I've been geeking out over the great flood for a few months now, I got started with a Joe Rogan podcast when he was speaking with two experts on the subject: Graham Hancock (who does have some woo in his head) and Randall Carlson (who is very anti-woo).
Unfortunately, the podcast is 3 hours long, but never feels it's length if you find ancient civilizations and global catastrophic events to be fascinating subject matter, in summary:
-10,000 years ago, the glacier covering North America was struck by meteor, starting a sudden massive flood, ending the ice age and creating hell on earth conditions for ~1000 years
-Nearly the entirety of the human population and civilization was wiped out during this time
They do a phenomenal job of combining myth, history, geology and scientific analysis to make a very compelling argument about the nature of the great flood and it's impact on the development of humankind.
Looking for a historical basis to things like the flood kind of misses the point. These myths are analogies - collective dreams born in the unconscious.
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There's not much bleed over between this article and the model proposed by Hancock and Carlson (H&C). The Skeptic is mostly arguing against the Great Flood as proposed by christian creationists (which H&C most certainly are not) and the geological evidence cited is largely different then the evidence in H&C's model. Unfortunately, I do not have the geological training to judge the Skeptic's evidence based on it's own merits, but it seems thin when I compare to it H&C's evidence (this may be entirely due to the fact that I'm much more knowledgeable about H&C's side) . I also have an aversion to any article framed as 'religion vs science' because one side is going to be heavily biased.
I'm still riding the H&C bandwagon, there is still a large volume of knowledge I want to absorb from their side of the argument before I start second guessing it all.
e: Hold on a minute, do you actually disagree with me, or are you just posting the first contrarian article you googled to see how I'd react?
I've been geeking out over the great flood for a few months now, I got started with a Joe Rogan podcast when he was speaking with two experts on the subject: Graham Hancock (who does have some woo in his head) and Randall Carlson (who is very anti-woo)...
What qualifies either of these men as experts???
From where I sit, without adequate training in the cultural underpinnings and the methodology behind myth creation and literature in the Ancient Near East, neither of these figures is competent enough on this subject to offer any sort of "expert" opinion.
I maintain: There is NO specific flood event from which the many individual flood myths originate. There are rather common experiences with all sorts and varieties of flooding, which have produced a wide range of stories that contain predominantly similar themes.
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Originally Posted by woob
"...harem warfare? like all your wives dressup and go paintballing?"
From where I sit, without adequate training in the cultural underpinnings and the methodology behind myth creation and literature in the Ancient Near East, neither of these figures is competent enough on this subject to offer any sort of "expert" opinion.
I maintain: There is NO specific flood event from which the many individual flood myths originate. There are rather common experiences with all sorts and varieties of flooding, which have produced a wide range of stories that contain predominantly similar themes.
Decades of research, field work and international acclaim. Agree with them or not, such things make an expert.
Myth is only piece of the puzzle in their model and certainly isn't the linchpin that ties it all together. Most of their work is based on evidence and mythology is one of the filters used to interpret that evidence.
I will agree that all I have read about 'evidence' concerning a global or near global flooding event usually gades under scrutiny. As well, I'm not sure why a meteor hitting a glacier would trigger a huge flood to be honest. Lastly, I am skeptical about Rogan (though I do like the guys show for some things) being the guy for a scientific round table.
But I have not listened to it so I'll give it a shot.
I gotta agree with Textcritic though. Flood myths are probably based on local flooding incidents which can be very destructive to those people.
I will agree that all I have read about 'evidence' concerning a global or near global flooding event usually fades under scrutiny. As well, I'm not sure why a meteor hitting a glacier would trigger a huge flood to be honest. Lastly, I am skeptical about Rogan (though I do like the guys show for some things) being the guy for a scientific round table.
But I have not listened to it so I'll give it a shot.
I gotta agree with Textcritic though. Flood myths are probably based on local flooding incidents which can be very destructive to those people.
I've been geeking out over the great flood for a few months now, I got started with a Joe Rogan podcast when he was speaking with two experts on the subject: Graham Hancock (who does have some woo in his head) and Randall Carlson (who is very anti-woo)...
