Going to go out on a personal opinion limb here, but I think we dismiss far too much in archaeology and ancient recorded history, even with the evidence all around us. I predict one day there will be a great revival in archaeology as we start to cast off our erroneous assumptions about native peoples stories of their history.
A few Examples that have really stuck in my mind:
The recorded history of the Egyptians says their dynasties go back FAR longer than is accepted by modern Egyptology, yet we dismiss it. The water erosion on the sphynx, as well as the change in flow of the Nile away from some of thier earlier cities, backs up their claim. Techniques to "carbon date" stone have been dismissed largely because they tell us some structures are much older than we think. Not possible therefore the science must be wrong... but what if its the other way around?
Plato describes Atlantis in great detail, which was passed down to him from his elders. We actually know of a site that matches his description exactly in Mauritania, deep in the Sahara, which would have been an island 12 thousand years ago when seas were higher. It has all the exact dimensions he described correct and geography correct, has the same stone color as he described their buildings, has the springs on the central island, is beyond the straits of Gibraltar, and has plenty of artifacts strewn everywhere, yet we still dismiss it as a tall tale and no one will dig there:
You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to take this stuff seriously. More than likely they were just a civilization advanced for their time (maybe Roman era advanced) but something happened to them. The Richat is likely a natural volcanic anomaly that they simply built on.
Plenty more where that came from that challenge our recorded history:
And to top it all off, I think most likely the Younger Dryas Impact Event described by Randal Carlson (great Joe Rogan Podcast about this out there) is the "Flood" event recorded by multiple cultures and responsible for wiping out traces of civilization past 12,000 years ago. This 12,000 year number recurs over an over when we talk about these sites that defy the narrative that it all started in Mesopotamia:
You definitely have to be a conspiracy theorist to buy any of the myriad contemporary Atlantis myths and the veracity of Plato's claims. The history podcast Our Fake History has an excellent three episode arc about Atlantis, including Plato's account.
The upshot is that his account does not match up with any real world location, unless you are willing to engage in cherry-picking and an extremely generous interpretation of various things, and there is no credible explain of how he alone could have gained such detailed knowledge of a civilisation that existed thousands of years before his birth. One which no other historical writer mentioned.
In reality, Plato's description of "Atlantis" was considered as plainly allegorical by his contemporaries and subsequent scholars. A situation that continued for hundreds of years, and only began to change in the relatively recent past, with the rise of pseudo-history and conspiracy theorists.
You absolutely don't need to buy into the fanciful myths of Atlantis to speculate that is probably was an ancient bronze age city located at the Richat.
I assume you are aware of and have real refutations for the proposition that the Eye of the Sahara could be a location for Atlantis?
And you are absolutely incorrect about Plato's description being considered allegory at the time. Anyone during his time could have gone to Egypt and asked the same questions Solon did and gotten the same answer from the same temple.
You are repeating wrote cultural knowledge as if you had real research to back it up.
"definitely have to be a conspiracy theorist" might be going to far. History gets a major rewrite every so often somehow at each turn there's no room for heterodoxy . . .
The whole field is full of dogmatists. The timeline of human history probably looks a lot different than the one we have written in textbooks.
_But_, take any of Graham Hancock's claims with a spoon-full of salt. He's not from a scientific background nor has he published any scientific work. It's easy to be lulled by the grandeur of the tales he tells on JRE.
Although I never mentioned Hancock, I don't buy much of what Hancock is selling. They originally just had Randall on, then later they had Randall and Hancock. I think Randalls research has WAY more foundation to it, and Hancock is riding his coat tails. I do find his commentary intriguing sometimes.
Tangentially related and may be of interest, I was recently reading about the Ramayana (or Ramakien), and reference to "Vimana"[1] ancient flying ship-palaces.
