Comment by thaumasiotes
Comment by thaumasiotes 2 days ago
> but I remember reading something about an aboriginal fire ritual that had been practised by indigenous people in Australia for something like 12000 years
In Australia they're very proud of asserting things like that, but obviously there is no evidence it's true. On the other hand, there's lots of evidence that that doesn't happen.
> Because these traditions were passed down orally or through generational practice they have gradually been lost which is sad.
The fact that this mechanism of loss exists is already sufficient to prove that a tradition can't last 10,000 years.
I've found the reference now: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/sticks-discovered-...
Based on this article I think that there's is a reasonable body of evidence to suggest it might be true. Sure, not irrefutable evidence, but evidence does exist.
I'd be genuinely interested to see evidence that it doesn't happen, too, though.
> The fact that this mechanism of loss exists is already sufficient to prove that a tradition can't last 10,000 years.
That seems a bit of a non-sequitur, and without being a glib keyboard warrior Sagan's "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" is pretty relevant here.
As I argued previously, there's a fairly strong line from ancient fertility rituals to Christian tradition, and I'm not sure that those syncretic routes are particularly disputed at a top level. I agree that there are definitely people who run away with those sorts of inheritances and make all sorts of claims using them, but the simple thread of "moon > fertility > Iah > Osiris > Dionysus > Christ" is not (as I understand it) particularly contested.
So I'm not sure that a "mechanism of loss" is proof that a ritual can't last 10,000 years in native populations with an exclusively oral cultural tradition - it might be fairer to say that we have no proof that it can persist.
Again, I don't have the reference, but I remember reading something that was essentially "the archaeology of story telling" tracing early oral tradition through to things like fairy tales, to the modern day.
Similarly, things like flood myths and myths around the seven sisters - the latter of which astronomers think could be as much as 100,000 years old - indicate to me that stories, and by extension ritual, could persist for far longer than 10,000 years.