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Aboriginal Folklore Leads To Meteorite Crater
An anonymous reader writes "An Australian Aboriginal dreaming story has helped experts uncover a meteorite impact crater in the outback of the Northern Territory. From the article: 'One story, from the folklore of the Arrernte people, is about a star falling to Earth at a site called Puka. This led to a search on Google Maps of Palm Valley, about 130 km southwest of Alice Springs. Here Hamacher discovered what looked like a crater, which he confirmed with surveys in the field in September 2009.'"
It's just too bad that so much of the Indigenous Australian's stories are "turned aside" by Western culture; they've been here AT LEAST 75,000 years (and most likely far longer than that) and there is so much within the framework of the Dreamtime stories and legends that bespeak heaps of extremely interesting occurrences - cosmic, geological and human. There's much more to be learned from studying what is left of their culture - and it's extremely important to preserve what we have now - for future generations. The Indigenous culture here is dying off at an alarming rate, and little care is aimed at this travesty.
YankDownUnder Veni, Vidi, volo in domum redire
Here it is. I went looking for it when the original story broke, without a picture or link, and easily found it. I knew where Palm Valley was, and from there the crater was pretty obvious. Mind you, it would be easy to dismiss it as an odd shaped formation if you didn't know you were looking for a crater, so hats off to Hamacher and the accuracy of "legend".
.... as far as I'm concerned is...
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His suggestion is that Aborigines may have learned to recognise craters from more recent impacts and then deduced the origin of the Palm Valley and Gosse's Bluff craters. Now, I don't know about you, but that feels extraordinarily unlikely to me, given the frequency of large meteorite strikes. But that might just be because I don't have the aboriginal sensibilities for land features.
I wonder how many "myths" have such a basis in true events? I'm reminded of the "hobbit humans" story where the native people had stories about them that had been passed down reliably for thousands of years. It seems that in our rush to be certain about our world, we are often too eager to dismiss the ideas of ancient people. It is unfortunate as well, because they cannot defend themselves, so they are especially easy prey for academics looking for notoriety.
Systemd: the PulseAudio of init systems
The Earth has been hit literally countless times by meteors and the best places to find craters are ones which have very sparse vegetation like Australia (there are around 25 known craters in Australia). The fact that they tell 'lots of stories' about stars falling out the sky with a noise like thunder coupled with the relative commonality of impact craters on the continent along with the fact that there was not a precise location, just a general area, makes it sound an awful lot like coincidence. I'm not dismissing it entirely, but it makes the connection seem a little weak to me.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
Okay, I admit, I RTFA, and the crater in question has been dated as millions of years old, long before *anyone* claims humans capable of cultural transmission visited Australia.
According to the article, the author himself thinks that the aboriginal Australians were sophisticated enough to recognize impact craters on the landscape, and what might have caused them, and concoct legends about falling objects to explain them.
With all due respect to the parent post, the Indigenous Australians may have great knowledge that has been dismissed by their Western colonizers, but this is not evidence of such.
Just as I was thinking of some way to spice up a Call of Cthulhu adventure located in Australia for my players - a million years old crater from the aboriginal dreams pops up, and it's a genuine, real one. A little too far to the east for the original plot location, but that's nothing, just might be a tad more difficult for them to reach. Brilliant.
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
A very recent podcast with transcript (3. Jan 2010) called Aboriginal Astronomy from Radio Australia was about this topic, referring to this book Emu Dreaming by Ray Norris
In a 1988 or 1989 edition of Astronomy Now (an english astronomy magazine), there was a very interesting article detailing Australian meteor craters.
In this article, there were about 30 craters listed, along with pictures and descriptions of the area, with the best-guess ages of the craters. Along with the radio-isotope dating, if there was a local name for the area that implies a large amount of sky-based fire in an area without volcanic activity, and without the vegetation to have a large bushfire.
