Evidence for global cultural diffusion | Hacker News Reader

Evidence for global cultural diffusion

vectorsofmind.com

36 pointsdrewcut21 comments

I see nothing that can't be explained by convergent cultural evolution. Also, what's that thing about "Shamans being able to access molecular information" ? Is the author seriously including this in his piece ? It makes it hard to take the rest seriously.

It's a joke that popular alternatives to diffusion are woo. Next line is "I guess DNA does kind of resemble intertwined snakes?"

There should be a law "if you make a joke to a wide enough audience you will eventually encounter someone who has never seen a joke in their entire life."

It's just Poe's law.

I lean towards the "convergent evolution" explanations of perennial philosophies as well. However paleolithic humans have also gone through geographical and population bottlenecks. If there are convergent features in culture you would expect them to also be the ones highly conserved after going through such a bottleneck. I don't draw the same conclusions as the author but the idea of paleolithic story telling as being an ancient memory preservation mechanism is compelling.

Music even more so. It's said that common emotional responses to certain features of music are culturally-mediated, but it's also weird how consistently certain features tend to elicit certain emotions. There could be a physiological basis, but that conflicts with the aforementioned, and anyway, it's not as consistent as, say, a reflex.

If I may succumb to romance for a moment:

"And a song someone sings, once upon a December."

Song as figurative memetic psychopomp, an automatic but not autonomic function to transmit ideas.

- "Narby spent two years living with the Ashaninka people in the Peruvian Amazon, where he observed the role of ayahuasca, a powerful hallucinogenic brew, in their cultural and spiritual practices. His experiences led him to theorize that the Ashaninka shamans could access information at a molecular level through their hallucinogenic visions, specifically about the structure and function of DNA."

That's a Stanford PhD anthropologist. Good god, the soft sciences have fallen hard.

What does "access information at a molecular level" even mean? Information isn't made out of molecules.

> Information isn't made out of molecules.

Oh yes it is. DNA, neurotransmitters, etc. biology is closer to information science than you might imagine (imagine with your brain molecules.)

No, those things are substrates that carry information, not the information itself. And examining those substrates at a molecular level usually means looking beneath the level of complexity at which the information is encoded in the first place, and so not even seeing the information itself.

No, those things are where information and reality meet. When you smell something the molecule and the information "in" or "of" the molecule are not distinct. The meaning of the molecule is itself.

I'm trying to offer information to help you understand the original article, I'm not interested in arguing about it.

Being able to communicate between the "ego" and the molecular level of information means being able to e.g. smell a plant and know what medicine it is.

Seven Sisters myth being a coincidence across cultures around the world:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qyjKND3dAE

The conclusion of the video says, "There are universal motifs that have survived since the African dispersal event 70,000 years ago." Timestamp 23:28

Motifs, but not shared myths.

> The best overview of this practice I could find was chatGPT [link], so all of the (now) usual caveats. It lists practices in dozens of societies spread across every continent[8].

I don't understand why an article that starts with scholarly pretense would throw that in there.

(If the best overview you could find was ChatGPT output, and you're suggesting the usual caveats apply, why not go validate what it said, from reputable sources, rather than passing through suspected bad information?)

is there a utilitarian school of archeology that looks at what would absolutely necessitate these things for survival? astronomy is for navigation, particularly over large distances (deserts) and at sea. music and flutes are for both signalling over distances and abstraction of language into transmissable signals for coordination. circumcision is as honest signal as possible for membership (hah!) in a group that provides security and benefits to its mothers and children. the feminine cults show that matriarchy is the harbinger of conquest, as objectively, the thing those civilizations and tribes had in common is being overrun and wiped out.

simple material explanations that can be modelled as incentives, each demonstrably essential for survival, which is the only ultimate measure of success. we don't need psychic aliens or DMT elves to make testable hypothesis' and predictions based on these necessities. Look for the physical necessities of survival instead of symbols and narratives and it probably yields better results.

> is there a utilitarian school of archeology that looks at what would absolutely necessitate these things for survival

Yes - mainstream archeology, paleo-archeology, and anthropology.

The blog above is literally peddling psudeoscience and/or Mormon theology (eg. Seven Sisters/Pleiades).

