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SeptimusHeap
MOD
(Edited uphill both ways)
23rd Jun, 2021 11:53:21 PM
This feels like a discussion that would get more input in Trope Talk.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
I believe I asked about this a year or two ago, but can't find the old thread.
Someone has added highly contentious statements about the oral traditions of certain cultures to Older Than Dirt - claiming without any hedging that they accurately record memories of events from tens of thousands of years ago. While of course this is possible, the truth of these claims is fundamentally unknowable, and for this reason the vast majority of relevant scholars don't take these ideas terribly seriously. As Older Than Dirt itself notes:
"Note: Tropes originating in mythologies/religions that aren't Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Anatolian, Vedic, or Chinese are never indexed here, as we have no idea whether those stories even existed in 800 BC, or what form they had, centuries or millennia before they were first written down. [...] Early folklorists often started with the assumption that folktales and myths were primordial; more research has shown that people can and do modify all sorts of tales for any purpose."
I think we should generalize the above statement to cover oral traditions as well. Otherwise, we'd need to list every single culture with a flood myth, as it's at least conceivable that such myths retain a memory of some Ice Age-era deluge.