I’m surprised by how tenuous the link is between the cave find and the archival find. Is the bar really that low for claims in archaeological papers or am I missing something? It’s a compelling story, but surely Occam’s razor would conclude that poking sticks into dead animals and fire pits is just what people have done for thousands of years? Where’s the evidence that there was chanting and a healing ceremony?
Edit: full paper is freely available on Nature here:
"Each one was found in a separate fireplace around the size of the palm of a hand—far too small to have been used for heat or cooking meat.
The slightly charred ends of the sticks had been cut specially to stick into the fire, and both were coated in human or animal fat."
That's rather more than circumstantial evidence. Granted the ritual might have changed a bit over 12,000 odd years but where else have you seen people poke sticks into tiny hearth's?
It’s all circumstantial evidence because that’s all we get.
Circumstantial evidence is not “weak evidence”, it is evidence concerning the circumstances.
For instance, DNA is circumstantial evidence. It’s evidence that can imply a connection between events, but it is not proof of such a connection. Fingerprints: circumstantial. Call logs: often circumstantial.
The opposite of circumstantial evidence is direct evidence. Direct evidence is rarer and often not as useful. Direct evidence would be an actual witness to the event. To call back to prior examples:
Fingerprints are direct evidence someone touched something. But they are circumstantial evidence they then used that object in commission of a crime.
Here, the direct evidence is that things were burned and sticks were sharpened. The circumstances in which they were found implies the rest.
This sounds like something out of law school, where for some reason "direct evidence" is oddly treated as superior to "circumstantial evidence".
So, for instance, you could have a murder, and the prime suspect's fingerprints were found at the scene and on the murder weapon too. However, an eyewitness testifies that he saw the murder committed not by the prime suspect, but instead by furry space aliens who then departed in their UFO. We're supposed to believe the witness?
After all the knowledge we have now about how utterly unreliable and frankly worthless most human testimony is, you'd think our courts would stop treating it as worthy of a conviction.
It varies a lot. Later European archaeology is generally quite well-founded as it ties in to a historical record. While I don't have any familiarity with the Colosseum, I have heard that there are records of payments to sailors for manipulating the shades.
If you get further away from historical records, it does get more tenuous, but there is often a solid basis of scientific or technical evidence. My own doctorate is in use of physics for dating by thermoluminescence and optically stimulated luminescence, which together cover a lot of ground for stuff that cannot be dated by C14. There are several quantitative techniques like that, for instance for isotopic analysis which can be used for deducing trade routes. There are also many qualitative and semi-quantitative techniques, varying from traditional trenches and ground penetrating radar to pollen analysis (which gives you information on climate and ground cover).
However all of this has to be tied together in to a picture of human culture. That necessarily has a large element of interpretation. This is not unique - you can see the same pattern in fields like astronomy. Generally I think archaeologists are reasonably good at knowing when they are on uncertain ground. If I may give an example: in Scotland, mainly on the north west coasts, there are the remains of pre-historic buildings called brochs. The biggest stands 40' high, and it is possible to walk up through the stairs between the double walls to the top. We know roughly when they were built, but not why. There are several theories, but I find it interesting that there is an absence of dogmatic assertion that one particular interpretation is true, and it is still possible to have a sensible discussion about a "fringe" theory (my own idea is that some of them may have been for excarnation) which will centre on what evidence you might need to search for (bone fragments in this case).
If they had been doing the ritual regularly enough to preserve it for over 12,000 years in a relatively small range, it seems surprising that the excavations didn't turn up way more instances than it did. They can find 2 perfect instances within centuries of each other 12kya in the same excavation, then it just teleports without a trace to the 1880s?
This sounds more like a birthday paradox. There are so many rituals and superstitions in indigenous peoples over the millennia that it would be shocking if you could never find cases of things that looked vaguely similar when reduced to an archaeological residue and you cast a net as wide as 'anything which anyone has ever described which sounds similar no matter how many millennia'.
(I would also note that 'fat smeared on stuff and involving fires' is not nearly as rare as it might sound. Fat is important and used in many sacrifices or medicines - eg Homer, with all that fat wrapped on or stacked on top of bones in a holocaust to the gods.)
Its a stick in the ground. People might have tripped over thousands of them, and millions lost to the elements and time. This find was only noticed because someone with the right specialized knowledge was looking in a specific location for artifacts, bothered to test the stick, and managed to link it to an obscure document written 150 years earlier, itself amazing that this particular ritual from this particular region was documented, unlike the unknown but huge number that were not. It is surprising we find this sort of thing at all. They might have cooked their lunch with a 35,000 year old stick without realizing it.
> People might have tripped over thousands of them
Obviously not, because when these guys tripped over them, they were struck enough to then spend years looking for explanations.
> unlike the unknown but huge number that were not.
The more that are not documented, the more plausible it becomes that vaguely similar rituals which yield the same residue may exist in many times and places, and enter into the sum total of rituals available for birthday-paradox collision. Arguing that it must be the same with zero intervening evidence is like arguing that that because an Aboriginal word for dog is 'dog' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbabaram_language#Word_for_%22...) both Mbararam and English must be descended from the same language which existed hundreds of thousands of years ago and have remarkably preserved one word for all that time. What are the odds?!
Its a stick they found in an area being actively examined, next to megafauna bones giving the age, that on inspection would have shown burn marks and probably not the megafauna lunch they thought it might be.
