Stonehenge: DNA Reveals Origin of Builders
bbc.com
bbc.com
"we know and from the chronicles and books of the ancients wefind that among other famous nations our own, the Scots, has been graced with widespread renown. It journeyed from Greater Scythia by way of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Pillars of Hercules, and dwelt for a long course of time in Spain among the most savage peoples, but nowhere could it be subdued by any people, however barbarous. Thence it came, twelve hundred years after the people of Israel crossed the Red Sea, to its home in the west where it still lives today."
NB Yes, I know Stonehenge isn't in Scotland but some of the earliest Stone Circles are apparently in Orkney.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebor_Gab%C3%A1la_%C3%89renn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A1l_Riata
Their 'capital' at Dunadd is quite cool - I've stood with my boot in the famous footprint - alhough I don't think that's enough to be King of Scots:
https://bladehoner.wordpress.com/2017/11/16/snorris-ancestra...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeneid
Edit: Of course the Scots/Irish origin myths might be an even vaguer retelling of the same story.
Over the last generation, we've had a bunch of what was assumed to be fiction confirmed. Eric the red's voyage and viking visits to North America. All sorts of very old biblical narratives are being confirmed, the existence of early iron age kings and conflicts, for example, are being confirmed by archeology. Troy, and the possible historical conflict with the Greek aegeans... Also from the bronze)iron age transition period.
It's like a swing. Modern historians worked hard to get rid of all the bible-based histories. A few generations later, the Bible (and lots of other old books and oral traditions) is a surprisingly reliable source... as are folk legends.
Noah's flood is as legitimate as it has been for 100 years. Searching for Atlantis is as non-crazy as it has been for even longer. Some aboriginal Australian oral histories are now thought (by some) to be incomprehensibly, mind boggingly old...
I'm still hoping for confirmation of at Brendan the voyager.
Do you have a source for that? My undergrad education is in history, and I am not aware of any attempt to get rid of bible-based histories. Are there attempts to look at the actual historicity of the events and to place them in their appropriate context? Absolutely, but there's no attempt to simply get rid of the histories.
Religion obviously causes biases, and those biases could inhibit scientific process.
In popular culture, most people think of scientists as atheists and that they try to disprove one side vs. comparing them in an unbiased fashion.
When you put the authors of the bible in their historical context many are removed via proximity or time from the actual events described (for instance, Paul didn't know Jesus before his crucifixion, the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were all written 60-110 years later), and so there's is going to be a search for primary sources that corroborate what was said.
My point was that people (on both sides of this issue) do mistake fact checking with agenda when it comes to religion because of the polarizing nature of the topic.
But...ultimately, that view ignores that many of the places (and even some of the people) of the Biblical narrative from the 9th century BCE seem to roughly match the archeological record.
And even before that the record is simply incomplete or mixed, rather than directly contradicting the Biblical era of prophets and early kings.
For example, at the Elah Fortress site (10th century BC), there were no pig bones (unlike Philistine sites) and a fragmentary inscription that at least resembles the Israelite culture depicted by the Bible:
1 you shall not do [it], but worship (the god) [El] 2 Judge the sla[ve] and the wid[ow] / Judge the orph[an] 3 [and] the stranger. [Pl]ead for the infant / plead for the po[or and] 4 the widow. Rehabilitate [the poor] at the hands of the king 5 Protect the po[or and] the slave / [supp]ort the stranger.
This isn't evidence for the Bible (which makes lots of other unprovable magical claims) but rather evidence that parts of the Bible do accurately convey information about an ancient society.
All that being said, I'm pretty sure we agree with eachother.
https://www.academia.edu/1720062/The_Common_Trojan_Origin_of...
Going to need a source for that.
> Noah's flood is as legitimate as it has been for 100 years
To an extent. 95%+ of the story is false, apart from there (probably) was a big flood. But the majority if the story is false.
As with most of the stories in the bible, they tied them into some real events to ground them to the people, to myths of the age, then wove into them a fantasy story perhaps with enough grounding to reality to state "based on a true story", but probably not even that
I too am impressed that so many old folk tales/myths/legends have recently been found to have a basis of reality.
I mean, the way I see it:
There are stories from a decade ago 'based on a true story' and if you look at our modern 'myths', like a movie based on a true story, generally they are very loosely based on the true story.
And that is with our modern ability to document and review what happened in the past.
These stories were oral tradition for hundreds of years before being written.
The fact that they have any basis left is amazing and a testament to the powerful events that resonated through history. It's a testament to the ability of humans to pass on information in a uni directional time dimension.
* I'm completely non-religious.
Why wouldn't they? You're going to want to pass on interesting stories. And what other means would they have had to transfer knowledge if not through oral tradition? It would have been the only available medium. The stories deemed interesting or important would have been the way people would have entertained each other.
The other thing to keep in mind is that with these stories we can suffer from historical pareidolia - where if the parts of the story fit the truth just enough we assume that must be the basis. I don't know if that's always the case.
Amazement comes when reality exceeds expectations.
