Edit: full paper is freely available on Nature here:
The slightly charred ends of the sticks had been cut specially to stick into the fire, and both were coated in human or animal fat."
That's rather more than circumstantial evidence. Granted the ritual might have changed a bit over 12,000 odd years but where else have you seen people poke sticks into tiny hearth's?
Circumstantial evidence is not “weak evidence”, it is evidence concerning the circumstances.
For instance, DNA is circumstantial evidence. It’s evidence that can imply a connection between events, but it is not proof of such a connection. Fingerprints: circumstantial. Call logs: often circumstantial.
The opposite of circumstantial evidence is direct evidence. Direct evidence is rarer and often not as useful. Direct evidence would be an actual witness to the event. To call back to prior examples:
Fingerprints are direct evidence someone touched something. But they are circumstantial evidence they then used that object in commission of a crime.
Here, the direct evidence is that things were burned and sticks were sharpened. The circumstances in which they were found implies the rest.
So, for instance, you could have a murder, and the prime suspect's fingerprints were found at the scene and on the murder weapon too. However, an eyewitness testifies that he saw the murder committed not by the prime suspect, but instead by furry space aliens who then departed in their UFO. We're supposed to believe the witness?
After all the knowledge we have now about how utterly unreliable and frankly worthless most human testimony is, you'd think our courts would stop treating it as worthy of a conviction.
If you get further away from historical records, it does get more tenuous, but there is often a solid basis of scientific or technical evidence. My own doctorate is in use of physics for dating by thermoluminescence and optically stimulated luminescence, which together cover a lot of ground for stuff that cannot be dated by C14. There are several quantitative techniques like that, for instance for isotopic analysis which can be used for deducing trade routes. There are also many qualitative and semi-quantitative techniques, varying from traditional trenches and ground penetrating radar to pollen analysis (which gives you information on climate and ground cover).
However all of this has to be tied together in to a picture of human culture. That necessarily has a large element of interpretation. This is not unique - you can see the same pattern in fields like astronomy. Generally I think archaeologists are reasonably good at knowing when they are on uncertain ground. If I may give an example: in Scotland, mainly on the north west coasts, there are the remains of pre-historic buildings called brochs. The biggest stands 40' high, and it is possible to walk up through the stairs between the double walls to the top. We know roughly when they were built, but not why. There are several theories, but I find it interesting that there is an absence of dogmatic assertion that one particular interpretation is true, and it is still possible to have a sensible discussion about a "fringe" theory (my own idea is that some of them may have been for excarnation) which will centre on what evidence you might need to search for (bone fragments in this case).
This sounds more like a birthday paradox. There are so many rituals and superstitions in indigenous peoples over the millennia that it would be shocking if you could never find cases of things that looked vaguely similar when reduced to an archaeological residue and you cast a net as wide as 'anything which anyone has ever described which sounds similar no matter how many millennia'.
(I would also note that 'fat smeared on stuff and involving fires' is not nearly as rare as it might sound. Fat is important and used in many sacrifices or medicines - eg Homer, with all that fat wrapped on or stacked on top of bones in a holocaust to the gods.)
Humans are a story based species...always have been always will be. Stories are our weak spot, the ultimate attack/control vector.
Stories (and LLM 'story models') can be fine tuned and A/B tested against humans with live neural monitoring to evaluate narrative effectiveness.
Donald Trump can tell a story (which is what all humans run on) adequate to motivate thousands of people up to no good to descend upon the nation's capital, do you think LLM's (science, etc) can compete in that specific arena/domain, at that level? (To be fair though, the Normies have been motivated to do more than a few silly things themselves by their trainers. Donald is good, but he ain't the best.)
There are readings of brain activity, and then there is brain activity that causes humans to do particular things with their bodies. One of these is more powerful than the other.
(Pardon for the vitriol, no offense intended.)
> FY2012 budget states a plan to “initiate investigations into the relationship between…neurotransmitters such as oxytocin, emotion-cognition interactions, and narrative structures.”
What has transpired since then is left as an exercise for the reader.
In fact I've heard archaeologists in the past specifically say that no oral tradition can survive intact more than 100 years. Usually this statement is in reference to certain creation myths being relatively modern inventions.
A claim of 12000 years needs strong evidence. Given what I've seen from the field lately I have a counter-theory, but I'm not really comfortable sharing.
Maybe you meant 1000 years?
If you really meant 100 years, there's an obvious counterexample: The "Happy Birthday Song", published in 1893. Arguably no one learns it by reading the words and notes from a page.
Furthermore, considering that until pretty recently in history most people were illiterate, the stories they learned were transmitted to them orally (even if read from a book).
The Happy Birthday Song isn't even the Happy Birthday Song! It's Good Morning To All! Happy Birthday lyrics didn't even make it into print until 1912 and that's not even the version that we use today. That version was first published in 1924 by Robert Coleman. The copyrighted version that even credited the Hill sisters with the melody (from Good Morning to All, in 1893) didn't come around till 1935.
