So those other people get wiped out. The ones that didn’t are the ones still around. Funny how that works. And they could have old (but not that old) oral histories.
The challenges with this being even possible are easily demonstrated simply from lessons learned From the Telephone Game.
In general a message can and is changed into something completely different when it is passed between even a small number of people. An incredible number of wrongful convictions are often the product of eyewitness testimony also demonstrates another limitation of human memory.
I am sure that readers can also think of family stories or friends stories that you have heard enough times to even imagine that you were there.
Over a long enough timeline the elements which are still manage accurate become the exceptional rare finds.
How does an anthropologist go about determining which oral traditions are “accurate”? Naively, it seems that if a culture has 500 stories about the Old Times, some of them will coincidentally mention something that matches a thing that we think we know from other sources. So if ‘the People came from the Night Sky cutting the testicles off the Dawn and sprinkling the blood on the Water, and where the drops fell they turned to ice and then the People emerged from the ice and wandered five hundred seasons through heat and cold and light and dark to reach This Place’, how do you compare that to 'in the times of the grandfathers, Trickster fought Death and they fell to earth, cutting the ground so the river ran backwards for a change of the Moon and raising a mound that is that hill over there, yes the one that was the result of a landslide in 36 BC? The latter sure seems to describe a specific event, but there’s probably a story to describe a lot of the features in the landscape. What techniques does the anthropologist use?
Lynne’s book is not a reliable source for this topic. I have it, read it, and it’s psychobabble nonsense.
Any bit in particular?
I’ve read it as well, and certainly the core of her argument, which is based on interpretation of the Australian anthropological and archaeological evidence is not overly contentious. The application to other cultural contexts is interesting and doesn’t push the evidence or her arguments into wackyland.
Plausibility (i.e. not setting off the audience’s"alarm bells") is coincidentally exactly what a dishonest author would cultivate.
Um… what? You’re saying plausibility is a sign of dishonesty? :smack:
Pick any scientific paper, published in any reputable journal (and this book is based on a Ph.D. thesis). Are the conclusions in the scientific paper plausible? Oh, dear! That means we should suspect it of dishonesty.
I think the problem some people have with this book is that at first glance it looks suspect. The Memory Code is an unfortunate title, recalling the Da Vinci Code. Stonehenge and Easter Island… well, there is any amount of eye-rolling nonsense written about them.
However, this is actually a serious and interesting book, by a serious researcher. If you can point to any specific problem with this theory, I’d be interested to hear it.
Incidentally, this is why looking for scholarly citations and discussions about this book will be fruitless. The citations and discussions by scientists will relate to the published Ph.D. thesis, not to the book for the general public.
I was looking for anything from experts in the areas. Discussions on archelogy related message boards and public archives of mailing lists would do. But I came up blank. (The only times the other book I mentioned comes up is when the author shows up hammering it in with all of the subtlety of a bull in a china cup.)
Perhaps the easiest approach would be to ask Lynne herself via PM where her theory has been cited and discussed, and what the professional reaction has been.
Perhaps I’d prefer an unbiased source.
It’s not a case of bias. Either there are citations, discussions at scientific conferences, etc. or there are not. Perhaps you haven’t dealt with academics very much.
I presume you are not interested in the academic endorsements found in the book itself, which must have been made even before it was published:
I have no reply to that that would not get me a warning. How about instead we drop this topic that I’ve already said was tangental to the purpose of this thread?
A quick check on Google Scholar picks up a number of reviews and some citations for the book and PhD in robust and perfectly cromulent archaeological and anthropological journals. The book came out in mid-2016 and the way that archaeological publication works would not generally see much new analytical work appearing citing such a recent work.
I agree with Darren G that we should not keep banging on about it, but a core tenet of this discussion is how you set testable conditions to demonstrate that stories now are actual oral memories, rather than doing a Nostradamus 2016 and forcibly retrofitting random statements to historic events.
Its not enough to say ‘Oral Story 2018 speak of heap big wave many moons ago’ and behold, here’s evidence of a tsunami 5,000 years ago!! Any claim has to show a correlation, but also a plausible mechanism for how that information does get transmitted. Kelly’s model for how that works is based on Australian indigenous practice and other studies and has that explanatory power. Some elements of her argument are actually quite well-rehearsed in discussions of landscape archaeology, especially by British archaeologists like Richard Bradley.