Decades of research, field work and international acclaim. Agree with them or not, such things make an expert.
Only if they are doing them correctly, and I have no reason to think that they are. Graham Hancock has some training in sociology, and is in this podcast willfully disparaging the academic disciplines of modern archaeology and ancient history. As far as I can tell, he is doing so from a layman's perspective, whereby he is utilising the tools gleaned from his own specialised discipline, and transposing them into fields in which he has no business conducting himself as an "expert." I have colleagues who are actual archaeologists. I have a good understanding of the principles, methods, and limits of modern archaeology, and I regularly read archaeological surveys and reports as part of the curriculum in my own discipline of study. But, I would never presume to pass myself off as an expert in archaeology based on this—not without the requisite, decades-long training that is needed for active participation in the discipline.
And what of Randall Carlson? He calls himself an expert in a varia of "arcane and scientific traditions," but I have yet to uncover any precise information about any of the actual academic disciplines in which he has honed his craft. Who is this guy, and why should I listen to him?
One does not just go out and "do research" and conduct "fieldwork." I remain highly sceptical that either of these two presenters possess anything approaching adequate training to preside over the scientific veracity of their theories.
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Originally Posted by Matata
Myth is only piece of the puzzle in their model and certainly isn't the linchpin that ties it all together. Most of their work is based on evidence and mythology is one of the filters used to interpret that evidence.
And this is what I have a serious problem with. I have only listened through about half of the podcast, but am highly dubious about the way in which Hancock and Carlson are so quick to connect the scientific findings to their own uncritical reading of a variety of ancient literary traditions. They very carelessly accept at face value the reports of Atlantis in Plato's Republic, and are unwittingly eager to promote an historically discoverable reality behind allegorically and morally derived tales. They are employing myths that are in the range of 3,000–5,000-years-old to account for the preservation of human knowledge of an event that occurred over 11,000-years-ago.
Based on what? The common presence of catastrophic flood stories conjoined to the ice age event that occurred more than six millennia before their commitment to writing. It's a preposterous leap. And quite frankly, not a very convincing one. Never mind the absence of any evidence for the necessary civil infrastructure to maintain the collective memory of such an event over the course of hundreds of generations, there is nothing from any of the actual myths themselves that approaches the scale and cataclysmic force of the extinction event they supposedly reflect.
A close shave from Occam's razor reveals that the theory they promote is vapid. I can subscribe to a massive, extinction event that was caused by dramatic climate change at the end of the last ice age. I can even allow for the possibility that there were civilisations that emerged before this event. (Hancock and Carlson actually make the point of stating that it is impossible to know one way or the other, but then proceed to presume their existence anyways!) But what I can't accept is the connection drawn between anything that occurred in 10,000 B.C.E. and the collective memory of cultures that developed thousands of years later. Not without some sort of demonstrable chain of evidence to bind them.
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Originally Posted by woob
"...harem warfare? like all your wives dressup and go paintballing?"
I do have a question for Textcritic though. If I am reading your last post correctly, you are discounting the idea that myths could have been born and carried before the written age to continue into the written age?
I do have a question for Textcritic though. If I am reading your last post correctly, you are discounting the idea that myths could have been born and carried before the written age to continue into the written age?
Not exactly.
I am challenging the notion that a myth could have been born and carried in the absence of a written culture for such an enormous period of time. The written stories that do survive show an extraordinary malleability even over the course of a few hundred years. Within an oral culture, I would expect that a thousand or two thousand years of transmission would render most of these stories unrecognizable. That is to say nothing about what is liable to happen for many thousands of years.
A problem that I have with the idea of flood stories preserving cultural memories from 10,000 B.C.E. is very much tied to the huge space in time between the event and its codification. But even more to the point, I am dubious about the possibility of survival of these myths in the absence of writing because of the circumstances and priorities within nomadic, preliterate, subsistence, tribal groups that necessarily would have set on other matters of greater urgency. The frequency of threats to the existence of the tribes would be enough to set the preservation of any of their collective memories into recurring jeopardy. This is why the invention of writing was such a phenomenal innovation when it finally did occur.
