Comment by rramadass

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.