Compare contrast Lucian of Samosata's "True History", sometimes considered the prototypical sci-fi story, describes a lunar voyage borne on wind and water (I am reminded of a taller ladder to the moon),
"a waterspout suddenly came upon us, which swept the ship round and up to a height of some three hundred and fifty miles above the earth. She did not fall back into the sea, but was suspended aloft, and at the same time carried along by a wind which struck and filled the sails...it was an island with air for sea, glistening, spherical, and bathed in light"[2]
That's true. Until it was discovered, Troy was considered to be mythical. Now most people think we have Homeric Troy.¹
But how far do we go? We practically have the specifications for Noah's ark ² - so do you expect us to find it, large enough to house every animal except dinosaurs, cruelly left out? ³
So at first I thought you made a pretty good case, but I don't know, man. There's a lot of weird stories that are super specific, like the one I just quoted.
² https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+6&versi... - "The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits. A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it..." etc.
On the Egyptians...only Manetho claims this; he lines up all the dynasties in sequential order to make it appear Egypt went that far back. When everybody knew at the time, and even more so today, that many dynasties ruled concurrently. So...there is that.
Another item is dating based on the stars. If you want to record a date you can record the position of the stars and planets. Such dating is attempted for the mahabharata and other Indian epics, but the language is very flowery so it is difficult to ascertain exactly.
To be fair the local people seem pretty close-minded about the origins of Gunung Padang. The local scientific community insists most of it is natural, and that because they found later evidence of less advanced technology, it is then impossible there was a more advanced culture previously there. However, this has been known to happen over and over again, with the most known example being the Mayans. At the same time, for a body of scientists, they seem pretty uninterested in finding the truth.
> At the same time, for a body of scientists, they seem pretty uninterested in finding the truth.
There's no reason anyone who believes the accepted truth is wrong can't go do some research to prove otherwise. (Like Schliemann did.)
Expecting others to be obliged to investigate one's own crackpot theories isn't fair. Their reluctance to do so is not evidence of a conspiracy against the truth.
For example, in the 1970's a popular theory was that 100 mpg carburetors existed, and a vast conspiracy by Big Oil was suppressing all information about them. The proof of this conspiracy was, naturally, nobody was able to find any evidence of such carburetors.
Just to add to that, scientists (especially young ones) would love to make their careers by proving existing theories wrong. Every physicist wants to be Einstein, every archaeologist wants to find a lost city, etc.
It always amazes me why historians and researchers start with the assumption that any tale from the past is fanciful until proven otherwise. We have little to no proof that our very distant ancestors sat around making up stories for the fun of it and then passing them on to future generations, when they'd surely be more likely to pass on useful information that keeps the tribe alive. Yes there will be embelishments, but we seem to treat everything from before the last couple if hundred years as total lies.
What I was taught is that ancient peoples did not look at history the way we look at it. When I open a book by a modern historian, I assume the book will be about things that actually happened, how they actually happened, why they actually happened, the correct order in which they actually happened, etc. I expect the historian will tell me when there is ambiguity or uncertainty.
Ancient historians would think this is nonsense. The point of writing history is not the events themselves, it is not to get down on paper what actually happened. What kind of idiot would want something like that? No, the point of writing history is to share a message. Often they would draw parallels between two events to explain something. Now they might need to greatly fudge, exaggerate, change the order, etc. of those two events in order to make everything to fit, but that is fine. The actual events that happened is not important, it is the truth (i.e., the point the historian is trying to get across) that is what is important. The events themselves are not the message, the message is served by the telling of the events, even if the telling is not 100% accurate (as we would see it).
and of course, modern 'history' is also suffused with, uh, spin. Classic recent example : the profound differences in Cold War history as told by each 'side'
I can also think of a concrete example from when I was in middle school : Shay's Rebellion was presented in history class in a completely different light to the way I've come to understand it from independent reading [i.e., in school we learned that Shay's guys were rogues as opposed to folks [generally Rev. War vets] unjustly dispossessed by (among other economic factors) ill effects of speculative investment in government assets and misguided fiscal + tax policy]
That might be the main difference. They would have considered the idea of "preserving your history" to be not worth considering. It didn't seem to be something they valued (at least in the sense we understand it).
The bias you are falling for is the assumption that what you are reading when you open said history book is not just generally about things that actually happened, but far more importantly not just "how they actually happened, why they actually happened" but what has been omitted and left out intentionally to frame a certain narrative that is not in line with the interests of those who make you believe the history book you are opening is 100% accurate.
