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

231–240 of 301 posts

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

#231

Post by [deleted] »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #223
InitialLastName wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#232

Post by jnurmine »

One thing that caught my eye was "both were coated in human or animal fat" and "throwing stick smeared in human or kangaroo fat".

I mean the "human fat" part, that seemed strange.

Getting human fat non-lethally is probably impossible using technology from 12000 years ago. If the fat was obtained from a human corpse, it would rule out at least burying the body. But still, wouldn't obtaining the fat from a non-buried corpse disturb the deceased on some religious-spiritual level?

Or was it common to mutilate dead enemies or something like that?

Edit: Oh, OK, I saw others asking the same question and replies which shed light on this.

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

#233

Post by nsenifty »

RandomCitizen12 wrote: post #116
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 an interesting way to do a checksum

The metre is a basic checksum, but there are more elaborated systems (pathas) of chanting verses that aids in correct learning and memorization.

Some of it is described here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedic_chant#Oral_transmission

An example in action - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLdq15ptqUs

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

#234

Post by rhelz »

martin293 wrote: post #121
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…

That's not how I understood it. From the article: > "The mulla-mullung would then chant the name of the sick person, and once the stick fell, the charm was complete," Which to me seems like a healing ritual.

Alas, the writer of this pop-sci article got it wrong---see my edited OP which contains a quote from the original nature article.

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

#235

Post by rhelz »

digging wrote: post #124
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…

Well, I read an article once discussing the social good of cursing each other. The essence was this: Yes, it's an attempt to do harm. You're mad at someone, perhaps they wronged you, and you want something bad to happen to them. So ask a demon to spoil their grain, or to tear their clothes. (In other words, pray that entropy will happen - you can't go wrong!) If you didn't have demons you could ask for help and you w…

This is a very profound point. We have to actually live with each other, and even for small groups, frictions arise. As the groups get larger and larger, friction intensifies. There has to be some way to blow off steam.

Kind of like how instead of cities fighting each other, we have their sports teams fight each other in a ritualized, ersatz combat.

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

#236

Post by kelipso »

abc_lisper wrote: post #229
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-indig…

It kind of feels like a local optima situation where they relied on memory so much that they didn't feel the need for writing. Either that or the fact that there was no writing for so long resulted in them specialising in memory techniques a lot.

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

#237

Post by kelipso »

mcguire wrote: post #208
0_____0 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you're alluding to the pronunciation of symmetry, I'm pretty sure eye and symmetry was specifically meant not to rhyme in order to throw off the reader slightly. Guess that hints at how difficult recovery of pronunciation can be.

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

#238

Post by ajkjk »

vkou wrote: post #228
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…

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.

I personally don't associate those rituals with the idea of democracy itself, rather just its particular instantiation in modernish society.

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

#239

Post by dkarl »

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.

I think you're assuming they're a lot smarter than us, not "just like us."

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

#240

Post by teddyh »

krapp wrote: post #225
teddyh wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is like claiming books change the world. In one sense they do, but in a a bit more real sense it’s people reading books who change the world. A crucial distinction.
Post reply on HN