A great examle of this is the Henbury Craters complex (NT, 24 34'S, 133 10'E) which is a collection of 14 craters, about 130 kilometres south of Alice Springs. They are scattered over an area of about one square kilometre. The craters range from 10 metres to about 73 metres across. The Aboriginal name for these craters is ''chindu chinna waru chingi yabu'' which roughly means ''sun walk fire devil rock''
text quoted from http://www.abc.net.au/science/k2/trek/4wd/Over11.htm
Typical! I read the fine article, and it looks as though the article already has this listed.....
- This sig deliberately left blank. Nothing to see, move along.
at a site called Puka
That was no meteorite, that's where Harvey's spaceship touched down.
ideopath @ play
132.7102717
-24.0527939
So that you don't have to hunt for it like I do.
Stealth Falcon
I saw that crater from a vantage point during September.
The guide told us the dream story and that it was a crater. Old, weathered info signs said the same. I did not get any specifics, but everything I heard and saw makes me believe that this has been known for a long time.
Primitive people would have needed to figure out their environment first. That is something you can't do in a few decades, specially when you are not using s systematic approach to collecting knowledge (the scientific method is a recent invention and is not innate as far as we know).
Most likely people would move to one place or area, stay there for several hundreds of years, and groups would move slightly further away to adapt to new environments slowly.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
How unoriginal!
"Genocide"? Really? I was not aware that non-aboriginal Australians were consciously and systematically trying to kill all aboriginal Australians in concentration camp ovens. Having been an Australian since 1980 you'd think I'd have noticed that by now.
Particularly since, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the aboriginal and torres strait islander population of Australia is growing at a faster rate than the national average.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
Well the story's about Australia, so that kind of fits.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Now THOSE would be fun . . .
I guess the trouble is the signal to noise ratio . . . for every myth that might have the potential of being true, there are 1,000 that are quite utterly bogus.
It's like a Website that you read . . . when too much garbage flows in, you don't take anything on it seriously, or stop reading it altogether.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
" In remote central Siberia, there was a time when the Tungus people told strange tales of a giant fireball that split the sky and shook the Earth. They told of a blast of searing wind that knocked down people and whole forests. It happened, they said, on a summer's morning in the year 1908. "
About 20 years later the legend of the fireball led to the search and discovery of what has become known as the 'Tunguska Event'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event
As seen in Carl Sagan's Cosmos, episode 4, Heaven and Hell.
http://www.hulu.com/watch/63316/cosmos-heaven-and-hell
Cheers.
Yet Socrates himself is particularly missed.
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
According to the article, the author himself thinks that the aboriginal Australians were sophisticated enough to recognize impact craters on the landscape, and what might have caused them, and concoct legends about falling objects to explain them.
With all due respect to the parent post, the Indigenous Australians may have great knowledge that has been dismissed by their Western colonizers, but this is not evidence of such.
So, figuring out what happened after the fact is not as impressive as witnessing it?
Seems backwards to me.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The latter seems to me to be the most likely explanation at this time. There would need be far more such occurrences before I would even begin to start to presume one of the others.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
No worries, Mate. We'll track AC down, and hit his country right after Yemen. Fricking inbred tribal shouldn't be on the internet anyway. He'll be extinct soon, too!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
If a dominant culture kills a minority culture, what do you call it?
I tend to agree that it's not conscious or systemic (at least not anymore), and possibly not even intentional. Genocide may be the best word we have.
I'm guessing that is what the parent meant.
/.-er, etc. We are VERY CLOSE to being identical to each other - individually AND collectively.
There really is not much GENETIC difference between all of those tribes of people.
From what I understand (citation needed,) homo-sapiens grew out of a very small breeding population - only several hundred individuals - while still on the plains of Africa. The exodus ~70k years ago did cause certain physical traits to come into dominance or fade for the various tribes, but the genetics didn't really change that much over those 70k years. It seems that today's chimpanzees are *much* more genetically diverse than today's humans are. (Chimps all look the same to me, but I am a known specie-ist.)
