Comment by samplatt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by samplatt | Hacker News Reader

As a native to south-western australia, this all reads pretty accurate. The animal certainly is alive and strong in hearts and minds, if not real life. There's all the usual local country-town big-creature legends, and a bit of 50-year-old evidence helps as well.

The idea of 'monsters' of all kinds have always fascinated me. As the article mentions, it's only in the extremely recent past (last couple of hundred years) that extinction was recognised as even something that was possible.

We normally think of extinct megafauna as something that existed in prehistoric times - literally, before we invented writing, but the word here is often by the layman used to mean "before we invented conscious thought". Many Aboriginal Dreamtime stories (so, within the last 80k years) are thought to involve now-extinct megafauna, other large creatures are known to have gone extinct only in the last 2-3000 years, untold small species have disappeared in the last ~200 years... it's hardly surprising that humans are such a superstitious bunch, considering we're only ~8 generations away from huddling in a village, frightened of the wolves and anything else that goes bump in the night.

>Tasmania, which is sometimes said to hang beneath Australia like a green jewel

...we don't say that. I don't think even Tasmanians say that. They're too busy trying to convince everyone not avoid the place so they can enjoy it.

> Considering we're only 8 generations away from huddling in a village, frightened of the wolves and anything that goes bump in the night.

I think you severely underestimate our predecessors. They were not feral beasts, they were almost exactly the same animals as you and I, minus some education and technology.

8 generations ago (25? 30 years each?), the Age of Exploration in which western European powers sent huge sailing ships, (more than a hundred feet long with dozens or hundreds of cannons) around the world to map and claim unknown lands was drawing to a close, because they were running out of unknown lands. London was a city of more than half a million people, importing goods from the furthest corners of the empire, with huge textile mills and blast furnaces and other factories ramping up,the industrial revolution. They weren't huddling in the mud and dark, they were sitting around candles and oil lamps, near streets lit with oil from whales they killed.

Even 80 generations or more ago the Romans, Greeks, Babylonians and Egyptians were dealing with problems of empire governance not wolf packs. (To say nothing of the Chinese, Japanese, or Mayan civilizations which I know less about.)

They may have been superstitious, but they were definitely homo sapiens.

Well I'm still terrified of wolves, so I don't get your point. Did you misread the parent comment? Fear isn't dictated by technology. We still fear things that can't really hurt us easily.

Dreamtime stories are awesome. Some apparently (was on HN a while back) describe maps of areas which are now under sea. That reliably dates the stories millennia back in time. Unchanged. Talk about error resistant coding.

I am not too sure about this. Every "dreamtime" story I have investigated has turned out to be so vague it could be anything or was "discovered" in very recent times.

More fundamentally there is no reason to think that Australian Aboriginal oral history is anymore reliable than it is anywhere else in the world (i.e. not at all after a few generations).

I don't know but it sounded convincing to me. Maybe there is more to stories in other parts of the world too, but they couldn't be cross referenced yet.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/sep/16/indig...

This is not exactly convincing. They admit that everywhere else in the world this doesn't happen, but somehow it happens in Australia. Given all these stories have appeared in recent time I am not convinced.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Aboriginals passed down their history and culture orally, so you can't really expect them to provide evidence other than their retelling. I don't think anyone is saying that the Dreamtime stories are 100% true, but it was probably influenced by something. The question is how much is story, and how much is fact?

The tree sisters story [1] (which was actually taught in schools) is apparently completely fake and the modern highway network apparently resembles the way aboriginals navigated Australia too [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(Australia)#Abor...

[2] https://theconversation.com/how-ancient-aboriginal-star-maps...

They are just stories like every other culture in the world has and are as unreliable as a form of history as everyone else's oral histories (myths).

Aboriginal people are just people and they don't have some magically ability that allows information to be passed down via oral transmission through 300 generations.

Edit. The huge diversity of Aboriginal languages is proof that information was not transmitted accurately. If you can't even preserve the word for "foot" (just an example) down 300 generations how can it be expected that a story of even less practical utility and far greater complexity would be maintained accurately. The whole idea is ludicrous.

Pure speculation: but the Aborigines are AFAIK relatively unique in their cultural isolation. Contrast this to any tribe living in Asia+Africa+Europe where migration over large scales definitely happened and cultural diffusion across thousands of miles and hundreds of distinct cultures was very possible.

I could see where this kind of cultural and physical mixing (migration) could dilute or mutate folk tales, washing out distinctive 'fact-derived' aspects of the stories

Actually there was quite a large amount of migration within Australia, it is just hard to track do to the lack of distinct cultural artifacts that survive over time.

The Basques have been where there are for a long time and they have had a oral culture for most of the time and yet their myths are not any more factual than anyone else's.

Oral cultures are... different from what we're used to. There's a fair bit of research on this (Walter Ong is your starting point if you want to start diving into it).

Without debating whether the information preserved is factually accurate, it's known that oral cultures develop interesting and complex -- from an information-theoretical perspective -- mechanisms for preserving information, and for making it possible to retain accurately in memory amounts of information that tend to shock people from cultures oriented around writing as the means of information preservation.

Yes oral cultures are different, but you don't have to go far back in European history to run across cultures that were oral (Anglo Saxon if we want to stay with English history). While a great epic poem of oral tradition, nobody today would consider Beowulf anything other than a complete work of fiction.

If your cultures can't preserve basic words, what possible mechanism could preserve useless facts in complex stories who's purpose is purely to entertain around the campfire?

Preserving something important to the culture is not identical with ensuring the language freezes and can never change further.

And if you don't think the old oral epics have value -- you seem not to -- then I don't know that it's really worth discussing them with you.

It is not that I don’t think oral story don’t have value (they are entertaining), I just don’t think they contain any facts after a few generation. Myths are fiction.

Oral cultures did manage to preserve plenty of facts.

Their epics just weren't intended for that purpose. You might as well criticize modern literate America for the vast quantities of fact-free written material being churned out.

There are multiple similar examples. Here's one backed up with genetic evidence.

https://www.nature.com/articles/520033a

This one has come up before here on HN. Apart from the obvious fact that there are only four major points on the compass and so chance could be 100% responsible for this story, aboriginal people travelled around and would have seen these palms to the north. Take out the gods from the story and the story is exactly what would be expected - where are the palms from - oh they come from the north.

Actually it does happen elsewhere in the world. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_memory for a few examples.

However there is an odd problem. There is evidence that literacy is in direct conflict with memorizing complex oral traditions. Oral traditions can be surprisingly long - for a well-known example consider that Homer's works were preserved as an oral tradition. People who can read and write are unable to memorize works of this length. And anthropologists learned the hard way that teaching someone who has already memorized things of this length causes them to forget what they previously knew.

These are not exactly convincing examples especially when near identical examples of these stories are found other cultures where they are accepted as pure myth.

Most oral epics and stories were never intended to accurately transmit facts about the past. The idea of history as based on facts is a very recent idea and it is one of the reasons we have so many problems with the written records from ancient historians. They had no problem making up entire stores and conversations that never happened as long as it furthered the purpose of their writing.

The purpose of these oral traditions is not to transmit facts, but to explain to the next generation what is important to their culture and/or entertain.

>Tasmania, which is sometimes said to hang beneath Australia like a green jewel

Tasmanian here - I have never heard this either, and have most definitely never said it.

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