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Comment by ForceBru | Hacker News Reader

Crazy stuff: "white storks that are injured by an arrow or spear while wintering in Africa and return to Europe with the projectile stuck in their bodies", they apparently helped people in 1822 learn that birds migrate?! Was it not widely known before that? Cool!

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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnacle_goose_myth

From our late scientific-era perspective it's really difficult to appreciate how badly intuitive understanding of cause and effect can let us down.

It wasn’t even accepted that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs until early 1990s

To be fair, that was a genuinely crazy idea until the detailed evidence came in. The question itself only comes up after lots of relatively modern science. Similar for plate tectonics.

Erm, the evidence for an event that happened 60+ mio years ago and the evidence for an event happening every year that you can watch in real time now is maybe not quite comparable?

Bird migrations aren't that easy to observe with 1822 tech either. It's not like they could stick a GPS recorder on a bird, or mark a bird and follow it in a car. You can make local observations (many birds fly overhead, heading South-East) but with how difficult travel was it's not trivial to piece that together to the conclusion that birds travel from Europe all the way to Africa

Or you could have talked to people who travel.

During the early age of scientific inquiry in Europe, very few human travelers were following the white stork's migration route (Europe→Anatolia→Levant→Nile→East Africa), and I'd guess that most of those who did were from the Muslim world and not particularly accessible to European observers.

The small number of long-distance travelers and cultural contacts between the Eastern Mediterranean and Western Europe did result in lots of valuable learning; this particular bit of learning just took a while.

and spontaneous generation before that: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation

It is possible that people knew that animals flew South for winter and just become unknowable. But then scholars tried to apply a new conceptual framework to that. Asking the question was a step forward, even if the hypothesised answer was wrong. Its basically quackary with good intentions. And I expect some people knew all along that birds flew South but lacked the words or the influence to wrap that in an abstract concept that would be taken seriously.

Maybe honkery?

It was likely widely believed before 1822 that birds migrate:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44926306

A little further down it said this:

> Besides migration, some theories of the time held that they turned into other kinds of birds, mice, or hibernated underwater during the winter, and such theories were even propagated by zoologists of the time.

This is hilarious in hindsight... I wonder what kind of beliefs we hold that will seem equally funny to the people in 200 years. ;)

Just look at Youtube.

Don't forget that first trains were invented just 50 years prior. A journey of even 100 kilometers was far.

E.g.: https://www.fastcompany.com/3024267/this-interactive-map-sho...

The idea that something can casually travel thousands of kilometers was beyond the realm of fantastical

But people did had eyes to see how easily birds can ride the winds along the sky. And ships also existed from where birds flying in formations over the sea could be seen.

edit: But it seems people did know since 3000 years, not all were trapped in superstition and ignorance.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_migration

TBF this is at least as much a story of the etymology of a German compound word as it is about natural science.

This should become some kind of business jargon aphorism: "Focus groups are the arrow storks of user migration" or something like that.

Some people thought that the birds flew to the moon in the winter!

Well, how did they know that the spear didn't belong to the men in the moon then?

that’s crazy, I read it in a book but can’t recall which one. In the same book they were going through the eels mistery about where they go to breed, hopefully we gonna find an eel with a spear in the neck one day

Migration was a theory but really been proven.

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