As for peoples' literacy, yes, that's the point. That history is often unreliable. We even have disputes between early _written_ historians writing about the same events and have to compare them and also evaluate whether they were alive at the time of the events and what their sources were. Often we can discount what those people wrote today based on what we've learned from the past.
I said 100 years and I meant it. If you really think about it deeply, it should be obvious. Hell, I don't know who my father is and my own mother couldn't manage to stay consistent between tellings of that story...
You expect a complicated tradition to stay the same for 12000 years? I went to Catholic Church my whole childhood and I couldn't even tell you beat-for-beat what happens at mass if you put a gun to my head.
Of course I don't think oral traditions go unchanged for 12,000 years. Some very old oral traditions, like the ones from ancient India, stayed relatively unchanged only because their emphasis shifted suddenly and dramatically from active composition to ritual performance, to the extent that most people had no idea what the actual language used meant. Their opacity became a feature, not a bug.
However, despite the details changing, consistent storylines and story fragments exist across many ancient cultures, sometimes because they are derived from the same narrative source, and other times because of shared experiences across divergent cultures.
You could get fat on a stick by roasting a small mouse (so a small hearth), or tons of other ways. This really isn't enough evidence, not without a ton more findings of the same thing at various dates over the timeperiod.
Sampling a continuous process once and describing it as the process.
"The original value of sin(t) is sqrt(3)/2."
They welcome you, or any respectful individual, to participate and to "live their rituals" with them. The local college even hosts such events, to help the neighboring communities understand each other better. Any elders will likely tell you many stories, once they see you're actually interested and not just in it for a cheap tourist thrill[1].
They discourage trying to record or explain it to people who did not participate. They consider the first-hand experience to be transformative, and that you fundamentally cannot understand them without it.
[1]: I understand there are some things they're not supposed to mention much, roughly in the sense of "speak of the Devil" in Christian societies, or naming Bloody Mary three times. Those stories you might only hear on special occasions.
Growing up in a Hindu household, a lot of our festivals involve listening to origin stories of the customs. A lot of those have of course been glorified to add an element of holiness, but it's possible they are actually derived from some small incident happened in the past.
Like a butterfly effect, a small insignificant event leading to a major celebration for billion people continued over centuries
And each ideology has a specific history of events, founders, and later elaborators that shape what these rituals and beliefs are.
Many ideologies reject deities or are at least ambivalent about them, but they're not really operationally different than religions.
So for as much as little bits of history linger in relgious rituals, both blurred and resharpened in later years, the same is absolutely true for ideologies.
The capitalism or feminism or humanism or atheism or whatever else you point to today is similar to the one sharing its name in the past, or in some other region, but is not the same, and these differences are all vestiges of little seed events that happened here or there.
An adherent of an ideology might, like, have rituals. But the ideology isn't the rituals.
Here are some ideologies off the top of my head: democracy, marxism, environmentalism, libertarianism, atheism, the moral basis of Christianity but not the religion itself, utitarianism, humanism, empiricism.
None of those have, as far as I can tell, a single ritual inherently associated with them.
(You'll also have a hard time enumerating those concepts in a complete and consistent way)
But if you're even a wee bit of a subjectivist, as many (not all) social scientists and social philosphers are, then a definition like that isn't interesting or productive. From that perspective, ideologies are something that people profess adherence to and express statements about and behave in self-identified accordance to.
They gather in elections, they discuss power through the lens of capital and labor, they recycle or avoid eating meat, they recoil at government overreach, they expose fraud in purported miralces, they pray, they trade trolley problem memes unironically, they protest against inequality, etc
If these don't make sense to you as "rituals of ideologies" for people doing cross-cultural studies, that's fine, but then I have a sense that a lot of cross-cultural studies just feels like hogwash to you anyway. I doubt I could change your mind here. :)
(nor would I call any of those rituals, either, but I guess words don't mean what they normally mean in those fields)
If you earnestly wished to "see the point", you're tripping yourself with by taking for granted "what it means to everyone else.." and things like "living in idea space"
There are traditions of study/thought that use ideology the way you mean, and traditions that don't. The variety of use is well-represented and has been since the word came into use. Likewise, "idea space" is a specific concept that some people accept as sensible and others don't. Again, the variety of relationships to it is well-represented (and stretches back millennia, on that one).
You can actually see an example of this kind of differing-perspectives-in-wide-use in the way use used "the moral basis of Christianity but not the religion itself" in your own comment above. While Platonic ideas predate Christianity and have much influence on its shape and study in the West, the that statement would strike most traditional and many modern Christian thinkers as non-sensical. To them, there is no sensible separation of Christianity's "moral basis" from its Church/people and trying to make some distinction is as alien and "pointless" to them as different senses of ideology are to you.
And yet, of course it's interesting to think about Christianity's "moral basis" as an ideology existing in "idea space" because it lets you relate that part of Christianity to other things that you feel are comparable using techniques that you know how to work with and have confidence in. That's pretty much exactly what's going on with social scientists/philosophers who think about ideology in the way I've been describing above.
