Aboriginal Folklore Leads To Meteorite Crater

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Aboriginal Folklore Leads To Meteorite Crater

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday January 6, 2010 @09:21PM from the bunyip-approved dept.

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.'"

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Always more to the legends and stories... by YankDownUnder · 2010-01-06 21:45 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

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1. Re:Always more to the legends and stories... by krou · 2010-01-06 22:02 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  On my brief visits to Australia, I was always fascinated by Indigenous Australian culture and history, and made a point of learning more about it. What struck me, though, was how present day Australia has assimilated their culture as a marketing tool, and done next to nothing to allow their people and culture to survive. You can buy cheap Indigenous Australian "art" tat at airports that are made in China, while the vast majority of Indigenous Australians seem to have been left to rot, poor and drunk, in the gutter. There is such a deep undercurrent of racism against them, that I find it remarkable that they still exist at all. Everywhere I went, I heard the same stories of how lazy and worthless they are, they just squander everything they're given, they're all just drug addicts and drunks, stupid, and child abusers, which sounded eerily similar to the attitude of whites towards blacks that I remember from South Africa. I see a deep irony whenever I hear white Australians talk about preserving the white, Christian culture of Australia as justification for their immigration policies: they basically don't want someone to do to them what they did, and are doing, to Indigenous Australians.
  
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2. Re:Always more to the legends and stories... by hwyhobo · 2010-01-06 22:04 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  The Indigenous culture here is dying off at an alarming rate, and little care is aimed at this travesty.
  Dying off of cultures and civilizations is a natural process. What must be preserved is their collective knowledge. Written records of their stories may one day prove to be a giant shortcut for future research.
  
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3. Re:Always more to the legends and stories... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-01-06 22:29 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  And what would you suggest we do to fix this? We've tried the 'just leaving them alone'. We've tried the 'throw copious amounts of money at them to promote development'. We've tried the 'educating them to help themselves'. We've tried both the carrot, and in the past, the stick, unfortunately.
  But nothing changes. And you can understand why ... their culture is most fundamentally a nomadic one. They have no concept of 'ownership' of land or property, and rarely stay in one place for long. Thus no amount of providing infrastructure does anything ... they simply aren't interested in that. They are quite happy doing what they've done for the last 80,000 years. And more power to them I say - except that the scourge of alcohol and other Western influences has corrupted this traditional lifestyle for many to such a point where their societies collapse.
  Australians are just as ashamed at the situation as you are. We've handed back vast tracts of traditional lands to the Aborigines (much like the Indian Nations in the US), but the native Americans seem to have done much better for themselves than the Australian Aborigines (from what I have seen during my numerous trips to the US, they are quite prosperous on their reserves and have good self-determination and leadership).
  Sure there are some racists around, like anywhere, but I firmly believe the vast majority of Australians are not prejudiced against the Aborigines. But the problems you describe are deep and very, very difficult to fix.
4. Re:Always more to the legends and stories... by ACDChook · 2010-01-06 22:31 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  It's doubtful they've been here much longer than 40000 years. Genetic evidence indicates they are descended from the same group of people that left Africa about 70000 years ago as every other non-African person on Earth.
5. Re:Always more to the legends and stories... by phyrz · 2010-01-06 23:03 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  I spent a bit of time during some touristy native american stuff while i was in canada and alaska last year, those tribes are (were) WAY more advanced than the Australian native peoples that the comparision just doesn't apply.
  Native americans built full blown cabins where aborigionals largely still lived in caves and temporary shelter. They had a far better chance at integration.
  Yeah its sad whats happened to the aussie abos, but at the end of the day they, as a people, need to save themselves - they have been given whatever resources they need. And perhaps they are making progress like alcohol bans in some towns up north, mon-fri boarding schools for children so they get proper rest at night, and pouring money into aborigional art and expression (hip-hop, dance and so on).
  The biggest problem is that a large proportion of this and the next generation of aboriginal kids will be growing up with fetal alcohol syndrome. those kids dont have a chance.
  
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6. Re:Always more to the legends and stories... by kklein · 2010-01-06 23:38 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Then you have no idea what is happening in Australia.
  Weaker cultures/civilizations being replaced by stronger ones is exactly what has been happening in Australia, and North America, and South America, and that's only in the last couple centuries. It has happened countless times throughout history. It's normal. That's isn't an excuse to be dicks about it, but it happens to every culture eventually. We're sitting here typing in the language of the people who had their own fine and dandy language which was decimated by Nordic raiders who took over the northern parts of their island and started supplanting bits of their culture with their own, then came the Normans who enslaved them for 300 years and relegated some of their best words (fuck, shit) to the "dirty" category... Oh, and don't forget about the Romans...
  We are the lucky benefactors of several waves of colonization. Just because our culture was the last to really go on a colonizing bender doesn't mean we were the first, or the last.
  That's what "natural" means.
7. Re:Always more to the legends and stories... by Jacques+Chester · 2010-01-06 23:41 · Score: 4, Informative
  Dissipation is slower than centuries for two reasons:
  