Good examples of mainstream "utilitarian archeology" would be "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language", "After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000-5000 BC", and "The Lost World of Old Europe: The Danube Valley, 5000-3500 BC"

> Look for the physical necessities of survival instead of symbols and narratives and it probably yields better results

That's mainstream archeology and anthropology. Sadly, a lot of people think it's "dry", "boring" or believe the world is only 6,000 years old.

Archeology and Anthropology have become very quantitative over the past century, but the "Indiana Jones" trope continues to persist, which is especially ironic because it was UChicago that made the social sciences quantitative.

Mainstream anthropologists have much to say on the bullroarer, which has been a part of the diffusion debate for over a century:

“No ethnomusicologist, I think, would stand for plurigenesis as regards the bull-roarers, which even in decorative detail are often alike and are used for the same purpose wherever and whenever found.” ~Jaap Kunst, 1960

"The question is not whether the bull-roarer has been invented once or a dozen times, nor even whether this simple toy has once or frequently entered ceremonial associations. I have myself seen priests of the Hopi Flute fraternity whirl bullroarers on extremely solemn occasions, but the thought of a connection with Australian or African mysteries never obtruded itself because there was no suggestion that women must be excluded from the range of the instrument. There lies the crux of the matter. Why do Brazilians and Central Australians deem it death for a woman to see the bullroarer? Why this punctilious insistence on keeping her in the dark on this subject in West and East Africa and Oceania? I know of no psychological principle that would urge the Ekoi and the Bororo mind to bar women from knowledge about bull-roarers and until such a principle is brought to light I do not hesitate to accept diffusion from a common center as the more probable assumption. This would involve historical connection between the rituals of initiation into the male tribal societies of Australia, New Guinea, Melanesia, and Africa." Robert Lowie, 1920

"“The case for diffusion is even stronger than stated by Lowie. Not only is the bull-roarer tabooed to women when used in connection with male initiation rites, but it is also almost invariably represented as the voice of spirits. Nor does the bull-roarer travel alone in connection with male initiation rites. This paper has demonstrated the fact that a form of tribal marking, a death and resurrection ceremony, and an impersonation of ghosts or spirits is found among male tribal initiation rites as the usual concomitants of the bull-roarer. There is no psychological principle involved which would necessarily group these elements together, and they therefore must be regarded as having been fortuitously grouped in one locality of the world, and then disseminated as a complex.” Loeb 1922

Or, more recently:

“Interest has long since waned in ‘diffusionist’ anthropology, but recent evidence is very much in accord with its predictions. Today we know that the bullroarer is a very ancient object, specimens from France (13,000 B.C.) and the Ukraine (17,000 B.C.) dating back well into the Paleolithic period. Moreover, some archeologists—notably, Gordon Willey (1971)—now admit the bullroarer to the kit-bag of artifacts brought by the very earliest migrants to the Americas. Nevertheless, modern anthropology has all but ignored the broad historical implication of the wide distribution and ancient lineage of the bullroarer.” ~Thomas Gregor, 1973

And Bethe Hagen in 2009:

“The bullroarer and buzzer were once well-known and well-loved by anthropologists. They functioned within the profession as hallmark artifacts that symbolized the cultural relativist commitment to independent invention even as evidence (size, shape, meaning, uses, symbols, ritual) stretching tens of thousands of years across human history pointed to diffusion.” ~Bethe Hagen, 2009

Which ones of these are pseudo?

> Which ones of these are pseudo

Every single one of those, because they have not been empirical and definitively proven, and cannot disprove cultural diffusion that arised from multiple other forms of proto-globalization over the past centuries.

It's my weekend so I'm not going to suffer fools of which you absolutely are (I'd give them a verbal or occasional physical lashing - for which I got a suspension in my undergrad once (pro-tip: don't try to justify phrenology to a guy like me)) so I don't feel like dealing with the convo atm. If an HN commentators with a karma over 5,000 and created before January 2020 wants to chat about this I gladly will - I've found discourse has fallen among HN accounts that signed up after the pandemic.

The article is bunk but in general I still think after the invention of whaling and ocean going boats 8000-6000 BC global cultural diffusion is often the much more plausible explanation why inventions show up close in time around the chalcolithic.

Or maybe humans are not particularly creative. We are not wired that differently. Two arms, two eyes, two legs, 5*2 fingers and toes. We see patterns and we try to define something around it.

Siblings are universal.

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