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Myths Help Geologists Understand Modern Threats
morleron writes "According to a report in the "Guardian Unlimited" geologists have begun using ancient myths as clues to geologic events in Earth's past. Among other things scientists have followed the tracks of ancient stories to uncover the huge Seattle earthquake and tsunami that obliterated large parts of the coasts of Washington and Oregon roughly 300 years ago; the discovery that a volcano on Fiji is active instead of dormant as has been thought for years; and that the Biblical and Near Eastern myths of a world ending flood are probably based on the sudden inundation of the Black Sea when the landbridge that used to link Turkey with Europe - what is now called the Bosporus - suddenly collapsed some 7600 years ago. It's amazing how much information our ancestors passed on in oral and early written myths...we're finally getting smart enough to listen."
have they found the place that the Earth makes contact with that giant turtle it is supposed to be sitting?
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
It's only a matter of time before they pin original sin on women cause of Eve's apple eating incident. Oh Damn..... Catholic Church beat me to the AGAIN! Somebody call Kansas before they find out about the monkeys.
Hey, as long as Myths are treated as such, and not absolute fact. At that point it gets hard to sort through what may be helpful, and what may just be white noise...
I shall have to start up my Volkswissen and search for ancient truths....
Yeah, it's great that "we're finally getting smart enough." Why weren't the people who came up with the "myths" in the first place smart enough to write them literally, instead of making up stuff about thunderbirds and killer rocks?
Don't blame me, I voted for Durga.
Yet again modern science bitchslaps the bible. Suck it, Jesus!
folklorists, ethnologists, and anthropologists have been trying to track down the historical basis for myths and legends for as long as their professions have existed. i guess the real news is that geologists and other hard scientists are starting to listen to folklorists and anthropologists, taking cross-cultural similarities traditions seriously as sources of insight about global climatic events in the pre-historical or semi-historical past rather than as amusing consequences or the result of some sort of freakishly convergent cultural evolution.
i figure as the amount of what we know about the earth's climatic and geological history increases, the more of these correlations with myth we'll find. i think the idea of being able to predict localized patterns of geological events like eruptions and earthquakes is what's really seductive, i don't know what kind of value this sort of new insight will have for predicting major natural disasters will have on a human timescale, though. saying an earthquake will happen in the next 200 to 1000 years is next to useless in terms of preparing for it in the short-term.
hell, the history channel loves to tell us that according to the mayan calendar, this age of the world will end in 2012. doesn't necessarily mean we'll have another great flood on our hands, but it certainly makes for good tv.
/. is what happens when geeks talk. get used to it.
I look forward to finding out that the Greek Gods were aliens with advanced Quantum Technology (read Ilium by Dan Simmons for that interesting diversion) Actually, isn't there a Star Trek ep based off this?
If there really was Pangea millenia ago, then it looks like the same thing happened at the Strait of Gibraltar to first fill the Mediterranean, Adriatic and Agean seas...
It looks a lot like the Bosporus.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
I thought that claim had been refuted.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Geologists selectively observe what they want to see.
I think Velikovsky did this before (but badly?).
No -- we were listening before. We just didn't have the tools to prove that there might be something more to this than just myths. This is called the scientific method.
Now me, I don't give a rat's ass about earthquakes or floods. It just isn't news. Wake me when they have found proof that there really were dragons and unicorns and elves and orcs and cool old guys with pointy hats.
Down at the south end of the border between British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, is an area known as the Crowsnest Pass. Over on the Alberta side was the small town of Frank. Frank existed solely because the Crowsnest is choc-a-bloc full of coal.
Anyway, not to get into too much detail: the residents of Frank lived at the bottom of a mountain they named "Turtle Mountain," but which had a much older Indian name of "The Mountain That Moves." Throwing all caution to the wind, the mountain was soon being mined for coal.
Needless to say, thirty million cubic meters of mountain moved -- downhill, rapidly -- during the night of April 29, 1903, burying the town under hundreds of feet of rock. It's a great story, though sad.
It is well worth the effort of visiting the site. Fascinating history throughout the area, lots of superb dayhiking, and if you hump it up Turtle mountain (or even partway up) you get the most astounding view of the destruction. When that mountain moved, it moved a long way. There are house-sized boulders halfway up the opposing slope. It was a massive landslide.
Point of the Story: Listen to the myths, people! The natives weren't just making shit up for the helluvit! It was the bleeding Mountain That Moves! D-oh!
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
but don't mention this anywhere near Kansas!