  People get used to where they grow up. It's not as though every generation set themselves the task of moving as far from their parents as possible.
  Land bridges depended on ice ages. Australia was settled by (depending on who you consult) 2 or 3 waves of humans, corresponding with ice ages making it possible to easily reach Australia from the Indonesian / PNG archipelago.
  As for the grandparent's claim that Aboriginal Australians have been on this continent longer than 75,000 years, the evidence is based on a single highly polluted sample. The evidence for 40,000 years of settlement is much stronger and corroborated by multiple sites.
  --
  
  Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
8. Re:Always more to the legends and stories... by drinkypoo · 2010-01-07 00:06 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  This is NO DIFFERENT from what racially privileged people have been doing EVERYWHERE since the dawn of racial privilege. I could as easily rewrite your last sentence as "I see a deep irony whenever I hear white Americans talk about..." etc etc. Oh noes the border is failing, the brown people are coming back! We invited them back... to clean hotels and offices and pick lettuce and strawberries.
  I live in Lake County, California which gives me some very close perspective on what you are talking about; for over 10,000 years it was the home of the peaceful Pomo people who enjoyed a land covered with acorn-dropping oaks and filled with deer and elk, a lake filled with fish, and a day's walk to a coast well-encrusted with shellfish (and peopled with other peaceful peoples.) I live in Kelseyville, named after a slaver rapist whose wife helped bring him to his deserved conclusion by sabotaging the weapons. Every time I go out I encounter Pomo-lite who glare at me (I'm big and somewhat evanescent in most lighting conditions) for my part in their oppression, though all I ever did to them was run reports against a casino database for one of their casinos. For my part, I'd prefer to return this land to the way it was before "we" came to mess with them, but you'd have to replant it with oaks and wait a hundred years before it would even be possible.
  
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9. Re:Always more to the legends and stories... by Jacques+Chester · 2010-01-07 00:06 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  But nothing changes. And you can understand why ... their culture is most fundamentally a nomadic one. They have no concept of 'ownership' of land or property, and rarely stay in one place for long.
  Because of the construction of townships and outstations, this is no longer true. Or rather, it is not as completely true as it used to be.
  It is very simplistic to say that "their" culture is nomadic. Firstly, there are dozens of distinct cultures, each with different features, languages and laws.
  Secondly, aboriginals understand freehold title pretty well at this point. It's not as if they haven't hundreds of years of seeing everyone else have it except for them!
  
  We've handed back vast tracts of traditional lands to the Aborigines (much like the Indian Nations in the US), but the native Americans seem to have done much better for themselves than the Australian Aborigines...
  You are probably thinking of the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (Northern Territory), the High Court decisions in Mabo and Wik and the Native Title Act which followed those decisions.
  However, the Land Rights Act did not give aboriginals freehold or even leasehold. Instead it created monstrously bureaucratic Land Councils which have mostly enriched a very few at the expense of the many. Thus the average aboriginal living on "their" land which was "given" to them can't actually do anything with it. They don't own it, and they can't own it. Consequently they can't start a business, or own a house. They cannot get a loan secured by the land. They can't do anything with it, in fact, except hope that they have mates in their Land Council.
  As for Native Title, again it grants nothing like freehold rights to land. All it grants is traditional rights, and only under very particular and difficult-to-prove conditions. Win Native Title and you might get Crown land back, but not always as ordinary freehold. Most likely you'll only get hunting rights or ceremonial access. Again it's basically economically useless.
  Aboriginals are human beings. They behave according to their perceived self-interest. I suspect that if we gave them freehold of their land, instead of trying to put them in a sort of cultural museum to assuage our own guilt, we'd learn that they're a smart and capable people.
  