If this isn't just the case of pareidolia or cherry picking data:
It seems I see maintaining an oral history that retains any connection to reality over hundreds of years as amazing.
That is because I see human communication as highly flawed, even in today's day where recording and reproduction are easy. Also, think of education; how much more standardized and advanced it is today and still people have a hard time passing things on accurately.
Some people think of human communication as less flawed than I do. So I guess there would be no amazement for them.
Broken phone is you listening to a message whispered once to you, and there's always a jerk in the middle who changes the story to something totally different. These stories would have been told to you over and over again until you know it by heart. They would naturally get embellished, and that's what we see - floods cover the earth men become gods, mountain peaks become heaven.
It's also important to note that, while we don't know events from 5 to 10 years ago off by heart, we all remember where we were when 9/11 happened - those are the sorts of events that would have been passed down. And really, all we get out of these stories is the equivalent to "9/11 happened" - many of the stories lose all other details.
For instance, there's a general consensus that Noah's Ark is based upon a flood myth shared by many different cultures is drawn from a Mesopotamian precursors, and seems to stem from ~2000 BCE. There are a bunch of retellings with a bunch of different details - there's heroes and gods, but the water varies from "killing everything on Earth" to "a river flooding", and was due to sin, or overpopulation, or just the caprices of the Gods.
That does sound like what would happen if you were playing telephone.
You seem to feel your version of expectations are better tuned so that when we subtract them from reality it is what you expected.
I see this as amazing. Again, that has to be because I see human communication more flawed than you do. And that is fine. Personally, I think you do a lot of hand waving when you say something like "there's always a jerk in the middle who changes the story to something totally different" and then just outright ignore that when talking about oral tradition maintenance. Especially when you consider wars, famine, mass migrations, etc.
But alas, it's different expectations and and given that you aren't amazed, your expectations are apparently more accurate (as long as those expectations were truly held before the proof was shown)
There's plenty of research and precedent for it.
We actually have some confirmations where oral traditions weren't bawdlerised in Judaeo-Christian history -- if you look at how they adopted a system of rewarding verity (as Muslims do now, with learning their scripture by rote) then you can see how separated populations maintained the same stories, in the same form, without alteration of major factual points.
https://www.sapiens.org/column/curiosities/dead-sea-scrolls-... read from "When I entered graduate school".
To the extent that the bible is inaccurate, it's certainly less a conspiracy to mislead and more a gradual loss of accuracy due to being passed down generations orally before eventually being written down.
EDIT: I’m perplexed that this is a controversial opinion. What evidence is there that supports a conspiracy explanation?
So maybe there was a guy called Noah, maybe there wasn't. But I strongly suspect there was an actual world wide flood within the mythic memory of our species.
In both cases it doesn't make the story of Noah's ark true.
Unless of course, like Greenland and Iceland, the naming was a marketing ploy.
I'm pretty sure that Atlantis was found a long time ago.
As https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Location_hypotheses_of_Atlanti... summarizes, the historical evidence of Atlantis is in Plato. And if we assume an easy to make factor of 10 misreading of Egyptian hieroglyphs, Plato's description fits the known destruction of Minoan civilization by the Theran volcano.
Yeah, not as glamorous as space aliens. But it fits all known evidence, including archeological.
The early colonists were substitance farmers and there are no journals or diaries or documents which talk about building walls.
They do have diaries of farming and painting and all other topics but not building walls up mountains and sprawling over legde and landscapes.
Search up liDAR and New England. The region is still being scanned but each time they scan more and more walls are illuminated.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/crowdsourcing-to-map-t...
https://nhdes.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?i...
What if the colonists occupied the land those people had farmed!
Edit: I'd add that these stone walls are still used by surveyors, especially when the historical records may be spotty, but also just because they in many cases happen to still fall along existing property lines. There _are_ a few "ancient" stone sites in New England of disputed origin, including "Mystery Hill" (also known as "America's Stonehenge"). But there is a strong argument to be made that these were constructed by modern Americans as hoaxes.
It's simply impossible for the farmers to have built all the walls, even if thats all they did was build walls all day every day for generations.
The early colonists were sustenance farmers and there are no journals or diaries or documents which talk about them building walls.
There is not one piece of written evidence that the colonists created all the walls. There is not one piece of written evidence that the native Americans built the walls.
We don't know who built the walls.
Putting into the title '.. origin of the builders' appears to be a fabrication by BBC.
The abstract of the referenced article in the scientific journal does not support the BBC's fabrication.
"...
We find overwhelming support for agriculture being introduced to Britain by incoming continental farmers, with small, geographically structured levels of hunter-gatherer ancestry. Unlike other European Neolithic populations, we detect no resurgence of hunter-gatherer ancestry at any time during the Neolithic in Britain. Genetic affinities with Iberian Neolithic individuals indicate that British Neolithic people were mostly descended from Aegean farmers who followed the Mediterranean route of dispersal. We also infer considerable variation in pigmentation levels in Europe by circa 6000 bc....
"