The difference being that far more in the past where there was an inherent interest in preserving the accuracy of certain classes of events where self-interests demanded and required accuracy, today what you think you are reading, whose accuracy is assumed by proximity to criteria that are surely far more accurate (i.e., order of things that were not fantasy), there is an inherent incentive to distort the perspective because those who record and disseminate the "history" are far less likely also self-interested in actual accuracy of the history. It's essentially the "to the winners go the myths and legends" problem. The accuracy of events actually goes down in many different ways when you start muddling interests as modern society has. Do you ever think, e.g., that we would have written a history in which the enemy is the "good guy", but we just happened to win the war? Reality though is that the history you read assumes an accuracy through formality or deliberateness ... it is the same reason that so many people are conned into thinking that NPR and the mainstream media are somehow inherently more accurate or right, let alone just not devious, because they talk in a deliberate and calm and precise tone.
In many ways the very precision the western world has obsessed about is contributing to the very corruption of its soul because we are obsessed with procedure and process to such a blinding and OCD degree that we miss the underlying message and lessons. It's a rather mentally unhealthy mentality that insists on the "accuracy" that "not all of those who want to conquer us have killed us yet...", thus, post hoc ergo propter hoc, "...our enemies are also just like us because they say they are and we believe their words over their actions". It's an odd obsession with formality and process that has totally negated spirit and emotion and just plain and simply most fundamental and instinctual self-preservation.
So here we are and instead of having learned a history that makes us realize that "socialism" is not about being social and friendly, and communism is not about being a community even if specific details are not perfectly captured; we say, "well, since they have not been done properly we will give it all another go."
Unless we think gods, talking animals, totems, spirits are real we've learned that many stories are embellished.
Another way to look at it that boring factual recipes and rules were not fun to tell and remember but the ones with drama and extra flourish were. So those are the ones that survived better.
Embellished is not the same as made up. Adam could be a real person, just obviously not the first man, but the first patriarch recorded by jew tradition, so his story was mixed with the creation tale. Egyptians believed that pharaohs were gods. Talking animals might be a misunderstanding, when animal names were actually monikers for some persons or tribes, etc.
So what is your explanation for the spacefaring journeys through the solar system found within ancient Hindu texts?
Animals do speak, actually. This is something you might not have come to understand or accept yet, but science is no longer able to assert that animals are not communicating in distinct languages. Everywhere we have studied, we have found one.
So the ability to understand an animal and learn its language is absolutely not far fetched, except to the fragile conception of human history that is the Western mind.
> Unless we think gods, talking animals, totems, spirits are real we've learned that many stories are embellished.
Notice, I prefixed it with "unless we think...". Surprisingly some of us do think, so then the statement doesn't apply there. And I suspect this forum is not appropriate to convince otherwise.
> So what is your explanation for the spacefaring journeys through the solar system found within ancient Hindu texts?
Right. Well ancient aliens apparently. It was on History Channel after all.
There is a difference between a useful story and a true story. If some distant ancestors sat around making up a story of how women were created from men, then this story was certainly useful to them in some way and reflected their truth (social structure etc.), but it wasn't a true story.
Well, it depends on what you consider a true story. We think a story is true if it accurately represents what actually happened (as if a camera was filming the event). Ancient peoples would think this is ridiculous. A true story is one that gets the "true" message you want to impart across to the listeners. A person who changes names, places, events, etc. to fit their message is not a liar, they are a historian. Of course we look at that and think its nonsense, just as they would look at the works of our historians and think its nonsense. Which one is right? Of course, we are biased to think we are right.
The ones we didn't burn and the ones we have bothered to actually treat as history rather than random flights of fantasy that humans went to great trouble to document.
For just one of endless examples, do you believe the ancient Greek gods were real? Some stories may indeed have persisted for millenia. But how does one separate those from the fanciful ones? With corroboration.
Because some are true does not mean all ancient stories and myths are true, and one must be careful to not impute meaning that isn't there, i.e. finding pictures in clouds.
I don't have evidence the Ancient Greek gods were/are not real. I do believe they are real in a sense. At least in collective unconscious, they will influence humankind.
Because most tales humans produce right now are fanciful. People in the past told stories for many reasons, survival being one, fun another, their political conflict being yet another.