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Originally Posted by woob
"...harem warfare? like all your wives dressup and go paintballing?"
When would you say writing occured. Are you talking cave symbols? Hieroglyphics? Alphabet?
My specialty is the Ancient Near East, and I can only speak to that. There is hieroglyphic writing in Egypt from before 3000 B.C.E., and cuneiform scripts in Sumar and Akkad appear as early as 2000 B.C.E. The Phoenician cuneiform alphabetic script in around 1500 B.C.E., and pale-Hebrew alphabetic script in around 1000 B.C.E.
But one must understand here, that the early symbolic scripts employed in Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia were ridiculously arcane. It would have required such a terrific level of specialisation be able to read them, that they almost certainly were not widely distributed, and surely not known among the agrarian masses.
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Originally Posted by woob
"...harem warfare? like all your wives dressup and go paintballing?"
Ok, so to be devils advocate, if your talking best case scenario we have some set of writing at 3000 BCE, you believe there weren't stories or consciousness absorbed from before that?
I also wonder about North American cultures. They only had symbols, yet seem to have old myths.
I don't really care for defending those flood theories mentioned, but I'm going to comment on something here.
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Originally Posted by Textcritic
But even more to the point, I am dubious about the possibility of survival of these myths in the absence of writing because of the circumstances and priorities within nomadic, preliterate, subsistence, tribal groups that necessarily would have set on other matters of greater urgency. The frequency of threats to the existence of the tribes would be enough to set the preservation of any of their collective memories into recurring jeopardy.
The opposite actually tends to be true. Pre-literate cultures tend to value storytelling very highly. Nomadic cultures even today tend to place high value in stories and storytelling, and this has probably been even more emphasized in previous times.
As a rule of thumb on cultures, the less possessions people have or carry around, the more important their stories become to them. In nomadic cultures that avoid carrying around anything unnecessary, stories were often the most important thing passed down in generations.
Understanding your identity has always been a big question for humans, and stories play a huge role in that. In farming cultures your identity was largely tied to the land. In modern times we have the whole of entertainment industry and schools and science to tell us those things. In pre-literate nomadic cultures, all that was replaced by storytelling, and all of it was oral tradition.
Lack of possessions also means that myths and stories were the main source of entertainment. What we know of humans, entertainment is also always important to us. Even in the most extreme circumstances (war, famine, slavery) people always find time for entertainment. You can easily say it's one of our most basic needs. (Maslow has been proven rather definitively wrong in this.)
We also know that fairytales such as Beauty and the Beast or Jack and the Beanstalk, which before the 19th century were mostly told in oral form, date back essentially as far back as our knowledge goes, which is that 3,000-5,000 years range.
I don't think it's in any way preposterous to suggest that stories that have lived on for at least 5,000 years might be at least twice that old.
We also don't know if stories have always changed at the same pace. Perhaps in pre-historic times the stories also changed much more slowly, as did people's lives.
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...having said all that, the question of how recognizable the stories would be after 11,000 years is perfectly valid. But to comment on that in this specific case, I would actually have to dig into that flood theory video above, and I don't care enough to do that.
...The opposite actually tends to be true. Pre-literate cultures tend to value storytelling very highly. Nomadic cultures even today tend to place high value in stories and storytelling, and this has probably been even more emphasized in previous times...
Yes, this is true. But without the infrastructure of writing in culture, there is no way to know how long individual myths survive. With the rate of change that naturally takes place in the transmission of oral traditions, and with a "natural selection" of only certain stories that are culturally useful it would actually appear that even within these conditions it is unlikely that these stories remain intact for thousands of years.
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As a rule of thumb on cultures, the less possessions people have or carry around, the more important their stories become to them. In nomadic cultures that avoid carrying around anything unnecessary, stories were often the most important thing passed down in generations.
