Scientists have traced folk stories back to the Bronze Age | Hacker News Reader

Scientists have traced folk stories back to the Bronze Age

theatlantic.com

126 pointscurtis18 comments

If this is interesting to you, then check out this frankly astonishing series of lectures from Jordan Peterson at the university of toronto. It's a psychology 40something course, and it covers the bible, ancient egypt, mesopotamia, jung, freud, piaget, skinner, dostoevsky, nietzsche, hitler, lots of evolutionary biology, lots of neurology, etc. etc. All tied up with the question of how to act in ones life. It's a truly amazing synthesis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tQOlQRp3gQ&list=PL22J3VaeAB...

That's the playlist for last year's course. The 2016 course has just started, with a better camera this time. The first lecture is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjnvtRgpg6g

You had me at "from Jordan Peterson". The man is utterly brilliant and virtually anything he writes or says is worthwhile.

Thanks for linking to this. I am on the second lecture and it is pretty stunning so far. I really appreciate it.

I have never heard of this before. It has since become one of the most interesting things I have ever watched. Thank you for exposing me to it.

Here's the actual study, sadly not linked to in the article: http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/3/1/150645

They mention Australian Aboriginal myths, and this was explained in David Attenborough's new series about the Great Barrier Reef. Apparently they have oral tales [1] and dances about how their coastline was slowly flooded (thus creating the reef, which used to be the coast of Australia) over a period of less than a hundred years. This coincides with a rise in sea levels around 6,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age.

[1] http://research.usc.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/u...

AIUI The Great Barrier Reef is a living coral reef which grew under water. I am not sure if the sea level changed twice - once to reveal it to become the coast of australia, and once to return it to the sea - or maybe the programme was referring to a larger area of continental shelf being above sea level, with its edge approximately coinciding with the reef? I'm interested in knowing more but the linked paper doesn't seem to be downloadable.

This is a good visualization: http://www.bluehabitats.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Scree...

The continental shelf is quite flat. The reef follows exactly along the rim of the shelf. I believe the coast used to extend all the way to where the reef now ends. The reef started growing as this part was slowly submerged in shallow water. Coral reefs only build in the photic zome (<50m) since they (specifically, the algae which produce the nutrients that coral polyps live on) require photosynthesis.

There are Native American legends about the volcanic eruptions about 7,700 years ago that formed Crater Lake. [0,1]

[0] http://knowledgenuts.com/2014/05/09/the-surprisingly-accurat...

[1] http://www.craterlakeinstitute.com/online-library/historic-r...

Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtI-lSvS028

Indeed.

I wonder how far back oral traditions go. Could anything survive for 100K years?

Similarly, there is good evidence that the Ho Chunk (Native American, upper midwest) story of Red Horn has been preserved via oral tradition (aka "folk tales") for over 3000 years: http://www.ontarioarchaeology.on.ca/Resources/Publications/o...

Being able to trace oral tradition back in time and discerning origin and carrier is eye opening... The aspect of peeking into the past is alluring... However, what's the confidence level here? What are the basic assumptions?

Exactly what I was wondering. These sorts of studies usually make assumptions about the rate of mutation across time in order to estimate the date of various divergences or of the ur-form, but these rates are difficult to calibrate. For a cautionary tale, see also glottochronology.

I'm surprised that this is surprising. Aesop's fables are pretty well known childhood reading, and they were ancient oral tales when he wrote them down 2500 years ago, in early iron age Greece.

Idries Shah's collection, World Tales, from 1979 strongly suggests common origins to many stories. It's also a wonderful children's book.

Check out narremes, they're like memes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narreme

I'm wondering what it would take to program a story-teller?

I'm thinking NLP + Narremes + ML . . .

“Most people would assume that folktales are rapidly changing and easily exchanged between social groups,” says Simon Greenhill from the Australian National University.

I imagine straw man arguments have been around since the Bronze age as well.

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