I’d be inclined to agree for a myth based on nothing but even after these giant birds disappeared the Thunderbird legend could have been reinforced with sightings of Condors or other large birds. Even if Teratonis was never seen by humans the entire legend could be have started 10,000+ years ago because of periodic sightings of large extant birds going that far back.
And it could have started with sights of condors alone, 9000 years ago. And again 8960 years ago. And again 8930 years ago. And from someone just making up a story about an absurdly huge bird 8880 years ago. And again. And again. And 8860 years ago by someone seeing a skeleton, as you say. And again. And again.
Imagining a giant animal (or an animal with golden feathers, or with an entrancing song, etc…) isn’t in any way extraordinary, not even remarkable. It doesn’t require an explanation. And as I wrote, even if such a story had been passed on after the disappearance of the bird (and it certainly did at least for a while), it would have been drowned by the thousands of instance where someone just made up a story about a giant bird over the course of thousands of years. And mixed up with other stories including, or not including, giant something.
There’s no reason to assume that what stuck was the “true story”, or even that there’s any conceivable way to determine what specific original story is the “ancestor” of the current tale/myth in the mass of stories that intertwined over the course of ages to eventually form the most recent version. And for all you know, this most recent version could in fact have been made up merely 400 years ago. Myths aren’t necessarily terribly old. And they change. 12 000 years is a really, really, long time.
Göbekli Tepe dated back to 7560- 8800 BC as early as the Epipalaeolithic. Which is 10000 years ago. So, yes, they are *capable *of building something like the Sphinx or other megastructures.
Not that I think the actual Sphinx was built back then, but as a unusual vaguely lion shaped rock it could have been some sort of center of worship.
The English Egyptologist E. A. Wallis Budge said “it is probable that it is a very great deal older than his (Khafre) reign and that it dates from the end of the archaic period c. 2686 BC.”
I am willing to accept that as reasonably possible, but yes, it only pushes it back hundreds of years.
Not quite what the OP asked, but lots of people had noticed how well the west coast of Africa fit into the east coast of South America. But the suggestion that there had once been a super continent was dismissed as fantasy. Until it wasn’t. I remember reading somewhere that any geologist who thought before 1950 that continents could move was utterly discredited. By 1960, any geologist who didn’t believe continents could move was discredited. Of course, this isn’t an ancient myth since it required a decent geography of the whole world to see it.
I’ve read (sadly can’t remember where) that the Goblin Shark was for centuries just a legend in Japan. Then, came deep sea probes and submarines and routine reports of the terrifying things. Protrusible jaws! Goblin shark - Wikipedia
Another Vietnamese one: the giant turtle of lake Hoan Kiem. Sadly, now probably extinct.
There used to be a tourist trap/roadside attraction in Sheffield Tasmania called “The Tiger’s Tale” that featured an audio-animatronic tiger. Sadly, it too is now extinct.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi%3Farticle%3D1042%26context%3Dnebanthro&ved=2ahUKEwiAj5OYz_HgAhVLON8KHaJ0B60QFjABegQIBBAB&usg=AOvVaw1hfU346N2Z9mVWSdp5iI_9
There’s more to it than you assume.
Page 86+ is particularly interesting .
You’ll see that these myths are categorized, and some more credible than others.
While some are obviously mis- interpreted fossil finds others can correlate to fossil evidence and show accurate knowledge of what the living creatures looked like.
I found the Lakota having words for the three toed horse, wooly rhino and a few other pleistocene mammals despite having no stories connected to them very interesting.
Many have mammoth legends.
Certain traditions seem to indicate an animal being very common and possibly part of everyday life for ancestors.
While creatures in oral tradition that are modified versions of animals still present are easy to dismiss ( like the giant beaver stories)
Tales, or lingering words referring to extinct creatures not resembling any on the landscape are telling.
Although I would call it more of a case of lingering imagery, since every 1000-1500 years any given language has usually changed so much as to be unrecognizable.
A horse with three toes, or a giant quadraped with long horns, round footprints, big ears and a long nose in North America seem awfully coincidental, especially when linked with big fossil deposits. Hard to make those assumptions from the fossils, but fairly easy for memory to last when associated with a location like that.
All in all, hard to say, but hard to refute as well.
I don’t find these kind of examples very convincing. It’s a bit like with Nostradamus prophecies : look into it long enough, and among all the legends and description of monsters and legendary creatures, you’ll find some whose description could match that of ancient species (or ancient events, etc…)
You say “hard to refute” but I would argue that for such extreme lengths of time the claim is plainly outlandish and doesn’t require refutation until its proponents bring serious evidences in its support.