But also, I am quite confident contemporary researches don't take old tales as total lies, but neither as total truth.
Except that in an orally transmitted culture, stories are _also_ told to communicate actual, factual history.
So the issue is that we no longer communicate our history through stories told out loud and therefore decided not to be able to conceive of any culture actually doing the same.
And those stories transform with needs of each generation. We don't trust what past people wrote about their own history either and not just because of fantastic elements.
You cannot judge another society's approach to history based on how we treat it.
The presumption of rapidly shifting history in orally transmitted culture is being debunked by this and other works. The shame is that if people would just for a second stop coming from places of assumption like the one you have written, we wouldn't need to wait for research to prove it is worth listening to before trying to learn from it.
When the tales violate the laws of physics, the tales are fanciful. Vedic flying palaces for example, involve expense of energy and energy transfer that a high school
student can calculate. Tragically, there is no mention of the energy source in the tales or we could solve our current energy needs.
You're equating our currently accepted laws of physics as being the only true set of physical laws. How naive to assume that what we know now is the only truth.
Much younger than the examples in the article, but rather a lot of Beowulf seems to describe real events. I think the Finnburgh Episode, told as a story inside the story, even gets the names right of the actual people involved.
Ancient writers who estimated population size (sizes of cities/regions/armies/soldiers list in battle) are almost always wrong and almost certainly impossible to have been real. I’m often amazed at is credulous modern people are though when it comes to those ancient estimates (unless it bolsters a modern prejudice).
Some of these seem like, leaps, e.g. is knowledge passed down for 15 millennia really the most likely explanation compared to say, meanings of words changing (like the name of the island used to refer to a promontory on the island before changing in meaning to refer to the island itself)
Even if the general narrative were completely false in a story, some level of ‘realism’ is an almost absolute requirement for a story to be enjoyed and retold.
Just yesterday, I told my two year old a story about how he was playing in the playground with his best friend T-Rex, collecting acorns, and a family of talking squirrels came down and asked if they could have some, then they invited them up to their treehouse to play.
An absurd story, to be sure, but also — the playground was real, acorns are real, squirrels are real, the fact that my son likes to collect acorns is real. There’s lots of true information available in even deeply silly stories.
Maybe analogous to the talking snake in the story of Adam and Eve. Some guy prob got kicked out of a nice place for sleeping with a lady he wasn’t suppose to lol.
These stories are fascinating and I don't doubt there are seeds of very ancient facts preserved for thousands of years in oral traditions.
That said, if we don't have a reliable way of picking these facts out from the rest of the oral tradition, how useful is this knowledge? Its not like we can go through the rest of the dreamtime corpus and select out other long-lost facts.
Which also raises the question - given a big enough oral tradition (assuming for the moment the stories are ALL made up) - what are the chances of finding stories that inadvertently line up with reality?
Would be cool if they provided other examples. The Aboriginal's of australia have the strongest and oldest oral tradition of any culture that I am aware of, so it would be nice to see some other, less obvious, examples.
"Analyzing how stories change in the retelling down through the generations sheds light on the history of human migration going as far back as the Paleolithic period"
Going to go out on a personal opinion limb here, but I think we dismiss far too much in archaeology and ancient recorded history, even with the evidence all around us. I predict one day there will be a great revival in archaeology as we start to cast off our erroneous assumptions about native peoples stories of their history.
A few Examples that have really stuck in my mind:
The recorded history of the Egyptians says their dynasties go back FAR longer than is accepted by modern Egyptology, yet we dismiss it. The water erosion on the sphynx, as well as the change in flow of the Nile away from some of thier earlier cities, backs up their claim. Techniques to "carbon date" stone have been dismissed largely because they tell us some structures are much older than we think. Not possible therefore the science must be wrong... but what if its the other way around?
Plato describes Atlantis in great detail, which was passed down to him from his elders. We actually know of a site that matches his description exactly in Mauritania, deep in the Sahara, which would have been an island 12 thousand years ago when seas were higher. It has all the exact dimensions he described correct and geography correct, has the same stone color as he described their buildings, has the springs on the central island, is beyond the straits of Gibraltar, and has plenty of artifacts strewn everywhere, yet we still dismiss it as a tall tale and no one will dig there:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richat_Structure
You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to take this stuff seriously. More than likely they were just a civilization advanced for their time (maybe Roman era advanced) but something happened to them. The Richat is likely a natural volcanic anomaly that they simply built on.
