Accurate descriptions of landscapes that are now under water.
It seems to me you’re not going to accept any level of evidence. I’m going to listen to the experts over some random on the internet whose entire argument is saying “oh no they didn’t”.
Rogue waves would be another myth that turned out true
As I posted in the thread I linked earlier:
What they are making is a hugely extraordinary claim.
If you could be more specific I would appreciate it.
The term is “Ring Species” (Ring species - Wikipedia). For example, the Greenish warbler - Wikipedia exists both south and north of the Himalayas. In the south, birds can breed with both the birds of the east and the west, but birds in the north form two non-breeding populations, one to the east and one to the west.
I’ve known a number of teachers (and students) of linguistics, and they all have tales of stories passed down for centuries. With spooky levels of accuracy. The explanation being that when you’re part of a culture that doesn’t have writing, an accurate oral tradition develops by necessity.
Hmmm, maybe I should pass this news down to my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandkids… but these days, just telling my daughter would NOT be effective.
N/M didn’t notice someone else already linked the whale penis story.
I agree with Digs. Think of stage actors and all the memorization some roles require and how some of them can accurately spout speeches years and decades after their appearances. As examples think of memorizing all the lines for Hamlet or for Jack Tanner/Don Juan Tenorio in a full-length production of Shaw’s Man and Superman. Think of the gargantuan speech at the end of Shaw’s Too True to be Good.
We think accurate transmission of oral tradition is incredible, but it’s a skill the vast majority of us no longer need. That wasn’t true for pre-literate societies.
Strange how people are able to preserve a few fairy tales but are unable to keep their languages from mutating into entire new language families over the thousands of years, then.
That’s completely different. Phonetics drift over time through usage because people aren’t correcting each other’s pronounciation (or spelling) all the time, nor are there hierarchical structures in place to enforce proper language (no, not even the Académie Française. They grouse, sure, but they can’t fine you or anything)
In contrast, the transmission of oral histories typically involves redundancy, error control, repeating the same stories over and over and over under the supervision of the previous generation of storytellers, “peer review” (i.e. meeting with storytellers from other tribes to compare versions or make sure they have the exact same details) and so on.
Which is not to say oral stories *never *drift especially when the details aren’t considered super important, as is the case with some Greek myths for example (e.g. everybody “knows” Athena cursed Arachne and turned her into the first spider ; but there are six or seven versions of the why. That’s likely because the why didn’t really matter, but “spiders are bad critters and you shouldn’t respect them” did for one reason or another). As well it’s likely that where myths are concerned (as opposed to factual tribal history), storytellers embellished or fudged the details depending on what they wanted to emphasize or what morals they wanted to impart.
Plus I mean, memorizing isn’t exactly rocket science, and once you’ve got it down it tends to last. I still accurately remember a monologue from Corneille’s El Cid that I had to learn by heart when I was 12 or so. Never heard it since, or read/seen the full play come to think of it. But I still know o rage, o desespoir, o vieillesse ennemie… thanks to three weeks of drilling courtesy of grandma, who didn’t understand biology one bit and couldn’t help with maths beyond multiplication table but could make **damned **sure I got my French poetry word perfect (or my English irregular verbs…)
But in the examples given in the article you linked to, there were in fact no “accurate description of landscape now underwater”. There used to be grass and trees and roos isn’t an accurate description.
And as I already wrote, I consistently saw “experts” dismissing these stories. I believe that those supporting them are completely on the fringe.
“Centuries” isn’t the same as 10 000 years. Oral tradition is most certainly taken seriously when it refers to specific events or individuals relatively close in time. But not for “generic” undated myths (flood, fantastical creature).
You seriously believe that stories don’t drift over time? That they don’t adapt to a changing culture and changing references? That new details aren’t invented? New characters more familiar to the audience added? That they don’t influence each other, aren’t mixed? That storytellers will make sure that their version is exactly identical to all the other versions, rather than embellishing it or changing it to fit they personal style or preferences, or the preferences of their audience? I’ve read already this “peer review” argument. But storytellers aren’t historians who try to preserve at all costs past knowledge. They’re entertainers who try to please and interest their public. It’"s one thing to recite a genealogy and another entirely to tell a legend.