Some, but not all of those rituals even stand up to basic scrutiny. Others, not so much.
Like, at its core, all it says is that there's one god, and he was his own kid, who died, and there's an afterlife, and you should live well.
Yet, I don't think you'd say that Christianity doesn't have rituals, even if no particular instantiation of it has the same rituals as any other one.
Interestingly, how to (or if we even should!) resolve such issues in our (use of) language is itself a highly ideological matter.
If you simply consider how the human mind works, this "should" be fairly obvious. But one's ability or likelihood to think about such things is once again a function of the norms and accepted practices of one's ideology. That which is not known of, essentially does not exist.
Similar controversies erupted over the stories of Osiris (c. 25th century BC).
By the 10th century BC, almost all of the story themes that we ascribe to more modern authorship had already been written.
IIRC the current scholarly consensus is that the shared parts represent two surviving variants of an even earlier story that was widely told across cultures in that region.
https://www.livius.org/articles/misc/great-flood/flood6-para...
I established this comparison table with ChatGPT:
https://markdownpastebin.com/?id=a97c76a889aa42038b877bf25bd...
We lack the collective self consciousness to see ourselves through the eyes of the people of other times, thinking through what it means to be understood through artifact, and the distortions it produces.
The closest we come is prophesying that future generations will blame us for the destruction of the natural world and climate of earth. That is a thin mask for our age's narcissistic fixation with producing myths of its own apocalyptic world-ending power.
The people of the future probably won't think of us as bad, evil doers, that destroyed the natural world for future generations with no care but for ourselves and our consumption, if they are anything like us, they will more likely think of us as having one hand digging for gold where the sun don't shine while the other stuffs hot, fresh cheeseburgers into mouth, unibrow freshly dripping with sweat.
While it's commonly used as an explanation for the prevalence of flood myths throughout the world, I just don't buy it. That level of sea level rise just isn't going to come across as world-ending flood; it's going to be noticeable over time, but even sedentary cultures along the coastlines who are the most impacted by the rise are going to easily capable of dealing with it.
To me, the more parsimonious explanation is... it's just extending the metaphor of a flash flood. There's already a pretty consistent metaphor of ritual cleansing among multiple cultures. Flash floods are pretty common in many climates, and especially in an alluvial flood plain, the utter devastation of a major flood is readily apparent. Combine the two of them with a metaphorical story of the world being so wrong that everybody needs to be swept away and... why not use a flood to explain the destruction of the entire world? What other disaster would you choose instead?
I'm entirely open to being skeptical about meltwater pulse 1A being responsible for the universal flood myth, but I don't agree with this refutation.
Many of our stories do not exist to relate literal events, they exist to explain natural phenomenons. And there are many ways for humans to frame these explanations, but for whatever reason the human brain seems hardwired to prefer stories, so the explanations that survived to be transmitted through the ages were the ones that happened to take the form of stories.
So rather than saying "the pulse event wasn't rapid enough, therefore it can't explain the story" is IMO too hasty. Consider a sedentary people living on the coast, where a child asks her grandmother where their ancestors are buried, to which the grandmother responds by gesturing out at the Persian Gulf where, 60 miles from shore, their village once clung to the coast 500 years ago. It only takes one curious child asking "why?" and one bored grandmother willing to come up with a story to get the ball rolling on a tale that still gets told 10,000 years later (a tale that, indeed, would likely also have been informed by the experience of annual river flooding).
For example, compare the following passages, describing how Noah / Utnapishtim let out birds to search for dry land, after their boats get grounded on a tall mountain.
Genesis 8:6-12:
After forty days Noah opened a window he had made in the ark and sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth. Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground. But the dove could find nowhere to perch because there was water over all the surface of the earth; so it returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it back to himself in the ark. He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth. He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him.
Epic of Gilgamesh:
> When the seventh day dawned I loosed a dove and let her go. She flew away, but finding no resting-place she returned. Then I loosed a swallow, and she flew away but finding no resting-place she returned. I loosed a raven, she saw that the waters had retreated, she ate, she flew around, she cawed, and she did not come back.
Historically, much of Genesis was likely written during the Babylonian exile. It's not surprising at all that the authors of Genesis borrowed a story that was extremely well known in Babylon.
That's very very unlikely, there's too much other stuff linked with it that is older than that. You might be able to claim that when it was set to paper, but there's no way Genesis itself is only from then.
According to Genesis Abraham lived at the time that Gilgamesh was recorded, with Noah living a little before then. It's quote possible Gilgamesh was written down from their stories, rather than the other way around. Genesis records how Abraham traveled widely telling his story, including to kings.
There were certainly earlier stories that were included in Genesis, but the actual writing occurred long after those stories supposedly took place.
> It's quote possible Gilgamesh was written down from their stories, rather than the other way around.
The Epic of Gilgamesh was written down long before there was even a Hebrew language. It's one of the most ancient written works.