Is there an actual quantification of this rule? If there is, I have never heard of it. In the reading and study I have done of purely oral cultures, there is no possible way to evaluate their traditions from a literary critical or text critical perspective that can actually reveal the layers within a given story, which is necessary for tracing its history. Moreover, within oral cultures, there is no way to know whether a story they attribute to their distant ancestors from thousands of years ago is not actually fused with events from only a few hundred years ago.
How do we know this? We have an extensive collection of oral traditions that have survived in a fixed form from the time they were written down, in the Mishna. As a collection of literature, the Mishna is impossible to evaluate precisely because of its preserved oral characteristics. We are certain that the oldest traditions in the Mishna trace back to only the first or maybe second century B.C.E., even if we can't identify specifically which of the traditions are the oldest. But there are stories and instructions within the text that purport to be from even thousands of years before this.
If this is the situation for oral traditions within a literate culture, then the situation of malleability and transposition is even more pronounced within purely oral cultures. That is because literacy fosters a precision in order and structure that tends to be absent in oral cultures.
What you miss in your description of oral tradition is its enormous flexibility that ensures a prioritisation of contemporary needs and values. Unless a story fulfills a current need or makes sense within the collecting group's present context, that particular story will not continue to be told, and will eventually disappear; replaced by another one that is more useful and meaningful.
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Lack of possessions also means that myths and stories were the main source of entertainment. What we know of humans, entertainment is also always important to us. Even in the most extreme circumstances (war, famine, slavery) people always find time for entertainment. You can easily say it's one of our most basic needs. (Maslow has been proven rather definitively wrong in this.)
...We also know that fairytales such as Beauty and the Beast or Jack and the Beanstalk, which before the 19th century were mostly told in oral form, date back essentially as far back as our knowledge goes, which is that 3,000-5,000 years range.
Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I was unaware of this sort of phylogenetic work taking place, and the results are interesting. I would yet maintain that the long-term survival of the tales discussed in the articles I accessed is likely the exception, and not the norm. I will remind you that the act of story telling and the circumstances surrounding the oral transmission of stories in no way guarantees their survival perpetually intact. Under extreme circumstances when basic needs change, the stories are almost certain to undergo dramatic changes, or to disappear altogether in favour of new ones that emerge from the fabric of older ones.
Moreover, I also wonder if all types of stories are likely to survive intact—since myths are fundamentally different from moral tales that appear in the studies, I would challenge the notion that this is the case for all types of oral traditions. The common element to the folk tales in the studies I read is their entertainment value, fused with moralistic qualities. These qualities are quite different from those common to cultural and religious myths, which tend more strongly to address contemporary concerns. This would help to explain why mythologies are commonly quite distinct, whereas the folk tales in these studies are more stable.
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...We also don't know if stories have always changed at the same pace. Perhaps in pre-historic times the stories also changed much more slowly, as did people's lives.
You are correct. That, we don't know. All we can do is extrapolate from the models that we do have by way of analogy. And the models strongly suggest that traditions that circulate within purely oral cultures are extremely fragile, prone to rapid and dramatic change and adaptation, and are likely to survive only so long as they continue to be useful or meaningful. This will invariably mean that those stories that do survive do so at the expense of hundreds of thousands of predecessors that were forgotten.
In the end, I think it is a mistake to assume that every oral tradition that purports to be extremely ancient is actually thus. I can see that this is (probably remotely) possible for some types of stories, but would still maintain that this is the exception, and not the rule. It doesn't change what we tend to discover within oral cultures, and that is that most of their traditions are comparatively recent. With regards to the flood myths from antiquity, it seems much more probable that these are locally derived, and without common descent to a single, massive cataclysm from over 12,000 years ago.
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Originally Posted by woob
"...harem warfare? like all your wives dressup and go paintballing?"
...having said all that, the question of how recognizable the stories would be after 11,000 years is perfectly valid. But to comment on that in this specific case, I would actually have to dig into that flood theory video above, and I don't care enough to do that.
Trust me. Your really don't need to.
The discussion from the Joe Rogan Experience posted above is pretty ridiculous.
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Originally Posted by woob
"...harem warfare? like all your wives dressup and go paintballing?"