Point being - "us" is Berber, Inuit, Norwegian, Ainu, Zulu,
australian army officials are trying to determinehow a mushroom smoking, dijeridoo blowing, hippie unknowingly discovered the site of a top secret nuclear test detonation in the middle of the outback...
Wiki (german) on rochechouart
Rochechouart ist aus Roca und Cavardus zusammengesetzt, der erste Teil bezeichnet einen leicht zu verteidigenden Felssporn, der zweite Teil ist der Name desjenigen Ritters, der hier um das Jahr 1000 eine Burg anlegte.
Rochechouart is composed of the word Roca and Cavardus (note from me : Roche=rock), the first part describe a easy to defend clip, the second part is the name of the knight which constructed a burg tehre.
In other word if wiki is to be believed, there is no relationship whatsoever with the fact it was a crater created by a meteorite.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I found out they also have an english wiki link (take previous post link and replace de. by en.) :
Rochechouart (Rechoard in Occitan, earlier La Ròcha Choard) is a commune in the Haute-Vienne department in the Limousin region in west-central France. It is a sub-prefecture of the department. The name of the town comes from Latin roca cavardi, which roughly translates as the rock of Cavardus, the lord who had the fortified place built at the beginning of the 11th century. More often than not, natives pronounce it [owa], not *[wa].
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I know that google maps has been used like this before, but it amazes me every time that this very same tool is available to everyone for free.
The FA didn't talk about any fieldwork that might have been done to gather/clarify the folklore, but the rest of it seems like it could have been done from a bathtub with a smartphone!
It's worth pointing out that every historical culture knew not only about meteors, but assumed they were, in fact, 'falling stars', which actually lingers on as an expression even in modern English. I mean, think about it. There are points of light in the sky, entirely stable, although some seem to wander around (And, sure enough, in English, 'planet' is from 'wanderer'), and occasionally one of those points moves incredibly quickly across the sky.
Every single culture came pretty much to the same conclusion. 'Hey, a star moving quickly'. And, because every culture knew abut gravity, the easiest assumption was that stars had come loose from what it was normally attached to (Whatever that was.), and was falling from the sky, like an acorn from a tree.
Now, I don't know how many people connected the 'falling stars' with impact craters, but that's really not a far logical leap. Impact craters show up all the time in other contexts, and hell, all it would take is one human tribe 60,000 years ago seeing something slam into the earth and no one would have to 'figure' anything out at all.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Give the man a cigar.
"Given enough stories, something, in some story, will apparently coincide with something in the real world. It doesn't show incite [sic] or understanding on the part of the story teller."
In other, less interesting news, an idiot savant in New York City on September 10, 2001 predicted that Miami would be struck by a meteorite the very next day.
Hip-hop is an aboriginal Australian form of expression?
Yeah, and its been evolving there on its own for about 75000 years... :P
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
My understanding is that the Irish language is actually getting preserved fairly well, in large part because the Irish people and government decided a while back that their language was a good way to stick it to the English invaders as well as recognizing Ireland's own cultural heritage (much like the revival of hurling and Gaelic football). About half of the Irish speak it to some degree, and most study it as part of their public school curriculum.
Actually the language spoken in England when it was Celtic dominated would be similar to Welsh rather than Irish in all likelihood. Actually, the Welsh could be viewed as the remnants of that population I believe. Welsh is also doing fairly well and being taught in the school system, likely better than Irish although I can't be sure. Scot's Gaelic (a descendant of Irish Gaelic mostly) is on the rocks, but efforts are being made to increase the speaking population with some success. Cornish died out completely but they are trying to revive it, and Breton is slowly dying off under the heavy hand of French culture I believe but am not sure.
It does take a tremendous effort to preserve these languages and encourage speakers under the onslaught of major languages like English sadly. We are losing a human language every few days apparently, and it won't be all that long before the majority of them have gone. Since each represents a unique perspective on what it means to be human, I think this is a massive shame.
