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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

#271
post #32
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…

It’s all circumstantial evidence because that’s all we get. Circumstantial evidence is not “weak evidence”, it is evidence concerning the circumstances. For instance, DNA is circumstantial evidence. It’s evidence that can imply a connection between events, but it is not proof of such a connection. Fingerprints: circumstantial. Call logs: often circumstantial. The opposite of circumstantial evidence is direct evidence…

This sounds like something out of law school, where for some reason "direct evidence" is oddly treated as superior to "circumstantial evidence".

So, for instance, you could have a murder, and the prime suspect's fingerprints were found at the scene and on the murder weapon too. However, an eyewitness testifies that he saw the murder committed not by the prime suspect, but instead by furry space aliens who then departed in their UFO. We're supposed to believe the witness?

After all the knowledge we have now about how utterly unreliable and frankly worthless most human testimony is, you'd think our courts would stop treating it as worthy of a conviction.

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

#272
post #195
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.

chuckle computer programs are the incantations we do to make computers do what we want. Quite a bit like shamans did incantations to get the world to do what they want. Only ours actually works. Or, it does if we can debug them.

Only if you take computers for granted as a natural part of the world. Which you do at your peril.

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

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Old forms of toothpaste and tooth powder and similar did actually work, to some extent. See the one described above; it’s basically an abrasive. Of course it worked. Toothpaste only _really_ advanced far past that in the 1950s with fluoridation.

Various other things worked to some extent. The key difference is that no-one was really trying to _demonstrate_ that they worked; that really only came with evidence-based medicine in the late 19th century.

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

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many linguistic and historical hints that the early chapters of Genesis were written during or after the Babylonian captivity: things like mentions of "great" cities that only became great during that era, borrowed Babylonian phrases, various stories borrowed from the Babylonians, etc. There were certainly earlier stories that were included in Genesis, but the actual writing occurred long after those storie…

At least portions of the Pentateuch certainly date prior to the Exile, because we have direct archeological evidence in the form of dated, physical scrolls. At any rate both the Babylonians and the ancient Israelites were Semitic peoples, so obviously they had a shared background long before the Exile. There are also many references in early Genesis that do suggest it originates in traditions much older, including re…

I wrote specifically that the early chapters of Genesis date to the exile.

The Bible is not a single book. It's really a collection of different works, written over the course of centuries by different people. Different parts date from different eras (and then were subsequently edited over the centuries).

> we have direct archeological evidence in the form of dated, physical scrolls.

From what I know, only very short fragments of a few prayers survive from before the exile.

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

#275
post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The river itself dried in around ~5000BC. The text attributed itself as being authored in 3000BC. The idea that text was written in 1500BC (3500 years ago) was proposed by Max Muller which was contested by his contemporary western and Indian scholars alike ( they proposed earlier dates) In his late life, Max himself admitted that the dates he gave were hypothetical, they were to considered minimum and it could actual…

"Scientific data and new evidence converge on the understanding that between 3000 and 2000 BCE (about 4,000 years ago), the river's demise began when Sutlej diverted from the present-day Ghaggar-Hakra valley to join the river Beas. By around 3792 BP (c. 1800 BCE), the river had completely dried up." https://theprint.in/opinion/first-we-lost-saraswati-river-no...

Thanks for the clarification! I was referencing from an archaeological website of India and had confused BP with BC along with many other things:P

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

#276

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…

One correction guys, river had started drying around 4000 years ago and took 500-1000 years to dry completely.

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

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The river itself dried in around ~5000BC. The text attributed itself as being authored in 3000BC. The idea that text was written in 1500BC (3500 years ago) was proposed by Max Muller which was contested by his contemporary western and Indian scholars alike ( they proposed earlier dates) In his late life, Max himself admitted that the dates he gave were hypothetical, they were to considered minimum and it could actual…

I encourage you to read research literature from the last century. Given that all of our linguistic estimates put Proto-Indo-European itself at around 3000 BCE, it makes no sense to claim that the RigVeda was composed earlier at that time. Indeed, Sanskrit likely did not exist at that time.

