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I think the modern, mainstream opinion underrates oral traditions greatly, which is to be expected because we only practice empiricism in our world. However, oral traditions are very important in a lot of cultures around the world, and they have been for a long, long time.

What do you base this on?

What does he base what on? The importance of empiricism in the modern world? The importance of oral storytelling and teaching in the ancient world? Both of those are extremely well known and documented, so I assume you mean something else.

I think the modern, mainstream opinion underrates oral traditions greatly

When you go against the opinion of mainstream experts, you should have some evidence of rationale.

But they aren’t going against it, they are saying that (for kind of obvious reasons) most people don’t look to oral tradition as a sign of civilization. Mostly because it’s impossible to date and verify oral tradition.

While the process of science might be done well enough, is it a case of looking under the lamppost for our keys that we lost somewhere over there in the darkness?

It feels akin to conservation groups in Wales fighting to maintain the barren hills, nevermind they used to be covered in trees before we cleared the land for sheep.[0]

[0] Feral, by George Monbiot https://www.worldcat.org/title/feral-rewilding-the-land-the-...

Lol, the act of asking for empirical evidence strengthens his point..

He can almost base his argument on your response to it.

I didn't ask for empirical evidence. You call it an argument. It's not an argument. It's just a naked claim, without any kind of basis at all. To ask for support somehow seems to offend everybody.

Okay, fine, let's just believe whatever feels good to us.

The ask you made was lazy nonsense. My use of language was imprecise. Fwiw I'm not offended in the slightest but think about it logically:

- language is important?

- speaking predates writing?

- in our current society writing is the source of truth?

This is the premise he implicitly asked for in order to voice his sentiment ... and you deny him even that without him listing a source (which is precisely the thing he was concerned with).

"I am saddened by all the violence" -> "take that back or I hit you"

Edit (slightly OT): let's not "all believe" in anything. We need to be able to allow contradictory things to coexist

I’d say on the fact that we only count societies who write their stories down as “civilized” while there have been numerous societies that lacked writing in America, Africa and the Steppe that you really have to try to not count as civilization. The Mississippian culture comes to mind.

Uhm common sense I guess. But as I said, in our society, you can't even make a statement like that without someone asking for a source or something. It's amusing, but also kinda unfortunate.

If it was common sense, it wouldn't be against mainstream opinion.

In our society, you can just say whatever you want without backing it up in any way, and then get irritated when someone asks how you figure.

Mainstream opinion isn't based in common sense, quite the opposite sometimes.

Others seem to think your claim for evidence is unreasonable, but I think it's a perfectly reasonable to ask.

One thing I've seen is that Indigenous Australian oral history is thought to extend back at least 37,000 years[1]. Natural events that have been demonstrated to have happened tens of thousands of years ago have been passed down in the oral history of some civilizations. This knowledge conversely seems to be lost with a transfer to written records, probably due to a lack of people keeping mental note of ancient knowledge. e.g., a lot of Native American history is just lost for countless reasons, despite them having written records now.

[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/aboriginal-tale-anci...

Yes, I would like to study the probably complex philosophic system of the celtic druids for example. But this is not really possible with the fragments remaining preserved only through the writing of christian monks.

The Iliad and the Odyssey were originally oral works in a prehistoric (pre-writing) culture. Transmission of culture was done orally and visually just as they are today. Culture wasn't just technology. It was also origin stories of the tribe, origin stories of the universe, and so on. A lot of information can be exchanged orally and visually without writing.

Definitely I guess my point is more that our definition of what constitutes writing seems to be arbitrary when we do have “writing” that goes back ~20k years it just isn’t letters representing sounds. I mentioned tally marks and we’ve found them all over the place. If our definition has to be that people use an alphabet to record sentences then civilization under the definition of writing + multiple city states may not be moved back. But I think that doesn’t capture a large (like 2-3 times as long) span of time in which there were “civilizations” and it’s really a shame.

I think that isn't defined as a writing system as you can only record numerical data.

Same as how the Inca Quipu[1] isn't generally defined as writing, despite the fact it seems they may have encoded some non-numerical information such as provinces for accounting purposes - like having a province_id in a database.

You can keep track of taxes etc. with a system like Quipu, but you couldn't write down the Iliad with it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu

>I really do think we need to rethink our idea of civilization

Why? Civilization is a description, not a value judgment.

If a society we value doesn't fit the description the answer isn't to change the description.

The answer is to remove the value you are placing on the label.

I would imagine trade centers would be another possibility.

civilizations come and gone, hopefully throughout the universe, are such a deep romance to me. the ancient egyptians should be enough to get you to this mental state. one of the largest and most mysterious structures in the world was built by them and still exists. expand this concept to the entire universe and boom my mind is blasted.