Plenty more where that came from that challenge our recorded history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunung_Padang_Megalithic_Site
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gornaya_Shoria_megaliths
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobekli_Tepe
And to top it all off, I think most likely the Younger Dryas Impact Event described by Randal Carlson (great Joe Rogan Podcast about this out there) is the "Flood" event recorded by multiple cultures and responsible for wiping out traces of civilization past 12,000 years ago. This 12,000 year number recurs over an over when we talk about these sites that defy the narrative that it all started in Mesopotamia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesi...
Again, personal opinion here, but it sure as hell all lines up.
You definitely have to be a conspiracy theorist to buy any of the myriad contemporary Atlantis myths and the veracity of Plato's claims. The history podcast Our Fake History has an excellent three episode arc about Atlantis, including Plato's account.
https://ourfakehistory.com/index.php/season-2/
The upshot is that his account does not match up with any real world location, unless you are willing to engage in cherry-picking and an extremely generous interpretation of various things, and there is no credible explain of how he alone could have gained such detailed knowledge of a civilisation that existed thousands of years before his birth. One which no other historical writer mentioned.
In reality, Plato's description of "Atlantis" was considered as plainly allegorical by his contemporaries and subsequent scholars. A situation that continued for hundreds of years, and only began to change in the relatively recent past, with the rise of pseudo-history and conspiracy theorists.
Would you have said the same of Troy right up until they found it a few years ago?
Can you point me to where in those podcast they discredit that the Richat structure in Africa does not fit the description of Atlantis?
This documentary is pretty sober and not at all fanciful, lays out how the Richat matches Plato's description exactly:
https://visitingatlantis.com/
You absolutely don't need to buy into the fanciful myths of Atlantis to speculate that is probably was an ancient bronze age city located at the Richat.
I assume you are aware of and have real refutations for the proposition that the Eye of the Sahara could be a location for Atlantis?
And you are absolutely incorrect about Plato's description being considered allegory at the time. Anyone during his time could have gone to Egypt and asked the same questions Solon did and gotten the same answer from the same temple.
You are repeating wrote cultural knowledge as if you had real research to back it up.
"definitely have to be a conspiracy theorist" might be going to far. History gets a major rewrite every so often somehow at each turn there's no room for heterodoxy . . .
The whole field is full of dogmatists. The timeline of human history probably looks a lot different than the one we have written in textbooks.
_But_, take any of Graham Hancock's claims with a spoon-full of salt. He's not from a scientific background nor has he published any scientific work. It's easy to be lulled by the grandeur of the tales he tells on JRE.
Although I never mentioned Hancock, I don't buy much of what Hancock is selling. They originally just had Randall on, then later they had Randall and Hancock. I think Randalls research has WAY more foundation to it, and Hancock is riding his coat tails. I do find his commentary intriguing sometimes.
Tangentially related and may be of interest, I was recently reading about the Ramayana (or Ramakien), and reference to "Vimana"[1] ancient flying ship-palaces.
Compare contrast Lucian of Samosata's "True History", sometimes considered the prototypical sci-fi story, describes a lunar voyage borne on wind and water (I am reminded of a taller ladder to the moon),
"a waterspout suddenly came upon us, which swept the ship round and up to a height of some three hundred and fifty miles above the earth. She did not fall back into the sea, but was suspended aloft, and at the same time carried along by a wind which struck and filled the sails...it was an island with air for sea, glistening, spherical, and bathed in light"[2]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vimana
2. https://lucianofsamosata.info/TheTrueHistory.html
That's true. Until it was discovered, Troy was considered to be mythical. Now most people think we have Homeric Troy.¹
But how far do we go? We practically have the specifications for Noah's ark ² - so do you expect us to find it, large enough to house every animal except dinosaurs, cruelly left out? ³
So at first I thought you made a pretty good case, but I don't know, man. There's a lot of weird stories that are super specific, like the one I just quoted.