I can't trust the linguistic estimates fully as they are vague and are prone to many assumptions and approximations in their calculations. Just like change of stance of Max Muller, such estimations change depending on whether much older antiquities have been excavated or not. Like RigVeda described Saraswati during its time as alive.( I was mistaken that river dried in 5000bc, it dried around 3000bc to 2000bc ). It's only a matter of time since new evidence are discovered that pushes such estimates further back in time. What they do very well imply that certain developments happened a 'minimum' of years ago. Authorship's mention of time as in rig veda cannot be completely discarded out of consideration.

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

#278
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is tig/tag?

The game tag, as in "Tag! You're it!"

Ok thanks to all that replied.

I was misdriven by "through oral tradition", I was expecting something that was supposedly transmitted as a linguistic invariant. It actually has significantly different names, so nothing close to some diachronic international onomatopoeia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-linguistic_onomatopoeias

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

#279
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.

What is tig/tag?

I guess it's the game of tag ("tag, you're it!"). In Dutch it is called tikkertje ("tikkie, je bent 'm!"); as Old English and Old Dutch were very similar, this may explain the -i- in tig, or at least it made it easier for me to recognize the word. :-)

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

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least portions of the Pentateuch certainly date prior to the Exile, because we have direct archeological evidence in the form of dated, physical scrolls. At any rate both the Babylonians and the ancient Israelites were Semitic peoples, so obviously they had a shared background long before the Exile. There are also many references in early Genesis that do suggest it originates in traditions much older, including re…

I wrote specifically that the early chapters of Genesis date to the exile. The Bible is not a single book. It's really a collection of different works, written over the course of centuries by different people. Different parts date from different eras (and then were subsequently edited over the centuries). > we have direct archeological evidence in the form of dated, physical scrolls. From what I know, only very short…

Sure, I don’t think anybody disputes that the Bible is a not single book written at once.

But the claim that any part of Genesis dates to the Exile is a weak historiographical claim, based primarily on a few pillars of very weak circumstantial evidence: a) we don’t have many physical examples dated to a prior time - but that’s not at all surprising; the vast supermajority of texts don’t survive, and many of the most ancient copies we do have are relatively recent discoveries; b) it makes sense to some people to argue this based on (reasonable) speculation about the development of the Jewish religion and the pressures at different periods of its development and c) as a corollary to b, one mainstream opinion is that Genesis can mostly be attributed to two different sources by a stylistic analysis and one of them is simply believed to date around the Exile.

This corresponds to the general current fads in historiography and history but it is by no means definite, and we shouldn’t be surprised if it is all overturned in a night by a single discovery, as these things very often are. This type of historiography is not really rigorous in a meaningful sense and is based essentially on current academic trends and a few authorities.

So we can safely consider the arguments underlying the dating ourselves without getting in too much trouble, but we don’t even have to do that to address your particular claim that the portions of Genesis must have been devised by an Exilic writer due to Babylonian influence. This essentially requires engaging in a deliberate pious fraud, which then was taken up by the other Israelites without question and who accepted the new stories with no recorded debate, and which also received no pushback when the Israelites who did not go into Exile. We would expect the possibility of diverging traditions on this point, but for example, the Samaritans have precisely the same story on this point, although the dating of that is also a point of contention. Either way, we should keep in mind that only some Israelites went into Exile, and plenty remained in Israel and Judah and maintained their traditions through the 70 year Exile.

It’s possible that this did happen. But it’s also the case that Babylonian contact was not new in the Exile period. The Israelites didn’t exist in a vacuum, they were part of the tapestry of the wider Semitic world for their entire existence and would have had familiarity with all these stories and beliefs the entire time. Indeed, it’s most commonly believed that the Israelite religion was not unique, but a simple development into monotheism from a normal localized Canaanite religion. And indeed, at some point, they all shared a common origin. Rather than adapting a Sumerian-via-Babylon story in a very late period, it’s a much more parsimonious explanation that some version of the story always existed amongst the Israelites in their oral tradition regardless of when it was committed to writing.

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