Is it just me, or is it vaguely racist how dismissive that article was of “ancient civilizations” and the idea that indigenous myths might be retellings of the Younger Dryas impacts? I feel like there’s always aggressive pushback from “modern scientists” whenever the idea comes up that indigenous myths speak of real historical events. It feels like, in the US and Canada particularly, Native Americans aren’t allowed to have histories - that the history of Native Americans began when white settlers arrived to write those histories down. They want to pretend the thousands of years of history passed down through tribal oral traditions never existed at all and Native peoples simply existed, like animals, without memory of past or hope of future, until civilized Europeans brought history to the Americas. When what really happened was most of the people who remembered those oral traditions died in the colonial apocalypse, and those settlers danced on the graves of history.
All that is to say, the science might be one way or another, but the dismissive attitude taken towards oral tradition and mythic history really rubs me the wrong way.
Have you ever played the telephone game? Things change as people retell a story. Science is based on information directly from the source. It has to be verifiable. It’s ok to use the stories to learn about a culture and their history, but they aren’t suitable for science.
Yeah but you can gleam certain real details by listening to all the stories.
All the stories are going to be unique and different but if they share certain details repeatedly then you can generally assume those details as being actual events rather than just mythology.
Like if every story you hear talks about a mountain breaking and breathing fire you can logically assume there was a volcanic eruption. If every story talks about the earth splitting apart and swallowing buildings whole you can logically assume there was an earthquake.
People didn’t always know what certain natural disasters were or why they happened so they would create stories to explain them. Sometimes those stories are simply explained in such a way that a modern person couldn’t possibly understand the meaning behind them.
Like sacrificing someone to a volcano to appease the fire god. The fire god is the volcano itself and they’re just trying to keep it from erupting and killing them all.
There are a number of examples of oral traditions including description of events a few hundred years prior. Further than that, and stuff tends to be garbled enough that it’s tough to tell whether people are talking about the same event
Is it just me, or is it vaguely racist how dismissive that article was of “ancient civilizations” and the idea that indigenous myths might be retellings of the Younger Dryas impacts? I feel like there’s always aggressive pushback from “modern scientists” whenever the idea comes up that indigenous myths speak of real historical events. It feels like, in the US and Canada particularly, Native Americans aren’t allowed to have histories - that the history of Native Americans began when white settlers arrived to write those histories down. They want to pretend the thousands of years of history passed down through tribal oral traditions never existed at all and Native peoples simply existed, like animals, without memory of past or hope of future, until civilized Europeans brought history to the Americas. When what really happened was most of the people who remembered those oral traditions died in the colonial apocalypse, and those settlers danced on the graves of history.
All that is to say, the science might be one way or another, but the dismissive attitude taken towards oral tradition and mythic history really rubs me the wrong way.
It is not just you. Two posts down on my feed, there’s a post about an article describing ancient European societies as sophisticated.
Have you ever played the telephone game? Things change as people retell a story. Science is based on information directly from the source. It has to be verifiable. It’s ok to use the stories to learn about a culture and their history, but they aren’t suitable for science.
Yeah but you can gleam certain real details by listening to all the stories.
All the stories are going to be unique and different but if they share certain details repeatedly then you can generally assume those details as being actual events rather than just mythology.
Like if every story you hear talks about a mountain breaking and breathing fire you can logically assume there was a volcanic eruption. If every story talks about the earth splitting apart and swallowing buildings whole you can logically assume there was an earthquake.
People didn’t always know what certain natural disasters were or why they happened so they would create stories to explain them. Sometimes those stories are simply explained in such a way that a modern person couldn’t possibly understand the meaning behind them.
Like sacrificing someone to a volcano to appease the fire god. The fire god is the volcano itself and they’re just trying to keep it from erupting and killing them all.
There are a number of examples of oral traditions including description of events a few hundred years prior. Further than that, and stuff tends to be garbled enough that it’s tough to tell whether people are talking about the same event