At any rate both the Babylonians and the ancient Israelites were Semitic peoples, so obviously they had a shared background long before the Exile.
There are also many references in early Genesis that do suggest it originates in traditions much older, including references to great cities and powers that were long, long gone by the Exile. This actually sent me quite recently down some rabbit holes.
The Bible is not a single book. It's really a collection of different works, written over the course of centuries by different people. Different parts date from different eras (and then were subsequently edited over the centuries).
> we have direct archeological evidence in the form of dated, physical scrolls.
From what I know, only very short fragments of a few prayers survive from before the exile.
But the claim that any part of Genesis dates to the Exile is a weak historiographical claim, based primarily on a few pillars of very weak circumstantial evidence: a) we don’t have many physical examples dated to a prior time - but that’s not at all surprising; the vast supermajority of texts don’t survive, and many of the most ancient copies we do have are relatively recent discoveries; b) it makes sense to some people to argue this based on (reasonable) speculation about the development of the Jewish religion and the pressures at different periods of its development and c) as a corollary to b, one mainstream opinion is that Genesis can mostly be attributed to two different sources by a stylistic analysis and one of them is simply believed to date around the Exile.
This corresponds to the general current fads in historiography and history but it is by no means definite, and we shouldn’t be surprised if it is all overturned in a night by a single discovery, as these things very often are. This type of historiography is not really rigorous in a meaningful sense and is based essentially on current academic trends and a few authorities.
So we can safely consider the arguments underlying the dating ourselves without getting in too much trouble, but we don’t even have to do that to address your particular claim that the portions of Genesis must have been devised by an Exilic writer due to Babylonian influence. This essentially requires engaging in a deliberate pious fraud, which then was taken up by the other Israelites without question and who accepted the new stories with no recorded debate, and which also received no pushback when the Israelites who did not go into Exile. We would expect the possibility of diverging traditions on this point, but for example, the Samaritans have precisely the same story on this point, although the dating of that is also a point of contention. Either way, we should keep in mind that only some Israelites went into Exile, and plenty remained in Israel and Judah and maintained their traditions through the 70 year Exile.
It’s possible that this did happen. But it’s also the case that Babylonian contact was not new in the Exile period. The Israelites didn’t exist in a vacuum, they were part of the tapestry of the wider Semitic world for their entire existence and would have had familiarity with all these stories and beliefs the entire time. Indeed, it’s most commonly believed that the Israelite religion was not unique, but a simple development into monotheism from a normal localized Canaanite religion. And indeed, at some point, they all shared a common origin. Rather than adapting a Sumerian-via-Babylon story in a very late period, it’s a much more parsimonious explanation that some version of the story always existed amongst the Israelites in their oral tradition regardless of when it was committed to writing.
I don't see why this should be called a "pious fraud." Babylon was a massive cultural center of that time, and the land of Israel was a relative backwater on its periphery. Babylon would have exerted an enormous cultural influence on the surrounding peoples, including the Israelites.
Exactly as Romans and Greeks had basically the “same” stories, in most cases they were not copying from each other, they had the same source.
At any rate, as the example in your other comments shows, it doesn’t share the same “little details”, the little details are different.
> I don't see why this should be called a "pious fraud." Babylon was a massive cultural center of that time, and the land of Israel was a relative backwater on its periphery. Babylon would have exerted an enormous cultural influence on the surrounding peoples, including the Israelites.
Because you’re suggesting some Israelite in Babylon basically saw the stories and then inserted it into Genesis under different names, probably existing ones, and that everyone else just went along with it. That is, they all knew it was not part of their tradition and that some guy was just adding it in based on the Babylonian story but accepted the insertion anyway because…
> they would have been descendants of the same story originating from the proto-Semitic people they both came from.
The Epic of Gilgamesh predates Genesis by about 1500 years. The people who wrote Genesis would have known of the Epic of Gilgamesh. I do not find it convincing to hand-wave the identical details in the stories (like the story about beaching on a mountain and then releasing birds from the Ark to find dry land, until one doesn't return) as merely suggesting a common origin. Babylon was a superpower of the time, both politically and culturally. The Israelites were influenced by it.
Yes, as I said:
> Indeed, it’s most commonly believed that the Israelite religion was not unique, but a simple development into monotheism from a normal localized Canaanite religion.
Early Judaism was obviously polytheistic. The Flood story is almost certainly a story that dates back to those times, well before the Exile.
That said, by the Babylonian Exile, Judaism was clearly monotheistic and not "syncretic" (that's not how syncretism works anyway).
> The Epic of Gilgamesh predates Genesis by about 1500 years.
This is the issue. You're conflating the current academic consensus (very rough and subject to change) on the composition of Genesis with "when did the Genesis stories originate among the Israelites." Nobody thinks Genesis was written ex nihilo by some priests in Babylon and pressed on the rest of the Jewish population. (If nothing else, this would make post-Exile events totally untenable: how did they convince the non-Exile Jews of...anything?)
