We live in an era where a cloak of obscurity is being drawn over science. Science is something that a few experts and institutions know about, and that the rest of us must accept when we're told about it.
We don't all have access to big numbers. But the essence of science is observation. Sometimes enhanced with experimentation, depending on the topic. The essential methods are in fact available to us all.
Adrienne Mayor's 2005 book Fossil Legends of the First Americans gains a special relevance in this time. Mayor is a scholar of natural history folklore, a fascinating field that until just now I didn't even know existed. But the native tribes of the Americas have been finding and collecting fossils for centuries, well before the bulk of European settlement. And the stories that they came up with by way of explanation have in many cases been based on good, solid observation, leading to insights on the kinds of animals that lived in the Americas in the deep past. In general they haven't really gotten credit for this, as Mayor reports.
Yet much more historical and natural knowledge has been retained and for a longer time span than is generally appreciated. To find these nuggets of genuine knowledge, the Iroquois scholar Barbra Mann suggests that one should look for the "consistent elements" in the layered matrix of storytelling over the ages. Many scholars have questioned whether oral traditions are "real history." Anthropologist Robert Lowie, for example, who studied several Native American cultures in the 1930s, famously declared in 1915 that "oral traditions [have no] historical value whatsoever under any conditions whatsoever." But Lowie's grip is loosening: today many mythologists and historians would agree with Roger Echo-Hawk, a Pawnee historian, that oral histories should be treated as "respectable siblings of written documents," as valuable sources for reconstructing "ancient American history." The most recent analyses of the mythmaking process, drawing on modern linguistics with datable historical, astronomical, or geological events, are revealing that accurate geomythology can extend back over millennia.
The Americas have a rich natural history in terms of both dinosaurs and other large reptiles and--in more recent epochs--mammalian megafauna. As far as we know now, that doesn't much extend to paleoanthropology. There are no known humans or hominids before anatomically modern humans to have lived in the Americans. Of course if this state of knowledge changes, it will be a tremendous shock and will require large amounts of scrutiny. To understand it we'll need to look at all potential sources of knowledge.
3 comments:
Of course you're correct about the essential truth of what constitutes the scientific method but as you've also noted, that hasn't been the way it's always worked - more so in recent decades. It appears to have been habitual of many western scientists to ignore or abjure anything told to them by people who don't comport themselves in a 'civilized' manner. No degree, no fancy institution, no means of proof all mean no respect.
It doesn't surprise me that Adrienne Mayor discovered aspects of No. American history in folklore that has never been taken seriously. There are a number of cultures who have historical records going back far beyond our particular time, even when the stories themselves were taught by one generation to another. Joseph Campbell had some interesting theories about the essential truths of folklore and myth.
The Indian Vedas were first written in Sanskrit beginning round about 2000 BC, making Hinduism the oldest known religion in the world. However, nobody knows just how old they are because the Vedas were transmitted orally long before they were codified.
Since this is a subject that's been interesting to me for a long time I was fascinated to learn that during the past several decades archeologists have had to revise their timeframes regarding how long people had lived in the Americas. The general theory proposed early in the 20th century, one that was taught for a very long time, was that the original inhabitants of North America were the Clovis people (named for the kind of spear points found that were unique to them) - a nomadic group who walked across the Bering Strait land bridge 13k years ago and on down into non-ice covered areas. They either disappeared or were eventually assimilated into tribes of hunter-gatherers who were already here.
More recent discoveries and studies have suggested there were people already living in South America at least 23k years ago. Some think they may have crossed the bridge before the last Ice Age began. The idea I found especially fascinating was Thor Heyerdahl's theory that ancient mariners rode the Pacific currents to the Americas. Since Andaman Islanders DNA has been found in a number of S. American people it's an idea that hasn't been entirely discounted.
Then there are the Aboriginal people of Australia who said they'd lived there for tens of thousands of years by describing the constellations of long ago. Now that proof has been found of human habitation going back 50-70k years they've been proven right.
Note that while the list of the uncivilized may change from one era to another, the barbarians are always said to be out there, somewhere outside of the ivory tower. Of course in terms of determining truth, scientific rigor is a good thing. At the same time, you do suspect that certain phenomena just get ignored because no one in any kind of position wants to hear about them.
That's an interesting truth. There are stories that go back well before they were written down. How far exactly? If it's from an old enough civilization it may contain traces of when human consciousness, our way of thinking, was still molten and unsettled. Even moreso than it is now, I mean. Campbell led the way in studying this. I'm sure there's still a lot more to be said on it.
The Indian Vedas are one good example. One can't help but be curious about what shaped Indian and Hindu mythology, what realities they were looking to explain. The trimurti, the trio of Indian gods, represents three different aspects of creation. Unlike with Christianity they're not all held to be the same entity, but still the parallel is there. Of course you could also make comparisons with the three Fates of Classical myth.
Human habitation in the Americas could well go back further than we previously thought. Even the presence of the Bering Strait land bridge (a.k.a. Beringia), has been moved back a ways, now thought to have begun 20,000 years ago. As for ships sailing from other parts of Eurasia, it's a good question. If there are myths of sailors who ventured out and never came back, maybe it's because they landed somewhere else.
Of course that still wouldn't mean that physically pre-modern humans had lived in the Western Hemisphere. Not directly at least. Native Americans do share some DNA with Denisovans, an East Asian species similar to Neanderthals. Probably not something anyone would remember, even in folklore, but could have affected the myths on some level.
So Aboriginals weren't just frontin'. They actually have been in Australia for tens of thousands of years. The continent on which their ancestors landed would have been quite different from what it is now. To take one major example, much of the marsupial and monotreme megafauna would have still been around. Such profound differences may be why the sky is the mythic frame of reference.
You've raised some interesting ideas. Have you seen any of the maps of the way SE Asia maps looked when the sea levels were much lower during the last Ice Age?
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