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

221–230 of 301 posts

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

#221

Post by Ar-Curunir »

busterarm wrote: post #86
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 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…

Several cultures have developed techniques to error-correct and prevent these kinds of transmission errors.

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

#222

Post by scotty79 »

ffgjgf1 wrote: post #154
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.

Human populations can survive just fine with low/minimal growth and average life expectancy of 30 or so for thousands of years, just like all other animal species, we aren’t that different after all.. You don’t need basically any access to medical treatments for that.

Ah yes, but what if that same population had access to modern medicine that can basically make them infertile on demand, because babies are such a drag and, still a bit controversial today, gender feels like something that should be easily changed. Suddenly cure for cancer doesn't seem to matter much on a grand timescales.

We have a bit of runway to figure out artificial wombs with 8 billion of us alive today.

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

#223

Post by IncreasePosts »

InitialLastName wrote: post #173
IncreasePosts wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if the floods are a yearly phenomenon, why would you necessarily write about a single big flood?

For the same reason people in places where it snows every year still remember the really big blizzards: some floods are worse than others. Any given generation will have a flood they recall that set the (ahem) high water mark for comparison to future floods.

I don't know, if I know it floods every year, and there is a really big flood, I don't think I would act like the flood was something completely out of the blue. I would probably mention how it was much bigger than the normal floods.

For that reason, I think an event completely different from the yearly flooding is more likely, for example the Minoan eruption or Black Sea deluge hypothesis.

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

#224

Post by ajkjk »

swatcoder wrote: post #216
ajkjk wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, the…

Well, you're right about that. I suppose I don't see the point in calling what you're describing an ideology. Just call it something else so ideology can mean what it means to everyone else..? I see all your examples as like, social behaviors that happen to presently align with the ideologies. But in the past or future they won't, while the ideologies will persist, cause they live in 'idea space'.

(nor would I call any of those rituals, either, but I guess words don't mean what they normally mean in those fields)

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

#225

Post by krapp »

teddyh wrote: post #167
krapp wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A computer can run them, and thereby accomplish things.

So programs can affect the internal state of the computer, thus resulting in useful work being done which would otherwise not be done in the absence of said program. Which means programs do something, rather than nothing.

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

#226

Post by cess11 »

busterarm wrote: post #183
cess11 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Confirms what I'm hinting at, through tradition a version is consolidated that becomes the consensus and can reach a very long-lived stability.

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

#227

Post by lebuffon »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #153
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.

But if the floods are a yearly phenomenon, why would you necessarily write about a single big flood?

I have often wondered if these flood stories document something much larger that might have occurred as the major ice sheets collapsed and raised the sea levels to unseen heights.

But the one that is most intriguing IMHO is the mediterranean sea event that happened but it is 6M years ago. Could ancestors of genus Homo have passed that story long for all that time even across speciation???

https://www.uu.nl/en/news/first-direct-proof-of-mega-flood-i...

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

#228

Post by vkou »

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…

Democracy has rituals that its disciplines believe that if adhered to correctly and reverently they will bring prosperity to their tribe.

Some, but not all of those rituals even stand up to basic scrutiny. Others, not so much.

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

#229

Post by abc_lisper »

pradn wrote: post #172

There are a few examples of oral cultures ensuring perfect transmission across a large expanse of time. One example is the several different recitation styles used to memorize Sanskrit verses. These methods give memorizers multiple ways to remember a line, and also prevent errors like the inadvertent mixing of adjacent words (" euphonic combination"). The "checksumming schemes" are far more elaborate than you'd imagi…

I think the harsh conditions in Australia, where there a thousand ways to die, put the onus on truth and preservation of it in the oral tradition. Unlike most other cultures where it's kind of ok to gradually deviate from the truth. It is worth paying attention to the aborigine stories.They have also made astronomical observations that are pretty accurate to the date. https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/australias-indigenous-peopl...

Singing/Ballads are also popular way of preserving information fidelity. Homer's works were based on ballads. We don't put premium on memory now, but before the invention of printing press, memory techniques were widely studied and used.

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

#230

Post by swatcoder »

ajkjk wrote: post #224
swatcoder wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, the…

Well, you're right about that. I suppose I don't see the point in calling what you're describing an ideology. Just call it something else so ideology can mean what it means to everyone else..? I see all your examples as like, social behaviors that happen to presently align with the ideologies. But in the past or future they won't, while the ideologies will persist, cause they live in 'idea space'. (nor would I call a…

I figured!

If you earnestly wished to "see the point", you're tripping yourself with by taking for granted "what it means to everyone else.." and things like "living in idea space"

There are traditions of study/thought that use ideology the way you mean, and traditions that don't. The variety of use is well-represented and has been since the word came into use. Likewise, "idea space" is a specific concept that some people accept as sensible and others don't. Again, the variety of relationships to it is well-represented (and stretches back millennia, on that one).

You can actually see an example of this kind of differing-perspectives-in-wide-use in the way use used "the moral basis of Christianity but not the religion itself" in your own comment above. While Platonic ideas predate Christianity and have much influence on its shape and study in the West, the that statement would strike most traditional and many modern Christian thinkers as non-sensical. To them, there is no sensible separation of Christianity's "moral basis" from its Church/people and trying to make some distinction is as alien and "pointless" to them as different senses of ideology are to you.

And yet, of course it's interesting to think about Christianity's "moral basis" as an ideology existing in "idea space" because it lets you relate that part of Christianity to other things that you feel are comparable using techniques that you know how to work with and have confidence in. That's pretty much exactly what's going on with social scientists/philosophers who think about ideology in the way I've been describing above.

Post reply on HN