As far as I know, this isn’t mainstream science, and this kind of claims aren’t taken seriously, generally speaking, by folklorists, linguists, etc…Even though I’ve read, over the years, some debunking of similar claims, I’m not knowledgeable on this topic and couldn’t demonstrate it. There is, however, a folklorist posting on this board, but his name escapes me. If someone remembers it, it could be a good idea to ask him to chime in on this topic.
I guess if someone believes it is true then it must be true, so how about that creature that could procreate with two different species which could not procreate with each other. I think they called it a Cog, it wasn’t a dog and it wasn’t a cat but it could reproduce with both dogs and cats whose gametes cannot fuse with the other which is necessary to produce a viable zygote.
Still unconvinced after reading the article and the examples in it. There are plenty of tales about flooding all over the world. And sea level changed all over the planet. So every time a legend says “and the sea rose”, this is an evidence that the knowledge was passed down for 10 000 years, rather than people living near the sea making stuff up? The simplest explanation between these two doesn’t appear to me to be the “ancestral memory faithfully passed down for 400 generations”.
How would they even know that the ancestors of these people were living there 10 000 years ago? People move around, displace others, and simply that is already a huge assumption.
I understand how it could look superficially convincing, but once again, since the level of the sea did rise, it’s totally unsurprising that you can find an example of the sea being lower 10 000 years ago in every place where people recount one of these common flood stories. I can go to the French coast or to any island, say “and then the sea rose” and if you check, you’ll inevitably find that it indeed rose there 8000 or 12 000 years ago. Nothing to do with knowledge passed down, it’s just that the history of our planet makes such a statement inevitably true if you go back enough in time.The stories would have to include much more specific verifiable details than what is included in the examples given for it to be convincing.
That’s from an Australian newspaper, where I first read it. Being Australian and being personally familiar with some of the places mentioned, I believe it.
sorry, my comment on the crater wasn’t clear. when Alvarez first published the idea that the dinosaur extinction could have been caused by catastrophic impact, the scientific community scoffed. the existence of the crater and the iridium layer found at the K-T boundary solidified his theory.
I don’t see how being Australian/familiar with the places has anything to do with it. For instance, there’s as famous legend in western Brittany about Ys, engulfed by the sea. Did the sea level rose in Brittany? Yes, of course, it did, like everywhere else, as mentioned by your article. In fact, you can even find underwater structures, there. Should we then assume that this story too has been passed down for 10 000 years? How being Breton or Australian makes more or less likely that it would be the case?
That’s the problem : given that sea level in fact rose, any legend/myth/story about a flood, everywhere, will have to be assumed to be the account of a real event passed down for 10 000 years, if we follow this reasoning. If someone says “according to myth/legend/tradition the sea rose”, there’s nothing remarkable in noticing that in fact it did in this specific place because it’s inevitably true.
If legends about the sea rising was an uniquely Aboriginal theme and the sea actually rising 10 000 years ago happened only in Australia, then it would be indeed a strong indication that the memory of an actual event has been passed down for 10 000 years. But since there are such stories all over the world and the sea level rose all over the world, then if you accept that the Aboriginal story is “ancestral memory”, you have no reason not to make the same assumption for all the other sea flood stories, equally “verifiable”.
I’ve never heard of a creature called a Cog. However, there are well documented cases of species A being able to breed with species B and species B being able to breed with species C, but species A and species C cannot breed. Is Darwin’s Finch still around? DF could tell you all about it.
Ring species? I believe it’s mostly a matter of definition whether A and C (and some intermediate B) should be considered separate species in such cases.
Still not quite accurate–the presence of the concentrated rare-earths in the katey was the cause of the theory, not the later evidence that supported it. (A good book on the topic.)
You may want to read (and bump) this thread.
As Darren Garrison said, the sequence of events was that Alvarez first discovered the iridium-enriched layer at the KT boundary, then proposed the impact theory to explain both the layer and the KT extinction. There was indeed initial skepticism, which was entirely appropriate, especially because Alvarez is a physicist, not a geologist or paleontologist. When someone proposes a radical new theory in a field in which they do not have expertise, it is reasonable to look at the theory with a little more scrutiny.
Another reason that the theory was initially viewed skeptically was precisely that there was no known crater of the expected size and the expected age. (Ironically, the crater had already been found by the Pemex geologists but was not published.) After the existence of the crater was published, much of the opposition evaporated pretty rapidly.
However, I don’t see how this is related to the topic of this thread. There were no ancient mythologies which told of a big crater in the Yucatan that was related to the KT extinction, since both the crater and the extinction were unknown in ancient times.