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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

#251

Post by willy_k »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #218
brightball wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And is completely made up nonsense pseudoscience

The show itself sure, but Graham Hancock just happens to be the loudest proponent of this theory, there is solid evidence to support it, from Randall Carlson and a few other people I’m not remembering atm.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothe...

“Although initially sceptical, Wallace Broecker—the scientist who proposed the conveyor shutdown hypothesis—eventually agreed with the idea of an extraterrestrial impact at the Younger Dryas boundary, and thought that it had acted as a trigger on top of a system that was already approaching instability.”

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

#252

Post by gwern »

gerdesj wrote: post #11
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:…

"Each one was found in a separate fireplace around the size of the palm of a hand—far too small to have been used for heat or cooking meat. The slightly charred ends of the sticks had been cut specially to stick into the fire, and both were coated in human or animal fat." That's rather more than circumstantial evidence. Granted the ritual might have changed a bit over 12,000 odd years but where else have you seen peo…

If they had been doing the ritual regularly enough to preserve it for over 12,000 years in a relatively small range, it seems surprising that the excavations didn't turn up way more instances than it did. They can find 2 perfect instances within centuries of each other 12kya in the same excavation, then it just teleports without a trace to the 1880s?

This sounds more like a birthday paradox. There are so many rituals and superstitions in indigenous peoples over the millennia that it would be shocking if you could never find cases of things that looked vaguely similar when reduced to an archaeological residue and you cast a net as wide as 'anything which anyone has ever described which sounds similar no matter how many millennia'.

(I would also note that 'fat smeared on stuff and involving fires' is not nearly as rare as it might sound. Fat is important and used in many sacrifices or medicines - eg Homer, with all that fat wrapped on or stacked on top of bones in a holocaust to the gods.)

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

#253

Post by roenxi »

griffzhowl wrote: post #247
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've also heard it about the Buddhist tradition, that at least three groups of monks would memorize parts of the canon, and they would preiodically come together to chant it. If one group differed from the other two, they would know that's an error (at least to fairly high probability). This seems to have been an accurate method of transmission since independently written-down versions separated by centuries of oral…

There are worse schemes, but that is barely comparable to Vedic chanting.

3-pick-2 as a method is quite good but also quite vulnerable to a bunch of transmission errors beyond simple memory issues. Over long periods of time there is a higher risk of group think or status plays leading to wild changes.

Of course the vedas aren't immune, but it is a lot more effort to get them wrong than just a few people thinking "we want to change the story". A group would have to be hugely motivated to successfully change the chant.

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

#255

Post by spacecadet »

dudeinjapan wrote: post #207
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.

I mean not much else to do back then but poke shit with sticks, am I right?

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

#256

Post by mistermann »

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…

I think the problem is that "is" and "equals" are often conflated - and there are some other issues in play too.

Interestingly, how to (or if we even should!) resolve such issues in our (use of) language is itself a highly ideological matter.

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

#257

Post by vkou »

ajkjk wrote: post #238
vkou wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And likewise, you can choose to not associate all the particular rituals surrounding the practice of any particular denomination of Christianity with Christianity itself.

Like, at its core, all it says is that there's one god, and he was his own kid, who died, and there's an afterlife, and you should live well.

Yet, I don't think you'd say that Christianity doesn't have rituals, even if no particular instantiation of it has the same rituals as any other one.

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

#258

Post by stubish »

gwern wrote: post #252
gerdesj wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Each one was found in a separate fireplace around the size of the palm of a hand—far too small to have been used for heat or cooking meat. The slightly charred ends of the sticks had been cut specially to stick into the fire, and both were coated in human or animal fat." That's rather more than circumstantial evidence. Granted the ritual might have changed a bit over 12,000 odd years but where else have you seen peo…

If they had been doing the ritual regularly enough to preserve it for over 12,000 years in a relatively small range, it seems surprising that the excavations didn't turn up way more instances than it did. They can find 2 perfect instances within centuries of each other 12kya in the same excavation, then it just teleports without a trace to the 1880s? This sounds more like a birthday paradox. There are so many rituals…

Its a stick in the ground. People might have tripped over thousands of them, and millions lost to the elements and time. This find was only noticed because someone with the right specialized knowledge was looking in a specific location for artifacts, bothered to test the stick, and managed to link it to an obscure document written 150 years earlier, itself amazing that this particular ritual from this particular region was documented, unlike the unknown but huge number that were not. It is surprising we find this sort of thing at all. They might have cooked their lunch with a 35,000 year old stick without realizing it.

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

#259

Post by mensetmanusman »

yencabulator wrote: post #212
ninetyninenine wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

That's what I was thinking, math has 0 atoms, physics works with ones of atoms, chemistry tens, polymer physics, tens of thousands, biology trillions, psychology 10^25, etc. :)

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

#260

Post by nemo44x »

rsynnott wrote: post #111
nemo44x wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides being dirty I imagine how people thought of “healthcare” was very different. In that most people didn’t see a doctor until things were bad so they’re naturally worse afterwards. “Preventative medicine” is a recent idea.

Eh. Predecessors to toothpaste have been around for _7000 years_. At _least_. > Since 5000 BC, the Egyptians made a tooth powder, which consisted of powdered ashes of ox hooves, myrrh, powdered and burnt eggshells, and pumice. (Obviously, there have been improvements since.) But seriously, preventative medicine, in _some_ form, has been around for a while. It mostly didn't work very well or at all, but the idea of do…

Yeah but it was all bullshit as you admitted. The idea of actually preventing things via actual medicine and hence “preventative medicine” is new. Whatever you’re describing is not that.

Your entire comment is essentially “people used to pray and have rituals to stop bad things from happening” and you equaled it to preventative medicine. Do you understand how retarded you sound?

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