> The people who wrote Genesis would have known of the Epic of Gilgamesh. I do not find it convincing to hand-wave the identical details in the stories (like the story about beaching on a mountain and then releasing birds from the Ark to find dry land, until one doesn't return) as merely suggesting a common origin.
There's nothing handwavy about this. This is exactly how it works, in religions and myths across the world. Sometimes we've been able to trace it very clearly, as with Indo-Europeans. The more closely related the peoples, the more their stories match up. Two Semitic peoples in the same region having two near-identical stories without them having borrowed from one another is the least surprising thing in the world; oral tradition actually holds up pretty well in most cases (as documented in the original article.) This is in fact clearly supported by the theory of the composition of Genesis by multiple authors, with very slightly different narratives.
If you want to be more technical about the composition of Genesis, opinions vary, but the current consensus holds there were three or four main authors: the Yahwist, the Elohist, the Deuteronomist, and the Priest. The only one of these believed to date to the Exile is the Priest, with all the others predating it. The earliest source is believed to be the Yahwist, supposed to be writing in the 800s BC. Critically, much of the Flood story and the details about birds are specifically believed to originate with the Yahwist source before the Exile period.
> Babylon was a superpower of the time, both politically and culturally. The Israelites were influenced by it.
Yes, as I specifically said:
> It’s possible that this did happen. But it’s also the case that Babylonian contact was not new in the Exile period. The Israelites didn’t exist in a vacuum, they were part of the tapestry of the wider Semitic world for their entire existence and would have had familiarity with all these stories and beliefs the entire time.
Either way, all the Semitic versions of the Flood myth likely depend on a Sumerian original, along with the general influence of Sumerian myth on Semitic belief. (Personally, I have no problem with supposing that it was based on some real event and then the tale grew in the telling, just as Gilgamesh was a real king.) It's of course conceivable that before the Exile the Canaanites and the Babylonians crosschecked each other's versions, but it's not at all necessary. There was never any reason for "late" contamination of the story by Babylonians; the pan-Semitic influence always existed, and whoever the proto-Israelites were, obviously they were wandering around somewhere concurrently with the other Semitic peoples.
At any rate, the Babylonians were very definitely on the downslope during the Exile period, as evidence by their permanent fall from notability after their conquest by the Persians at the end of it. They and Egypt were the two regional powers Judah was stuck between at the time. Israel, of course, was earlier destroyed by the Assyrians, who had been a definite superpower but saw their glory days end with Nineveh.
For that reason, I think an event completely different from the yearly flooding is more likely, for example the Minoan eruption or Black Sea deluge hypothesis.
But the one that is most intriguing IMHO is the mediterranean sea event that happened but it is 6M years ago. Could ancestors of genus Homo have passed that story long for all that time even across speciation???
https://www.uu.nl/en/news/first-direct-proof-of-mega-flood-i...
My guess though is it's probably a plot device where the storyteller takes a known phenomenon and just exaggerates it to magical-mythical proportions, which may contribute to the story being repeated as it strikes the balance between the relatability of the real phenomenon and the attention-grabbing otherworldliness of its exaggerated version.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothe...
“Although initially sceptical, Wallace Broecker—the scientist who proposed the conveyor shutdown hypothesis—eventually agreed with the idea of an extraterrestrial impact at the Younger Dryas boundary, and thought that it had acted as a trigger on top of a system that was already approaching instability.”
I'm aware there is no direct archeological evidence of Abraham, except for Gilgamesh, so now you need to decide which direction the knowledge flowed.
Did he, though? There is archeological and contemporary written historical evidence of an actual Gilgamesh. Not so with Abraham.
The Abrahamic tradition was orally transmitted by a people who for generations lived in Babylonian captivity (1300 years after the earliest surviving copy of the Epic of Gilgamesh in Old Balylonian, with the earliest partial texts appearing 1600 years before), and was finally written down 3 generations after they left Babylon.
Few hundred years later they give him a magic sword and a round table. Same idea, but with other cultures, religions, etc.
https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/archaeology/indigenous-au...
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/may/26/rio-t...
Wait, what? Where did they get human fat from…?
So how does a ritual get successfully passed down for something like 500 generations? What must the observer get from it that motivated them so strongly to pass it along with the necessary vigor? Was it something in the ritual itself, perhaps an altered state drug experience? Or was the motivation just cultural?
Is there anything in our culture that could possibly have such staying power, or is our cultural temperature so high that nothing can survive for long?
There's literally nothing else but this.
> motivated them so strongly to pass it along with the necessary vigor?
There's no vigor. There are almost no outside influences. There's almost no rebellious thought. You're raised into this life, and you know the rituals by heart from a young age.
> Is there anything in our culture that could possibly have such staying power,
Any isolated/primitive culture with no outside influences. Throughout the 20th century ethnographers collected thousands of such rituals before they disappeared after contact with the outside world.