I read it when it first came out, and was underwhelmed; sorry, can’t remember much detail at the moment, but my overall impression was one of “too many assumptions” and “too many unsubstantiated inferences from coincidences” to take seriously. I have a shelf-full of books, typically self-help ones or ones with psychological themes that seem to share these characteristics, and have been discarded scholarly over time.
I feel Lynne’s theories are intriguing and plausible, but not proven.
Okay, I didn’t dig up one specifically about crossing the Bering land bridge, but here is one that he thinks is a record of a comet impact 13,000 years ago.
With a lot of redundancy, mnemotechnics and quality control.
Seriously, look up how the Aborigines *do *do it, it’s quite fascinating and it goes a long way into busting the whole “history means writing things down” assumption that we Western historians tend to make. An assumption which coincidentally (or “coincidentally”) means that, taken literally, Sub-Saharan Africa has no history whatsoever prior to colonization - which is of course ridiculous. Another similar assumption is “civilization means building things out of stone”. Which, again, is comfortably euro-centric and denies the historical and cultural validity of hundreds of other cultures.
We *try *to grow out of that kind of euro-centric and implicitly xenophobic mindset in historical academia, but it’s a slow going process. I mean, just the notions of “crossed histories”, “global histories”, “shared histories” - which are all fancy ways of saying “guys, guys, guys, how about we look into what the *other *guys wrote and compare it with what we wrote to see what, if anything, lines up ?” is a very recent and at the time (the early 90s) revolutionary methodology.
A wonderful case in point, Darren Garrison. That account isn’t an account of a meteor impact. It’s conceivable that maybe, it was such an account once, but it’s been warped to the point that it’s not about a meteor impact any more; it’s about two brothers fighting. And really, two brothers fighting is a much more common event than a meteor impact, so if that tale has any factual basis in origin at all, it’s far more likely to be based on two brothers fighting.
I know others have talked about this, but the comparison isn’t to the classical game of telephone.
This is telephone where you whisper something to me, and then I repeat it back to you. If I get it wrong, you try again until I get it right. The I tell the next person, and the same thing happens - we talk until he has the message I gave him correct (and possibly the person who told me also vets it (grandparent and parent instructing the child)).
Now, over 10,000 (or even 1,000 or 100 years) changes are probably going to creep in (but the same thing happens in written records (think of the classic “celebrate/celibate” joke)). But for things the culture values highly, I’d think you could expect some pretty high accuracy.
While various methods like meter and rhyming do help mitigate this issue, and the scribes that copied even written work were imperfect until technology recently removed that aspect even the biggest champions in the field don’t seem to have a problem pointing out that this is still an issue.
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0006/000687/068747eo.pdf
While I am not making any claim that it is of no value I think that music could be argued to be similar, particularly some folk forms which were culturally important and often historically restricted due to cultural limitations on dancing and religion. “Spontaneous dancing” is still illegal in Sweden and the allowed forms are a good proxy for above.
The Swedish Slängpolska for example, has a time signature that is simply unprintable under the southern developed sheet music and which has a swing which is simply not possible on non-bowed instruments. There was a great variation regionally that developed before the rise of the automobile and fast transportation and the nyckelharpa becoming disfavored over the cheaper industrial accordion changed the songs significantly due to the limitations of the instrument.
Despite having very strict and highly practiced beats, notes and flow this changed as not having a bow to stroke in a W pattern reduced the songs to 3/4 time which is harder to keep and thus were expanded to counts that lost the entire flow.
Ask even a modern 1st chair top level orchestra player if they can even keep track of the time in a Slängpolska. They will simply not know this type of bow movement as the best teaching example I can find here demonstrates and will get lost.
https://youtu.be/1YzV5aYtl5I?t=903 @~15:15
This is context and timing that was lost over less than a generation of fashion, despite far harder rules than spoken metrical feet. Similar changes happened with the rise of the recording industry which was typically more urban based and while the changes weren’t really good or bad, resulted in significant changes to recordings of “folk music” which would have been unacceptable by the rural individuals who were passing them down.
Shifts in language, politics and style can result in changes just as mistakes or miss-understandings can. The extremely poor written accounts by culturally ignorant Europeans that were collected during the initial contacts with the new world is an extreme example here too.
The fact that so many attempts to solve this issue in oral traditions like heavily rhythmic speech or mnemonics were developed to reduce this drift demonstrates that it was a common concern and problem.
I fully admit that they would have helped reduce drift, but as the authority would still have been the parriarch the drift could still happen.