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  Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
10. Re:Always more to the legends and stories... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-01-07 01:08 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Its a bit sad to see how racist some of the comments from fellow Australians are on this matter. Coories or any other "race" should not be judged on European standards.
  The are not nomadic, the indiginues Australians lived in many differnt specific areas, and tended to remain in that area for a great deal of time.
  To place them in a category of always drinking, or have no respect for property is just plain wrong, racist and stupid.
  A group of people who can live for thousands of years, in harmoney with the enviroment, and not hurting anyone, no human sacrifices and generally peacefull.
  Im embarassed to see other Australian, (even if we are all immigrants) showing so much racims.
11. Re:Always more to the legends and stories... by anss123 · 2010-01-07 02:07 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  You're wrong! Before Europe there were no wars or famines and people had perfect teeth. I've seen plenty of movies so I know it's true.
12. Re:Always more to the legends and stories... by digitig · 2010-01-07 02:13 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  I spent a bit of time during some touristy native american stuff while i was in canada and alaska last year, those tribes are (were) WAY more advanced than the Australian native peoples that the comparision just doesn't apply.
  Native americans built full blown cabins where aborigionals largely still lived in caves and temporary shelter. They had a far better chance at integration.
  So you define "advanced" as "more like you"? Has it occurred to you that permanent shelter is just not the issue in a generally warm place like Australia than in a generally cold place like Alaska? That they might not have made those "advances" because they have no need of them? That "integration", whatever benefits it might have, might not be the best way to preserve the culture, and that the later is a valid choice?
  
  pouring money into aborigional art and expression (hip-hop, dance and so on).
  Hip-hop is an aboriginal Australian form of expression?
  
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13. Re:Always more to the legends and stories... by neonsignal · 2010-01-07 02:25 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Talking about 'them' and 'us' is perhaps the first root of your problem.
  If you really think that Aboriginal cultures are 'nomadic' and 'have no concept of ownership of land', then you aren't even at a wikipedia level of understanding of traditional cultures. Not to mention that many Aboriginal Australians are living in cities.
  You are correct that the problems are complex, which is why the solutions need to go beyond political grandstanding and patronizing platitudes. At the root of the matter is a lack of respect.
  Prejudice is to pre-judge a person. There is plenty of that going around in Australia, whether or not you like to think of it as racism.
14. Re:Always more to the legends and stories... by elrous0 · 2010-01-07 03:02 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Wow, looks like someone really bought into that noble savage horseshit. I can almost picture the wind blowing through the Indian's hair as I read your post. But here is my non-hippie interpretation of the noble native American (you politically-correct types might want to avert your eyes):
  The "Native Americans" were actually many different tribes, many of whom despised one another. They fought wars with one another where torture, enslavement, rape, and various other atrocities were common. Some even practiced human sacrifice. They did not use "every part of" whatever animal they killed. They were not environmentalists. They were not peaceniks. They weren't even really "natives" (having immigrated from Asia once themselves). The relationship between Europeans and natives was a very complex one. It was not just a case of evil Europeans stealing the land of the noble savage and displacing some romantic hippie communal lifestyle. Some tribes welcomed Europeans, some fought them (using the same brutal tactics they used before the colonists came), some assimilated, some didn't. Many tribes appreciated the technological improvements of the Europeans, some spurned them. Different European "tribes" also treated the natives differently. The Spanish were much more open to intermarriage with the natives than the English. The French were more reluctant to build permanent settelments than the Spanish, British, or Portugese. Again, it was all a very complex cultural interaction--with plenty of atrocities and injustices to go around on all sides.
  Today's Native Americans still love to bitch about the evil white man--but few turn down our vaccinations or technology. And far too few turn down our hand-outs and alcohol. When they build casinos, they don't do it with "noble savage" architects. Again, it remains a complex situation--easy to romanticize, but much harder to *really* understand.
  
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15. Re:Always more to the legends and stories... by rident · 2010-01-07 03:14 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  I had the same opinion when I read that. The Lakota, Mandan, and other tribes from northern North America required better shelter to survive. They had very large animals (bison) to kill and process for food, shelter, and clothing. There are also vast forests as you progress farther north in their area of what is now the northern Minnesota and southern Ontario. All of which makes a big difference when you need to learn to survive. It's -9 F outside right now and I'm guessing the temps weren't that much different back then. Compare that to the arid plains, desert, and relatively small prey size which the Aboriginals had to contend with. I saw others mention the concept of land ownership. That was also a new idea to Native Americans when the Europeans arrived also. Sure there were tribes with their semi-staked out hunting lands and there were battles over that space but I would say it was more for basic resources which grew or fed upon that land than the land itself.
16. Re:Always more to the legends and stories... by Nadaka · 2010-01-07 04:07 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  What vast tracts of land were returned to the native american people? They currently have tiny tracts of the most desolate and inhospitable land in the US. Every time land was set aside for them in a binding treaty, that treaty was broken. I hear time and time again that in the US, treaty trumps all law, even the constitution. This is a lie, every single treaty with the native people has been broken. They were "given" (aka removed from all land that is not) all land west of the Apalacha's. That was taken and they were given all land west of the Mississippi. Then all land west of the rockies. Then a few large reservations. Then the reservations shrank. etc.
17. Re:Always more to the legends and stories... by BobMcD · 2010-01-07 05:15 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Has anyone tried ASKING them what they want, instead of just assuming a solution?
  I'd assume the answer would be:
  "Pack up your belongings and go back where you came from."
  Not sure how much that helps...
18. Re:Always more to the legends and stories... by PaganRitual · 2010-01-07 12:33 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  relatively small prey size which the Aboriginals had to contend with
  Drop Bears, while relatively small in size, are vicious fuckers that will have torn a hole in your jugular and be drinking the warmth of your life force before you even realise what the hell is going on.
The most intriguing paragraph... by Angostura · 2010-01-06 21:53 · Score: 4, Interesting

.... as far as I'm concerned is...