Hence, one explanation may be that participation was essentially mandatory to be considered part of the community at all, and to be recognised as an adult.
Jesus was in the world, but not of the world.
Rastafarians step one foot at a time out of Babylon.
The Amish have removed themselves for the most part, but they are still somewhat free riders on the greater society.
Jews celebrate the sabbath. In this way, 6 days a week they are of the world, and can share in its prosperity, but one day is reserved for keeping the traditions.
Probably some combination of of a large pool of rituals in traditional societies (so the probability of any of them carrying over 500 generations is greater than that of a single given one), high fertility (so if you don't feel inclined to carry it, some of your siblings/cousins do) and utility (some rituals may increase surviving odds of people that follow them). This particular ritual don't seem very useful, but maybe it has some unexpected benefical side effect, say, the plant they traditionally picked the sticks from, when burned, could shoo away insects that were potential vectors for disease (completely made up example, just to make the point clearer).
The compulsion to raise and seek answers for questions like this has a lot to do with it.
Over the last couple centuries, increasingly much of the world has been inducted into a culture that looks at life from the perspective of an individual, looks at that individual's life through the lens of economy and benefit, and invites the individual to approach that life as some engineer seeking optimization.
For many, this way of seeing the world as economic individuals is even projected onto the people of elsewhere and elsewhen, taking for granted that they must have been doing the same thing whether they knew it or not.
A different perspective sees ritual and tradition as the blood and flesh of a community or legacy, and sees the community and legacy that lives for hundreds or thousands of years as the far more important thing than the individual that arrives and leaves over the pittance of just a few decades.
For a community, carrying forward a ritual is like breathing, and an individual who fully understands themselves as a fleeting little lung cell in this long-lasting community implicitly fulfills their role of perpetuating the community's life by practicing the ritual.
But what's interesting is that asking questions framed like yours is itself a kind of ritual, perpetuating a different (and much more recently birthed) community, and there are countless other rituals of "modernity" that we implicitly peform. These rituals are so natural to us that we barely even recognize them as something outside of us... the same, most likely, your great-grandparents with theirs.
I think small, pre-literate societies on the edge of survival rely heavily on "traditional" knowledge, and for very good reasons.
One of my anthropology professors told me a story about a village (I forget his source for this, but it sounded like he had one). They had an old woman, probably in her 80s, toothless, partly blind, and mostly immobile. She only survived because of a significant ongoing effort of the village.
Then the village had a bad year, a famine. And the old woman said, "This happened when I was a child. What you need to do is take the leaves of such-and-such a plant. They're poisonous. But if you beat them with rocks, soak them, and let them age a bit, then they're disgusting but edible." And so the village remained fed. The old woman was contributing to the village's survival, because she was a source of mostly-forgotten knowledge.
Similarly, we know that modern hunter-gatherers might be able to find and identify 47 species of edible mushrooms in their local climate. This knowledge base can easily be the equivalent of a college education focused just on finding food.
Now, inland Australia is famously one of the most inhospitable places in earth. Early European explorers noticed just how difficult it was to survive there. But the locals someone managed just fine. They knew all the tricks.
So my guess is that the kind of society which can remember how to find and prepare 47 kinds of edible mushrooms, or which can survive a famine that occurs every 75 years, or which can survive inland Australia, is a society with significant respect for ancestral knowledge. Learning the rituals may often be a matter of life and death.
The modern world is different because we have books, and science, and high division of labor. If we forget how to do our grandparents' jobs, someone else will still learn. Or the nature of work will change so much that a new generation needs to learn a new way of working.
I suspect your grandparents moved to the US after the holocaust and settled somewhere far from other Jews. Judaism can not be practiced in isolation, it was not setup that way.
Also, nothing stopping you from finding a Chabad near you and reclaiming at least a portion of your heritage.
> "However in our societies, memory has changed since we switched to the written word, and we have lost this sense."
I sort of think that this is a "what's water?" thing, because a lot of our ancient prehistorical traditions and practices that continued into the historical era and beyond are so embedded with how we see how ourselves and act and behave that it's impossible for us to even notice them. There's a lot that we have looked at in ancient sites and have just known what the purpose was for because we still do the same thing now, or at least we had recorded uses for it from historical texts, it's just said to be "obvious" and not really worth commenting about how interesting it is that we preserved these oral traditions.
There's a kind of exoticism/noble savage thing going on here, I think.
However what interesting about this tradition is the degree of specificity that was preserved with this ritual (e.g. stick of same type of wood, coated with fat, put in a small fire to break), none of which has any real practical purpose.
Lots of people asking how they had human fat... you poke someone's wound with a hot stick, there is probably fat on it after. So they may have been using cauterization.
They may also have been cooking small animals while trying to avoid the light, smell, and smoke plume a larger fire creates. Which would attract predators.
And it still being passed on orally, child-to-child.
The cat is less than one year old. Our 17 year old cat does not engage in this at all and hisses at the kitten for even trying to start a game of tag. This makes me wonder if that origin is more related to predator/prey.
