Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sevrene | Hacker News Reader

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...

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com