...the better to bathe that joke in the glory it deserves.
/. is what happens when geeks talk. get used to it.
Else three rednecks will beat them up on the side of the road.
Someone hates these cans.
"followed the tracks of ancient stories to uncover the huge Seattle earthquake and tsunami that obliterated large parts of the coasts of Washington and Oregon roughly 300 years ago"
300 years is "ancient"? Really??
The 'black sea flood' didn't actually happen. Meltwater inputs into the Volga, Deniper and other major rivers in Ukraine were, as far as the evidence shoes, greater than evaporation, leading to an outflow across the Bospohorous; it was not until ca. 7500 years ago that the Med rose to a similar level to the black sea.
It looks like it will take us a little while longer to realise that they really were serious.
Uluru/Ayer's Rock is more or less a huge turbidite collection turned on its side and eroded back. You don't get homogenous features that large from the infilling of a minor sea or two. Nor do you get intact seashells near the top of Everest by protracted and gentle uplift, or something like Mars' Valles Marineris by the patient action of endless thin sandstorms. Velikovsky may not have been right about every detail, but it's painfully obvious that some serious cosmic shit has gone down in relatively recent history.
Interestingly, the fruit being an "apple" comes from Greek mythology. Hera stands in the place of Eve. The Greeks have it all upside down, of course. The serpent is the liberator, rather than the deceiver in Greek mythology, and Athena takes the serpent as her protector, etc, etc.
There is an implication of a historical basis.
How about pulling your own head out of the sand and realizing that pre-history had no way of anticipating modern science therefore Biblical accounts of natural history are just as "factual" as they could possible be? We think we have come so far in understanding the natural world, but the Hebrew descriptions of natural phenomena are no less "factual" than our own.
The problem is that thinking of "explanations" for the myths is easy, but verifying them is all but impossible.
Easy to explain them. You make them fit, however it takes, same as psychology.
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And if you think we've risen past that, witness how many people still have "a lucky shirt" or pass around chain letters. *grumble* Even members of the church can be quite guilty of talismanic behavior. They start revering Bibles and crosses and forget that objects and prayers have no power; God alone has power.
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I remember reading somewhere that the earliest illustrations they have tied to Genesis and the fruit involve a mushroom. Which do grow on trees in some varieties and I'm sure some people would argue that certain mushrooms do grant cosmic insight. Makes more sense than an apple in a lot of ways.
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As a Christian, I completely agree. There are some literal parts and there are some metaphorical parts. And a large amount of it is a human mind trying to explain the divine which obviously doesn't work altogether well.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
If we are on the subject of ancient writings, myths, or oral traditions, the bit about the planet Venus being ejected as a flaming comet from Jupiter in Biblical times and showering manna down on the starving Israelites in the form of cometary hydrocarbons no longer interests me one way or the other.
The bit about Velikovsky that has my attention is "The Greek Dark Ages Never Happened." See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy or http://www.varchive.org/dag/index.htm.
The standard chronology is that you had the Trojan war, which supposedly came at the end of the Mycenean Greek culture about 1200 BCE, that culture collapsed, and then you had a reemergence of the Greek city state culture around 700, the height of Classical Greece around 500, the Peloponesian war which weekened them, the Macadonians taking over, Alexander, the superceding of the Alexander empire by Rome, etc. The interval between 1200 and 700 BCE is regarded as a Dark Age, a much deeper, darker stop backwards in the advance of culture than the supposed European Dark Age of the Middle Ages.
Jerry Pournelle writes often about the Greek Dark ages -- mysterious, unknowable things are always kind of cool, and ancient disasters involving regression from a more advanced culture, a kind of Atlantis, are even more cool. One of the big things supposedly lost in the Dark Ages was writing -- Homer's Iliad makes reference to writing borne by messengers in such a way to suggest that Homer didn't understand the concept of writing (Homer, by the way, is believed to be one source or perhaps a composite source, of an oral tradition). That a civilization and trading culture collapsed and regressed to cave man conditions so utterly and completely that they lost writing is fascinating -- if we had an atomic war or a global warming-triggered climate flip back into an ice age, you would think we may lose our automobiles, and central heat, but would hang on to painless dentistry through the cultivation of coca and poppy and would still know how to write.
While Velokovsky fascinates with cool tales of flaming comet planets, he takes a dump in the punch bowl of cool things to spin yarns about by claiming the Greek Dark Ages never happened, that the whole thing is a goof up from trying to connect the chronology of dynasties of Egypt to the Greeks? Anyone know anything more about this?