All mammalian species have something in common.
When mammals are young we all love playing. This is true for humans, dogs, elephants, primates, cats and so on.
But play ends up disappearing as the mammal gets older. Compare a playful baby elephant to an adult elephant. The baby elephant loves playing. Not just with other elephants but with humans and dogs and so on. But older elephants are more likely to watch and less likely to play.
This is why your 1 year old cat loves playing while your 17 year old cat doesn’t.
It’s a very interesting phenomenon
for working out and keeping fit!... oh, hmmm, I guess that's glaring evidence that working out and keeping fit are not beneficial after all
Adult lions don’t play like baby lions yet adult lions are still fit.
It's even thought that the first domesticated dogs pre-domesticated themselves to an extent because the less suspicious wolves were able to use human settlements' trash middens as a food source.
I was misdriven by "through oral tradition", I was expecting something that was supposedly transmitted as a linguistic invariant. It actually has significantly different names, so nothing close to some diachronic international onomatopoeia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-linguistic_onomatopoeias
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/15/upshot/britis...
the chain is broken..
Persistent rituals passed on from elders to youngsters, oral transmission of huge poems and other such "low tech" information tools must have given some structure to what otherwise might have felt as an eternal reboot.
I wonder if technology development has a similar effect. When the world essentially remains unchanged for your entire life, things must seem much faster with days blending together.
People are quick to call in the placebo effect, as a scientific sounding explanation, but is nobody reminded of faith healing? People get up out of wheel chairs, cast away their crutches and say they've been healed.
That's just common fakery.
Some of it is described here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedic_chant#Oral_transmission
An example in action - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLdq15ptqUs
It dramatically narrows the possibilities of what idea or word or sound or whatever could fit in any particular place in the verse, making it easier to memorize and accurately recite. Clever (and some blundering) poets and changes in language still set up these recitations to evolve away from whatever they originally were, but the original seeds linger a long, long time.
However I think parables are an even better checksum, as they can be translated also, but if the meaning is altered the story fails to be coherent. Parables are imo, the best form of information transference across time, imo.
For a contrived example, 100 years ago, the idea that one would defy one’s parents and pursue one’s own dreams would have been frowned upon, and any parables referencing that action would clearly contain the moral that one should listen to one’s parents. Today, that would be an almost unthinkable moral - discard your dreams and stick to whatever hidebound business your parents were in? Surely we got something wrong in the translation here.
Written in meter, though, clearly the only word that fits here is “shan’t”, not “must”.
If the parable is talking to a foundational reality, rather than cultural situations, I think it can endure.
I get what you are saying, but even parables don't have 'the truth'. I would imagine that there may even be parables that argue the opposite position. And both, opposing positions could be right, depending on the context.
Seeded/whole seed mustard was commonplace in my family.
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?I love reading the posited explanations for that joke in academia and when it’s posted randomly people usually have a stab at it too.
Not sure how that's funny though.
Makes me wonder, dogs supposedly have evolved to be better companions of humans, and lateral gene transfer is a thing. I wonder of they had much poorer sight 7k years ago, or perhaps, a popular local breed did.
(Naturally, to support my blind hypothesis, and walking into a bar instead of seeing it)
7000 is a bold estimate. But they remained intact for 3000 years in the face of significant religious changes.
Today modern Hindu hardly knows whats there in the Vedas, and religious customs are significantly different. But these verses are letter-to-letter same across India.
https://theprint.in/opinion/first-we-lost-saraswati-river-no...
The article mentions that because we have invented writing, passing down oral traditions became much less important to us, and hence our societies have "lost" some of the old tales, paradoxically. That's because while people write down things they think is important, they couldn't have known that unlike oral information (which adapts as language evolves, imperfectly but enough to keep the basic structure of the original), the means on which they write decay rapidly, and due to the speed at which language evolves (without modern technology, a few hundred years is enough for isolated regions to develop their own language branches), much of what was written in the distant past would become unintelligible even to people living in the area, even if it managed to survive (though modern techniques using computers seem to have made it easier to do so). Not to mention that in much of the world, civilizations were constantly being replaced by newer ones or migrating to different areas as their neighbors expanded and faded. Much of the ancient texts in any given area would make no sense to the new inhabitants, who would have no qualms about destroying everything (in fact, they probably burned everything down as soon as they conquered a new area).
Basically, the written word turned out to be much less resilient than people probably believed it would be. I think we are making the same mistake with digital information. It may look "eternal" but try to find websites from the early internet, for example. Almost everything is disappearing quickly.
and, migrating farthest from Africa (can tell by red-shift :) they git the oldest branch of our oldest stories
Side Node: computer programing is kinda cool. It is a set of incantations which actually does work.
EDIT: Hello, all you down-voters and people who say I should read the article before commenting :-) I to, don't like it when people just start commenting without reading the article.