--
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy
² https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+6&versi... - "The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits. A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it..." etc.
³ https://alvinalexander.com/sites/default/files/styles/previe...
On the Egyptians...only Manetho claims this; he lines up all the dynasties in sequential order to make it appear Egypt went that far back. When everybody knew at the time, and even more so today, that many dynasties ruled concurrently. So...there is that.
Another item is dating based on the stars. If you want to record a date you can record the position of the stars and planets. Such dating is attempted for the mahabharata and other Indian epics, but the language is very flowery so it is difficult to ascertain exactly.
To be fair the local people seem pretty close-minded about the origins of Gunung Padang. The local scientific community insists most of it is natural, and that because they found later evidence of less advanced technology, it is then impossible there was a more advanced culture previously there. However, this has been known to happen over and over again, with the most known example being the Mayans. At the same time, for a body of scientists, they seem pretty uninterested in finding the truth.
> At the same time, for a body of scientists, they seem pretty uninterested in finding the truth.
There's no reason anyone who believes the accepted truth is wrong can't go do some research to prove otherwise. (Like Schliemann did.)
Expecting others to be obliged to investigate one's own crackpot theories isn't fair. Their reluctance to do so is not evidence of a conspiracy against the truth.
For example, in the 1970's a popular theory was that 100 mpg carburetors existed, and a vast conspiracy by Big Oil was suppressing all information about them. The proof of this conspiracy was, naturally, nobody was able to find any evidence of such carburetors.
Just to add to that, scientists (especially young ones) would love to make their careers by proving existing theories wrong. Every physicist wants to be Einstein, every archaeologist wants to find a lost city, etc.
It always amazes me why historians and researchers start with the assumption that any tale from the past is fanciful until proven otherwise. We have little to no proof that our very distant ancestors sat around making up stories for the fun of it and then passing them on to future generations, when they'd surely be more likely to pass on useful information that keeps the tribe alive. Yes there will be embelishments, but we seem to treat everything from before the last couple if hundred years as total lies.
What I was taught is that ancient peoples did not look at history the way we look at it. When I open a book by a modern historian, I assume the book will be about things that actually happened, how they actually happened, why they actually happened, the correct order in which they actually happened, etc. I expect the historian will tell me when there is ambiguity or uncertainty.
Ancient historians would think this is nonsense. The point of writing history is not the events themselves, it is not to get down on paper what actually happened. What kind of idiot would want something like that? No, the point of writing history is to share a message. Often they would draw parallels between two events to explain something. Now they might need to greatly fudge, exaggerate, change the order, etc. of those two events in order to make everything to fit, but that is fine. The actual events that happened is not important, it is the truth (i.e., the point the historian is trying to get across) that is what is important. The events themselves are not the message, the message is served by the telling of the events, even if the telling is not 100% accurate (as we would see it).
and of course, modern 'history' is also suffused with, uh, spin. Classic recent example : the profound differences in Cold War history as told by each 'side'
I can also think of a concrete example from when I was in middle school : Shay's Rebellion was presented in history class in a completely different light to the way I've come to understand it from independent reading [i.e., in school we learned that Shay's guys were rogues as opposed to folks [generally Rev. War vets] unjustly dispossessed by (among other economic factors) ill effects of speculative investment in government assets and misguided fiscal + tax policy]
When the only means of preserving your history is to speak it truthfully, that's what you do.
That might be the main difference. They would have considered the idea of "preserving your history" to be not worth considering. It didn't seem to be something they valued (at least in the sense we understand it).
That's entirely the cultural bias of treating other humans as savage and primitive and not listening to a word they say.
They were hardly primitive, they just valued things differently than we do. Having a different value system doesn't make them savages.
The bias you are falling for is the assumption that what you are reading when you open said history book is not just generally about things that actually happened, but far more importantly not just "how they actually happened, why they actually happened" but what has been omitted and left out intentionally to frame a certain narrative that is not in line with the interests of those who make you believe the history book you are opening is 100% accurate.