There are plenty of stories, for instance that are presented as anecdotal, referring to specific places of people : “this castle over here on the hill”, “the famous count of whatever”, but the same story is told everywhere with the names and places and times changed. To give a well known example : how many bridges have been supposedly build by the devil, in exchange for a the soul of the first creature using it, who ends up being a random animal? Do you think that one should assume that the story is “based on real events” and that we should investigate what real occurrence related to the building of this specific bridge led to the “devil made it” story? Basically it’s the same with the flood stories. They’re generic even though details vary and each story point to a different place where supposedly the sea rose. There’s no need for an actual architect clad in red or for an actual rise of sea level for such legends to be told about a specific place. And as I already said, even if a specific tale was born out of an actual event, it would be indistinguishable from all the others that aren’t.
I’m still holding out hope that someone will dig up a fossilized dragon egg or two. 
You belong to an old lineage of dragon-riders immune to fire?
Dragons
Archaeology is a relatively new science, but people have been stumbling across dinosaur skeletons at river banks and such as long as there have been people. Imagine as a caveman finding a partial T. Rex skeleton, what would you think? The skull and spine of a large specimen are the most likely pieces to remain intact which is my dragons look similar no matter which cultural legend we’re talking about.
I think it depends on the nature and purpose of the stories. Caricaturally, whether the stories are about “where do we come from ? What happened ?” or “What **should **we be ? **Why **did it happen ?”.
The latter are rife with flights of fancy, but the former would tend to be more grounded, at least from what I’ve studied.
Again, that depends on the story, but yes, from what little I understand some cultures did put a very heavy emphasis on “do NOT fuck with this story, or else”, and did punish those who erred from the One True Story.
Or, to put it another way : do you think Caesar the first would have put so much of an effort rounding up and killing the Gallo-celtic druids if their stories were just fanciful bullshit ?
But that’s, err, you know, sort of, kinda, err, the point. Oral historians are not entertainers. They’re historians.
Genealogies are part of it, yes, as are relations and unions with other tribes, weather patterns, crop outputs… a lot of things that seem hella boring and certainly don’t make for great fireside karaoke. Some of it can be fanciful, and not all cultures have as robust an error or BS control mechanism - but here’s the thing : the Enead and the Odyssey might be complete drivel… but Troy really did exist, and there really was a war, and it’s very possible the remaining Trojans fucked off to Italy and founded Rome after their city was destroyed. And sure, it’s somewhat doubtful Poseidon had very much of a say in the events of the war, just as it’s doubtful Odysseus & co ever met a 'tarded Cyclops, but that doesn’t really matter, does it ?
I think that one is still up in the air. On the one hand, the Jungian Bullshit Krew would argue that it’s a story that appears in so many cultures, it’s probably an archetypal expression of the human serendipitous psyche and whatnot ; but at the same time when you’ve got stories about Ys and Avalon and Atlantis all somewhat telling of that thing happening roughly in the same general direction, roughly in the same time period and various actual historical examples of volcanic islands popping up then popping back down… it’s somewhat likely (or at least believable) that those stories all refer to a given historical event, or a series of historical events even, as distorted through time and cultures because there was no intra-tribal value assigned to *that *story in particular - it was just A Thing That Happened Sometime (And Lets Me Illustrate Why Greed is Not Good), not Thing That Happened To/Because of Us.
Do you see the difference there ?
I disagree with this. Yes, AFAIK there are records from China of fossils (and rocks that looked like fossils) being sold as dragon bones. However, the appearance, nature and behavior of dragons varies wildly. I think the myth preceeded discovery of fossils.
Why couldn’t it be both ? Here they made stories about a mighty beast and gave it the appearance of the most ugly critter they could think of (tail of a serpent, mouth of a lion, wings of a vulture etc…) ; there they found a big ol’ skull with teeth up to here and tried to explain it ?
What? There is no point in human history we haven’t been finding dinosaur bones. How can that predate a myth?
As far as wings and fire breathing and stuff, I think those are late additions. Dragons are the ancient worlds answer to dinosaurs the way ‘The great flood’ was ancient people’s way of explaining plate tectonics.
The difference is these animals existed.