I also don't like it when people take what a pop-sci writer too seriously. In this case, I was interested enough to read the original article in Nature, where it says this practice was for cursing (see quote at the end)
Don't forget Gell-Man's Amnesia :-)
"Howitt described how magic was employed to harm a victim using a ritual fire and a wooden object smeared or attached with a piece of human or animal fat (major sources of lipids): “In all these tribes a general, I may say almost an universal, prac- tice has been to procure some article belonging to the intended victim. A piece of his hair, some of his faeces, a bone picked by him and dropped, a shred of his opossum rug, or at the present time of his clothes, will suffice, or if nothing else can be got he may be watched until he is seen to spit, when his saliva is carefully picked up with a piece of wood and made use of for his destruction..."
>"The mulla-mullung would then chant the name of the sick person, and once the stick fell, the charm was complete," a Monash University statement said.
> "The mulla-mullung would then chant the name of the sick person, and once the stick fell, the charm was complete,"
Which to me seems like a healing ritual.
Yes, it's an attempt to do harm. You're mad at someone, perhaps they wronged you, and you want something bad to happen to them. So ask a demon to spoil their grain, or to tear their clothes. (In other words, pray that entropy will happen - you can't go wrong!) If you didn't have demons you could ask for help and you were motivated to do them harm, you'd have to take matters into your own hands. By slandering them or harassing them or attacking them. Much better for society that we genuinely believe we can get our revenge by not doing anything at all.
Struggling to find the article now though...
Kind of like how instead of cities fighting each other, we have their sports teams fight each other in a ritualized, ersatz combat.
As far as a condescending attitude---I did say they were underpaid and overworked, didn't I? When you are overworked don't you start to make mistakes as well? I sure do.
Books cannot change the world if they lie unread on a shelf or are confiscated or impounded and kept out of people’s hands.
In the same way, software cannot be useful to you if your hardware will not run it.
Therefore we cannot think that by being programmers making software, we are directly helping people; we can only help those people who can, and will, run our software.
One example is the several different recitation styles used to memorize Sanskrit verses. These methods give memorizers multiple ways to remember a line, and also prevent errors like the inadvertent mixing of adjacent words (" euphonic combination"). The "checksumming schemes" are far more elaborate than you'd imagine. [1] The result is perfect transmission of text and its pronunciation, including pitch accent.
Another example is a "multi-party verification" scheme in some Aboriginal Australian cultures. "... storytelling among contemporary Aboriginal people can involve the deliberate tracking of teaching responsibilities. For example, a man teaches the stories of his country to his children. His son has his knowledge of those stories judged by his sister’s children—for certain kin are explicitly tasked with ensuring that those stories are learned and recounted properly—and people take those responsibilities seriously. ... the 'owner-manager' relationship, requiring a story to be discussed explicitly across three generations of a patriline, constitutes a cross-generational mechanism which may be particularly successful at maximising precision in replication of a story across successive generations". [2]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedic_chant
[2]: "Aboriginal Memories of Inundation of the Australian Coast Dating from More than 7000 Years Ago", Patrick D. Nunn, https://doi.org/10.1080/00049182.2015.1077539
Singing/Ballads are also popular way of preserving information fidelity. Homer's works were based on ballads. We don't put premium on memory now, but before the invention of printing press, memory techniques were widely studied and used.
3-pick-2 as a method is quite good but also quite vulnerable to a bunch of transmission errors beyond simple memory issues. Over long periods of time there is a higher risk of group think or status plays leading to wild changes.
Of course the vedas aren't immune, but it is a lot more effort to get them wrong than just a few people thinking "we want to change the story". A group would have to be hugely motivated to successfully change the chant.
These are smart people. Just like us. Time is money for them just like it is for us. They probably had a very good, practical reason to do this "ritual". As surely as tapping keyboards.
"Rituals" need not have any efficacy at all. Surely burning a stick smeared in kangaroo fat does nothing to cure ailments. It's entirely possible the only reason is "this is what our tribe has always done." Certainly rituals create tribe cohesion and can have a placebo effect, but it is a fallacy to equate these things to science-based medicine. "Tapping keyboards" is not a "ritual"--we are not typing to appease the great silicon gods--we are doing it as means of communication and performing economically valuable work.
Rituals which do seem to work, e.g. plant-based medicine, can be used as an "intuition pump" for scientific study. The fact that a plant has been used for thousands of years is a good sign that it may have some effect, but that effect still needs to be verified.
I mean the "human fat" part, that seemed strange.
Getting human fat non-lethally is probably impossible using technology from 12000 years ago. If the fat was obtained from a human corpse, it would rule out at least burying the body. But still, wouldn't obtaining the fat from a non-buried corpse disturb the deceased on some religious-spiritual level?
Or was it common to mutilate dead enemies or something like that?
Edit: Oh, OK, I saw others asking the same question and replies which shed light on this.
so there were two sticks, at the same site/ritual, but one stick was a 1000 years older than the other?
does that mean the ancestors of the present day people were coming to this location for the ritual for a 1000 years? but then for some reason stopped?
This is so fascinating!