The difference being that far more in the past where there was an inherent interest in preserving the accuracy of certain classes of events where self-interests demanded and required accuracy, today what you think you are reading, whose accuracy is assumed by proximity to criteria that are surely far more accurate (i.e., order of things that were not fantasy), there is an inherent incentive to distort the perspective because those who record and disseminate the "history" are far less likely also self-interested in actual accuracy of the history. It's essentially the "to the winners go the myths and legends" problem. The accuracy of events actually goes down in many different ways when you start muddling interests as modern society has. Do you ever think, e.g., that we would have written a history in which the enemy is the "good guy", but we just happened to win the war? Reality though is that the history you read assumes an accuracy through formality or deliberateness ... it is the same reason that so many people are conned into thinking that NPR and the mainstream media are somehow inherently more accurate or right, let alone just not devious, because they talk in a deliberate and calm and precise tone.
In many ways the very precision the western world has obsessed about is contributing to the very corruption of its soul because we are obsessed with procedure and process to such a blinding and OCD degree that we miss the underlying message and lessons. It's a rather mentally unhealthy mentality that insists on the "accuracy" that "not all of those who want to conquer us have killed us yet...", thus, post hoc ergo propter hoc, "...our enemies are also just like us because they say they are and we believe their words over their actions". It's an odd obsession with formality and process that has totally negated spirit and emotion and just plain and simply most fundamental and instinctual self-preservation.
So here we are and instead of having learned a history that makes us realize that "socialism" is not about being social and friendly, and communism is not about being a community even if specific details are not perfectly captured; we say, "well, since they have not been done properly we will give it all another go."
Unless we think gods, talking animals, totems, spirits are real we've learned that many stories are embellished.
Another way to look at it that boring factual recipes and rules were not fun to tell and remember but the ones with drama and extra flourish were. So those are the ones that survived better.
Embellished is not the same as made up. Adam could be a real person, just obviously not the first man, but the first patriarch recorded by jew tradition, so his story was mixed with the creation tale. Egyptians believed that pharaohs were gods. Talking animals might be a misunderstanding, when animal names were actually monikers for some persons or tribes, etc.
So what is your explanation for the spacefaring journeys through the solar system found within ancient Hindu texts?
Animals do speak, actually. This is something you might not have come to understand or accept yet, but science is no longer able to assert that animals are not communicating in distinct languages. Everywhere we have studied, we have found one.
So the ability to understand an animal and learn its language is absolutely not far fetched, except to the fragile conception of human history that is the Western mind.
> Unless we think gods, talking animals, totems, spirits are real we've learned that many stories are embellished.
Notice, I prefixed it with "unless we think...". Surprisingly some of us do think, so then the statement doesn't apply there. And I suspect this forum is not appropriate to convince otherwise.
> So what is your explanation for the spacefaring journeys through the solar system found within ancient Hindu texts?
Right. Well ancient aliens apparently. It was on History Channel after all.
My point is that space travel would have been considered high fantasy aka impossible during previous eras of scientific reasoning.
And yet now we know that it is indeed possible, and are close to achieving it ourselves.
What is your explanation of for the ancient spacefaring journeys through a distant galaxy found in the works of the modern sage Lucas?
There is a difference between a useful story and a true story. If some distant ancestors sat around making up a story of how women were created from men, then this story was certainly useful to them in some way and reflected their truth (social structure etc.), but it wasn't a true story.
Well, it depends on what you consider a true story. We think a story is true if it accurately represents what actually happened (as if a camera was filming the event). Ancient peoples would think this is ridiculous. A true story is one that gets the "true" message you want to impart across to the listeners. A person who changes names, places, events, etc. to fit their message is not a liar, they are a historian. Of course we look at that and think its nonsense, just as they would look at the works of our historians and think its nonsense. Which one is right? Of course, we are biased to think we are right.
> Ancient peoples would think this is ridiculous.
How would we conclude what ancient people think?
Because they tell us in their writings.
The ones we didn't burn and the ones we have bothered to actually treat as history rather than random flights of fantasy that humans went to great trouble to document.
For just one of endless examples, do you believe the ancient Greek gods were real? Some stories may indeed have persisted for millenia. But how does one separate those from the fanciful ones? With corroboration.
Because some are true does not mean all ancient stories and myths are true, and one must be careful to not impute meaning that isn't there, i.e. finding pictures in clouds.
