematics. The Lack of proof is foundational to science, it’s built into the core axiom of the scientific method. This axiom is actually the reason why science is so “bad” because nothing can really be confirmed. But something like psychology is on a whole different level because of…

Following in the true style of mathematics, I propose that you two actually agree, and that math has 0 of parent's "components involved in a field".

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

#213

Post by Ar-Curunir »

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…

The Saraswati description in the RgVeda is not 7000 years old. The text itself is believed to be only around 3500 years old

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

#214

Post by mauvehaus »

sambeau wrote: post #176
psychoslave wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is tig/tag?

In parts of the UK it's often called 'tig' in the US and other parts of the UK it's called 'tag'

Fittingly, it was a Yorkshireman who discovered you could use inert gasses other than argon for gas-tungsten arc welding.

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

#215

Post by kibwen »

jcranmer wrote: post #186
whatwhaaaaat wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

> That level of sea level rise just isn't going to come across as world-ending flood

I'm entirely open to being skeptical about meltwater pulse 1A being responsible for the universal flood myth, but I don't agree with this refutation.

Many of our stories do not exist to relate literal events, they exist to explain natural phenomenons. And there are many ways for humans to frame these explanations, but for whatever reason the human brain seems hardwired to prefer stories, so the explanations that survived to be transmitted through the ages were the ones that happened to take the form of stories.

So rather than saying "the pulse event wasn't rapid enough, therefore it can't explain the story" is IMO too hasty. Consider a sedentary people living on the coast, where a child asks her grandmother where their ancestors are buried, to which the grandmother responds by gesturing out at the Persian Gulf where, 60 miles from shore, their village once clung to the coast 500 years ago. It only takes one curious child asking "why?" and one bored grandmother willing to come up with a story to get the ball rolling on a tale that still gets told 10,000 years later (a tale that, indeed, would likely also have been informed by the experience of annual river flooding).

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

#216

Post by swatcoder »

ajkjk wrote: post #202
swatcoder wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, humanis…

If you categorically define an ideology to be a system of pure concepts, independent of any practice of thought, speech, or action by a professed adherent, then you will inevitably see it as a category error, yes.

(You'll also have a hard time enumerating those concepts in a complete and consistent way)

But if you're even a wee bit of a subjectivist, as many (not all) social scientists and social philosphers are, then a definition like that isn't interesting or productive. From that perspective, ideologies are something that people profess adherence to and express statements about and behave in self-identified accordance to.

They gather in elections, they discuss power through the lens of capital and labor, they recycle or avoid eating meat, they recoil at government overreach, they expose fraud in purported miralces, they pray, they trade trolley problem memes unironically, they protest against inequality, etc

If these don't make sense to you as "rituals of ideologies" for people doing cross-cultural studies, that's fine, but then I have a sense that a lot of cross-cultural studies just feels like hogwash to you anyway. I doubt I could change your mind here. :)

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

#217

Post by Aerbil313 »

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.

Not at all. Islam can be verifiably traced back to a single source, and mainstream Islam belief today is the same as it was 1400 years ago.

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

#218

Post by Ar-Curunir »

brightball wrote: post #168
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.

You’d love watching Ancient Apocalypse on Netflix. It essentially tracks this experience globally.

And is completely made up nonsense pseudoscience

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

#219

Post by scotty79 »

Hizonner wrote: post #56
scotty79 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's my point. Maybe actually healing is a detriment in the long run. Especially as technology progresses. Who knows.

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

#220

Post by [deleted] »

endofreach wrote: post #156
vlovich123 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But language itself and pronunciation of that language shifts over time. Probably better than hand transcription, but 7000 years is a long time.

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

[deleted]
Post reply on HN