Comment by aetherson
7 hours ago
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.
One is not like the other.
We have no idea when the Rāmāyaṇa was composed or who composed it. We traditionally attribute it to Vālmīki and call him the ādikavi and the work the ādikāvyam -- first poet and first piece of poetry respectively. The entire set up presents it as the story of a man named Rāma.
The poet specifically says in the fifth sarga of the Bālakāṇḍa:
तदिदं वर्तयिष्यामि सर्वं निखिलमादितः।
धर्मकामार्थसहितं श्रोतव्यमनसूयया॥ ४
"Now I shall recite the entire thing from start to end. As it relates to dharma, kāma and artha, it should be heard without complaint/malice/envy/etc."
The neo-Western standard of written or epigraphic evidence being the only real evidence was not really that relevant in the ancient world. Hinduism itself is based on the concept of time as a cycle instead of the linearity that is common in Western religions.
So, the story could have received its present form some time in the past 3-4K years, and has been fiddled with by grammar-obsessed scribes across the country over the past 2K years, but it could encode memories from a time long before that. The story has many fantastical elements like the tale of Sagara and his 60K sons and the descent of the river Gaṅgā from the heavens, but it is much more reserved in other aspects. The etymology of the term vānara itself is debatable. Has it been derived from narō vā (is it a man/human)? Or vanam + naraḥ (forest + man = forest dweller)?
Not that I 100% believe that the Vanaras were cultural memories of Neanderthals, but it's pretty hard to prove or disprove this. Maybe they were. Maybe a whole bunch of stories we tell throughout the world are cultural memories of events long past.
I kinda choose to somewhat believe in this hypothesis because it's mighty fun, and makes the past look so much more romantic!
Equally, you and I can't prove that hindu myth isn't a record of contact with advanced space aliens, and wouldn't it have been fun if it was.
But it's implausible for all kinds of basic reasons.
It's just clear all throughout history that humans do not have trouble making up fantastic creatures. There's no reason to think that these fantastic creatures weren't made up. It just seems at first blush that there might be a reason because it was "very long ago." Until you realize that "very long ago" by the standards of hindu myth are wildly different than "very long ago" by the standards of hominid species.
I am not talking about what might actually have been; but merely pointing to parallels in one specific culture which has maintained links to its hoary past via oral and then written literature.
> The vanaras were probably conceived of around let's say generously 3000 years ago.
No, that is purely your speculation since we don't have evidence one way or the other.
> it's not much different from claiming that Tolkien's orcs and elves were part of some kind of historical memory of hominids.
This is the oft made comparison which is a meaningless red herring, since we know Tolkien wrote his stories in modern times (20th century). Not so with Sanskrit literature; they are accumulations over time, first orally and then written down gradually.
One must not be glib in dismissing ancient narratives/myths/stories, and equally, accept it as fact without thought and corroboration (of whatever type).
David Frawley coined "Frawley's Paradox" w.r.t. Sanskrit literature vs. Archaeology, where on the one hand you have a massive corpus of quite advanced texts on various subjects, while on the other hand, you have evidence of advanced civilizations (Indus valley, Harappa etc.) with no decipherable/surviving textual evidence.
If you now consider the various ancient vernacular languages (i.e. Prakrits and Proto-Dravidian) their actual archaeological evidence predates Sanskrit!
It is all highly fascinating and gives one a lot of food for thought as we add to history using modern means. But as i said in the beginning, we should not limit ourselves to archaeology exclusively, but look at the sum total of what a culture says about itself and has maintained over time w.r.t. linguistics/literature/narratives/myths etc.