And conversely just because one story is not 100% true doesn't mean that every story is not true, which is what most academics appear to assume.
I don't have evidence the Ancient Greek gods were/are not real. I do believe they are real in a sense. At least in collective unconscious, they will influence humankind.
I don't have any evidence that I'm a (buggy) computer simulation, either. But that's not reason to believe that I am one.
> I do believe they are real in a sense.
Which ones are real, the Greek gods or the Norse gods?
Both
The ancient Greeks spent a lot of time looking for rational explanations for ancient stories.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euhemerism
Because most tales humans produce right now are fanciful. People in the past told stories for many reasons, survival being one, fun another, their political conflict being yet another.
But also, I am quite confident contemporary researches don't take old tales as total lies, but neither as total truth.
Except that in an orally transmitted culture, stories are _also_ told to communicate actual, factual history.
So the issue is that we no longer communicate our history through stories told out loud and therefore decided not to be able to conceive of any culture actually doing the same.
And those stories transform with needs of each generation. We don't trust what past people wrote about their own history either and not just because of fantastic elements.
You cannot judge another society's approach to history based on how we treat it.
The presumption of rapidly shifting history in orally transmitted culture is being debunked by this and other works. The shame is that if people would just for a second stop coming from places of assumption like the one you have written, we wouldn't need to wait for research to prove it is worth listening to before trying to learn from it.
HN, 4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18216459 - Our (most likely) distant ancestor made up a ridiculous story for the fun of it and got it published.
When the tales violate the laws of physics, the tales are fanciful. Vedic flying palaces for example, involve expense of energy and energy transfer that a high school student can calculate. Tragically, there is no mention of the energy source in the tales or we could solve our current energy needs.
You're equating our currently accepted laws of physics as being the only true set of physical laws. How naive to assume that what we know now is the only truth.
Much younger than the examples in the article, but rather a lot of Beowulf seems to describe real events. I think the Finnburgh Episode, told as a story inside the story, even gets the names right of the actual people involved.
Ancient writers who estimated population size (sizes of cities/regions/armies/soldiers list in battle) are almost always wrong and almost certainly impossible to have been real. I’m often amazed at is credulous modern people are though when it comes to those ancient estimates (unless it bolsters a modern prejudice).
Some of these seem like, leaps, e.g. is knowledge passed down for 15 millennia really the most likely explanation compared to say, meanings of words changing (like the name of the island used to refer to a promontory on the island before changing in meaning to refer to the island itself)
Even if the general narrative were completely false in a story, some level of ‘realism’ is an almost absolute requirement for a story to be enjoyed and retold.
Just yesterday, I told my two year old a story about how he was playing in the playground with his best friend T-Rex, collecting acorns, and a family of talking squirrels came down and asked if they could have some, then they invited them up to their treehouse to play.
An absurd story, to be sure, but also — the playground was real, acorns are real, squirrels are real, the fact that my son likes to collect acorns is real. There’s lots of true information available in even deeply silly stories.
Wait -- talking squirrels are real? I knew it!
Maybe analogous to the talking snake in the story of Adam and Eve. Some guy prob got kicked out of a nice place for sleeping with a lady he wasn’t suppose to lol.
These stories are fascinating and I don't doubt there are seeds of very ancient facts preserved for thousands of years in oral traditions.
That said, if we don't have a reliable way of picking these facts out from the rest of the oral tradition, how useful is this knowledge? Its not like we can go through the rest of the dreamtime corpus and select out other long-lost facts.
Which also raises the question - given a big enough oral tradition (assuming for the moment the stories are ALL made up) - what are the chances of finding stories that inadvertently line up with reality?
Would be cool if they provided other examples. The Aboriginal's of australia have the strongest and oldest oral tradition of any culture that I am aware of, so it would be nice to see some other, less obvious, examples.
From the third paragraph of the article: Another such oral history surrounds the Klamath people of Oregon, in the western U.S.
really good related article: http://web.archive.org/web/20161006142042/https://www.scient...
"Analyzing how stories change in the retelling down through the generations sheds light on the history of human migration going as far back as the Paleolithic period"
archive.org because of the paywall