Despite the link to the dreaming story, weathering and the absence of meteorite fragments suggest that the crater is millions of years old and humans could not possibly have witnessed the event, Hamacher said.
.
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.
1. Re:The most intriguing paragraph... by Arker · 2010-01-06 22:02 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Much of "dreamtime" and similar bodies of lore elsewhere, but the australian dreamtime is the canonical example by most accounts, is "cultural geography." The stories were adaptive strategies for human groups which travelled great distances and relied on their knowledge of local features for survival. If a person can predict features of geography in an area he has never been before because he remembers stories which encoded those features, this is a huge advantage. So that accurate information can be decoded from them should hardly be surprising.
  Nor would it be very surprising that they correctly deduced that craters are caused by meteor impact. The frequency of *large* meteorite collisions may be quite low, but the frequency of medium and small impacts is orders of magnitude greater, and they also leave craters. Simply dropping a rock into a still body of water forms a crater as well, even though it erodes away in the blink of an eye many people have sat dropping rocks into a pond and observing what happens as well.
  
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2. Re:The most intriguing paragraph... by dargaud · 2010-01-06 22:19 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  His suggestion is that Aborigines may have learned to recognise craters from more recent impacts and then deduced the origin of the Palm Valley
  I would like to point to a similar story. In France the town of Rochechouart sits on a meteor crater. The name of the town, dating back centuries, literally means 'Fallen rock'. But the crater is 200e6 years old and is hardly recognizable from the ground (it's 21km in diameter, yes, it was a big hit). So who and how did they name the city ?
  
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3. Re:The most intriguing paragraph... by MichaelSmith · 2010-01-06 22:32 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  His suggestion is that Aborigines may have learned to recognise craters from more recent impacts and then deduced the origin of the Palm Valley
  I would like to point to a similar story. In France the town of Rochechouart sits on a meteor crater. The name of the town, dating back centuries, literally means 'Fallen rock'. But the crater is 200e6 years old and is hardly recognizable from the ground (it's 21km in diameter, yes, it was a big hit). So who and how did they name the city ?
  Many people in history and pre-history mined meteorites for iron. They learnt to associate meteorites with impact events and so associated iron mines with impacts.
  
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4. Re:The most intriguing paragraph... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-01-06 22:47 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Although the "roche" part of the town's name does indeed mean rock, the other part, Chouart, does not mean fallen. It comes from the name Cavardus, the original owner of the fortification built on a rocky pillar there. Check out the official town history through a translation machine of your choice: http://www.ville-rochechouart.fr/Tourisme/Histoire/index.php
5. Re:The most intriguing paragraph... by DavidTC · 2010-01-07 05:56 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  They don't need to witness an event.
  They just need to see a meteor in the sky, and then later find the crater.
  As was pointed out, the entire purpose of dreamtime is to know the landscape. They know the landscape very well. They're going to notice if a big damn crater shows up.
  Hell, they don't even need to figure out that a specific meteor in the sky caused the later. They see meteors all the time, they know about the 'shooting stars' as Europeans called them, and they apparently came to the same, logical conclusion that they were stars that had broken loose and fallen down. (They already knew that some of them were loose, aka, the planets.)
  As any fool can figure out how impact craters work by watching rocks drop into water, it seems a very logical conclusion that an brand new geographic feature that looks like what happens when rocks are dropped into water was made by something dropping into the land. Duh.
  So what drops from above? Well, there are stars up there that come loose...maybe a star hit here!
  And once they knew that land can suddenly be shaped like that, and that the 'story' for such land is 'it got hit with a falling star', of course they're going to label the other places where land is shaped like that with similar stories. (As that is, in fact, the entire point of dreamtime, to make up stories for the land so you can remember what the damn thing looks like because you haven't invented maps yet.)
  
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Re:This is not one of those cases by derdesh · 2010-01-06 22:14 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.
Aboriginal names for crater areas are well known. by popoutman · 2010-01-06 22:35 · Score: 3, Informative

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.....

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Re:what the story doesn't mention... by Hognoxious · 2010-01-07 00:25 · Score: 3, Funny

like English, but without grammar or meaning
Well the story's about Australia, so that kind of fits.

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Re:This is not one of those cases by Jah-Wren+Ryel · 2010-01-07 01:43 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.

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