And as far as Nordic raiders are concerned, don't forget that a lot of modern English is also due to the Norman Conquest, when French-rooted words started moving in.
As far as the Norman raiders are concerned, lets not forget that they were descendants of other Viking Raiders who settled north of Paris and created Normandy. Yes, they adopted Frankish as their language, but the aggressive military culture the evolved was due in some part to the Norse heritage they came from.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normans
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
The word is 'assimilation'. The people are still alive. Genocide is the death of people (as well as culture).
that's only true if there actually is assimilation. This is not the case in a number of situations including Australian Aborigines, Japanese Ainu, and to a slightly lesser extent, Native Americans.
Besides, we're not talking about actively killing individuals, we're talking about isolating small social groups in harsher than usual conditions, and letting them fend for themselves.
When the dominant culture is hardly changed (if at all) and the minority culture withers and dies, what is that called. Genocide is too strong a word, but assimilation isn't right either. Perhaps subsumed is better.
blah blah blah
posting to undo
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
To sum up the OP's actual points:
1. Most aboriginal knowledge is focused on survival level skills.
2. Modern Western culture expresses a guilt complex towards less complex societies.
The guilt complex is unjustified because societies which exist only on a subsistence level are of lower value and should be replaced by those capable of improving quality and quantity of life / knowledge.
I would tend to agree with these points with the provisos that modern Western culture has its own problems and no one culture has all the answers. I would also tend to seek out those areas where other cultures have positive value (and it may be, as in the case of a hypothetical culture where murder and cannibalism are the highest and only positive values that some cultures have no positive value--though I am not familiar with such at this point in history).
Even more impressive. But the credit should go to their scientific understanding of how the world works, not to some (Western interpreted) mythology of primitive peoples.
Wow, where to begin to unwind the arrogance here. first of all we have "their wider spiritual culture, based as it was mostly on twoddle, has rightly been sidelined as an historic artefact" Sidelined by YOU, in your considerable opinion, but how is your opinion relevant in any way in judging this culture?
"Interesting to study, but void of incite about the real world." In the "real world" that they inhabit, it runs circles around your awesome knowledge base. iow, you'd last 24-72 hours out there without a good load of imported technology, and without regular re-supply you'd quickly perish. Your hubris would vanish and you'd be begging like a baby for their technology!
It gets funnier; "in the west, most of us, long ago pushed our superstitions to one side, and reappraised the world around us. The aboriginal people would do well to do the same and move on"
How well would they do i wonder, and why haven't they jumped at this fine opportunity sooner? Your answer is something along the lines of "obviously they're untemensch" but could it be instead that they would no longer be able to maintain a sustainable lifestyle, they would be forced into the model that requires vast amounts of energy, pillage and slave labor to maintain, a pyramid scheme that is patently terminal? no, they're just aborigines, so how could they be smart enough to know that, yeah?
This one takes the cake; "It's about time liberal, middle class, white people got over their fear of appearing racist, and rid themselves of the pretence that they believe all this baloney. It does nobody any good, least of all the aboriginals." double-plus wow. cf. "the white man's burden" seriously dude, take a philosophy course already. it has nothing to do with "belief", or should i say, everything has to do with belief, even your vaunted axiomatic theorems. Your Science is, at the end of the day, a description of what works. as soon as something works better, it magically becomes the new science. it is not the end of the story. In that outback, their strange voodoo works, it kicks your butt. you dont understand it any better than they understand your voodoo. I'm sure they have their own racist equivalent word to describe Western science. It only appears to you as superior because of its energy inputs, it has shown itself to be far far far from comprehensive, so show some intelligence already.
look sig is kool
In 1982 the University of Washington Press published R.J. Blong's 'The Time of Darkness: Local Legends and Volcanic Reality in Papua New Guinea'. In that case a local oral tradition was proven to have been an accurate account of an ancient volcanic eruption. Out of print now but easy to find second hand and a good read.