Comment by rramadass
1 day ago
One thing that i think should be considered in human archaeology is the narratives/stories/myths from different cultures featuring "different sorts of people". Many were handed down orally from the misty past before being written down and hence may contain some truths to them.
We are often quick to dismiss them as mere fanciful story-telling of primitive cultures but i am not so sure.
I have a soft spot for such folklore. Strictly speaking, much doesn't hold up to scrutiny but I see no wrong with wild conjecture for the fun of it.
For starters, some catastrophes do shine through more recent history:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flood_myths
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter_of_536
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
Then, Nuclear Evangelism is a fun idea, proposing a religion teaching us to stay away from nuclear waste for 10k years: https://www.nahomatsuda.com/nuclear-evangelism
Or you can poke around linguistics
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_linguistics
- https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/does-your-name-belong-...
The Arthurian legends and Robin Hood are two English-speaking examples of folklore snowballing into what we have today. I bet James Bond will join them in a few hundred year's time.
You are mixing up a lot of timelines (mostly in AD) and hence not a good comparison.
I am talking about records from 5000-7000BC (deducing from Sanskrit literature) by which time they had already been orally transmitted for eons. So they are truly ancient with layers upon layers of grafting of realities/myths/stories over time.
Some Aboriginal Australian cultures have folklore describing the rise of sea levels at the end of the last ice age. Also, Songlines are fascinating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songline
It is really not far-fetched that these passages describe some ancient memories of coexisting with another quasi-human race. And certainly the narrative of interbreeding is tantalizing. Perhaps if it did not actually happen this way, we believe it now, because many Christians would need to interpolte truth about the past and reconcile these passages.
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/genesis/6?1
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/ezekiel/32?27
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/numbers/13?33
It can be no coincidence that George Lucas chose to name his antagonist "Anakin", taking this Hebrew word from the ancient race of quasi-human adversaries. Perhaps the very narrative of Darth Vader's fatherhood and clash with the peace-loving, spiritual Luke and rebels, is a recapitulation of humanity's own struggle with our brutal Neanderthal past.
Agreed. Considering the range from neaderthals to homo florensis etc...
Floriensis is a particularly good one, due to the Ebu Gogo mythology - and they seemingly died out 50kya ago. The locals specifically didn’t have giant humans in their mythology, rather tiny ones.
And then you go look at where there were Denisovans and Neanderthals, and those cultures have mythologies with trolls and ogres.
The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence - in fact, it is speculated that floriensis perhaps hung on much, much later than 50kya ago - and I see no reason the same shouldn’t apply to Neanderthals or denisovans.
On a similar note - cultural memory runs deep. Take hill forts in the U.K. for instance. Commonly accepted as defensive structures. Except… the populations of these places, the topography, all of it, made them pretty crap defences - and the top of a windy hill, far from water, isn’t such a great place to live. So why? My take: the doggerland flood, and cultural memory. When the sea is slowly encroaching, building on top of a hill, building a dyke, a berm, sensible.
5000 years later, still doing the same thing. Why? Nobody quite remembers, but it’s important.
They don't live on top of the hill, all the time. The local chief, maybe. It is a defensive place to retreat to when under attack.
In the Hindu Sanskrit literature of Itihasas and Puranas it is actually made explicit that Humans ("Manusya/Manava" in Sanskrit) are distinct from other beings (eg. "Devas/Asuras/Vanaras/Gandharvas" etc. in Sanskrit), each with their own specific characteristics. And also there are plenty of stories of interbreeding amongst them.
It is fascinating to note that the distinctions are pretty clearcut throughout the vast corpus which implies it was common and wellknown at that time. There seem to be some good parallels to our anthropological knowledge of different Homo species.
In particular, the "Vanaras" were a humanoid ape-like species who have all the human psychological characteristics but with ape-like physiology. This was one source of inspiration (amongst others) for the "Na'vi" in James Cameron's Avatar movies.
The vanaras were probably conceived of around let's say generously 3000 years ago. Neanderthals disappeared about 40,000 years ago. You live ten times closer in timeline to the original Ramayana story than neanderthals did.
It's just not very plausible that hindu mythology is a corrupted record of living with multiple species of hominids. Timeline-wise, it's not much different from claiming that Tolkien's orcs and elves were part of some kind of historical memory of hominids.
2 replies →
Those myths and legends are old enough to contain traces of shared Indo-European beliefs, so the real old stuff should be found, in some form, in other cultures, like Greek or Norse mythology. But I don't think it is true in this case
2 replies →