Birthday paradox? I guess it might originate from a similar but now extinct ritual, rather than the modern documented one. But given the near infinite number of potential rituals, it seems reasonable to suggest that because of the similarities it has been passed down over the 12,000 years. Even if the original ritual would be completely unrecognizable apart from the remaining similarities and performed by a different tribal group. Or maybe that is like claiming modern druidic rituals have been passed down for thousands of years.
Have to agree here. Also just kind of doesn't pass the common sense test. We all learn the "game of telephone" as a kid and how information can change even just being passed once.
In fact I've heard archaeologists in the past specifically say that no oral tradition can survive intact more than 100 years. Usually this statement is in reference to certain creation myths being relatively modern inventions.
A claim of 12000 years needs strong evidence. Given what I've seen from the field lately I have a counter-theory, but I'm not really comfortable sharing.
> In fact I've heard archaeologists in the past specifically say that no oral tradition can survive intact more than 100 years. Usually this statement is in reference to certain creation myths being relatively modern inventions.
Maybe you meant 1000 years?
If you really meant 100 years, there's an obvious counterexample: The "Happy Birthday Song", published in 1893. Arguably no one learns it by reading the words and notes from a page.
Furthermore, considering that until pretty recently in history most people were illiterate, the stories they learned were transmitted to them orally (even if read from a book).
You are aware that the Happy Birthday Song has dozens upon dozens of variations (and not just the parody ones), right?
The Happy Birthday Song isn't even the Happy Birthday Song! It's Good Morning To All! Happy Birthday lyrics didn't even make it into print until 1912 and that's not even the version that we use today. That version was first published in 1924 by Robert Coleman. The copyrighted version that even credited the Hill sisters with the melody (from Good Morning to All, in 1893) didn't come around till 1935.
As for peoples' literacy, yes, that's the point. That history is often unreliable. We even have disputes between early _written_ historians writing about the same events and have to compare them and also evaluate whether they were alive at the time of the events and what their sources were. Often we can discount what those people wrote today based on what we've learned from the past.
I said 100 years and I meant it. If you really think about it deeply, it should be obvious. Hell, I don't know who my father is and my own mother couldn't manage to stay consistent between tellings of that story...
You expect a complicated tradition to stay the same for 12000 years? I went to Catholic Church my whole childhood and I couldn't even tell you beat-for-beat what happens at mass if you put a gun to my head.
My point is that the Happy Birthday song is an oral tradition which has lasted more than 100 years. That seems corroborated by the 1924 date you cited. That's all.
Of course I don't think oral traditions go unchanged for 12,000 years. Some very old oral traditions, like the ones from ancient India, stayed relatively unchanged only because their emphasis shifted suddenly and dramatically from active composition to ritual performance, to the extent that most people had no idea what the actual language used meant. Their opacity became a feature, not a bug.
However, despite the details changing, consistent storylines and story fragments exist across many ancient cultures, sometimes because they are derived from the same narrative source, and other times because of shared experiences across divergent cultures.
I came to post the same thing. You have a stick from 12,000 years ago, and a story from 100 years ago, and they link them because of a similarity "there is fat at the end of the stick".
You could get fat on a stick by roasting a small mouse (so a small hearth), or tons of other ways. This really isn't enough evidence, not without a ton more findings of the same thing at various dates over the timeperiod.
If tiny hearths with fat-covered sticks were common elsewhere, this would be a valid objection. But as it is, this seems to be a distinctive practice that is present at the same location separated by 12k years, and the ancient one was buried and so not observed for most of that time. What's the alternative explanation except a common root in a cultural practice?
It's actually not that far-fetched when you consider the long view of human history. Hominins have been capable of cultural transmission for millions of years, and during most of that time it made most sense to repeat what the previous generation had done as closely as possible, since they had by definition survived and reproduced well enough to make a new generation. Among all those practices of toolmaking, hunting strategies, herbal knowledge, and whatever we call 'ritual', it wouldn't have been clear to the practitioners which were actually effective at increasing survival and which not, so everything gets repreated over generations (with occasional modifications catching on and producing cultural evolution ofc)
Have you ever watched US State Department press briefings, and paid close attention to how they use language (ie: "X is linked to Y")? Or, heard the public subsequently discussing what was said in them (say, right here on HN)?
Humans are a story based species...always have been always will be. Stories are our weak spot, the ultimate attack/control vector.
Donald Trump can tell a story (which is what all humans run on) adequate to motivate thousands of people up to no good to descend upon the nation's capital, do you think LLM's (science, etc) can compete in that specific arena/domain, at that level? (To be fair though, the Normies have been motivated to do more than a few silly things themselves by their trainers. Donald is good, but he ain't the best.)
There are readings of brain activity, and then there is brain activity that causes humans to do particular things with their bodies. One of these is more powerful than the other.
> FY2012 budget states a plan to “initiate investigations into the relationship between…neurotransmitters such as oxytocin, emotion-cognition interactions, and narrative structures.”
What has transpired since then is left as an exercise for the reader.
It’s such a weird pissing contest because if you’re alive today that means your ancestors survived to produce you and that’s saying something as most groups and cultures, etc have not survived to the present day. So just surviving as a group for thousands of years is quite the accomplishment. That’s good enough.
I really don't think that watching documentaries are equivalent to being able to discerning anything about an academic field. That reminds me of reading press releases to understand scientific papers, which we all understand to be a junk way of doing it.
Wait you are telling me they were not for some religious rites? Or had some religious significance? Isn't that the usual reasoning for nearly everything found ever...
It very rarely is. Most things found are known to be tools, dwellings, pottery for storage or cooking, clothing, etc.
Wierd stuff, the stuff without a mundane explanation is labeled ritual, and since its wierd - you (presumably non-archaeologist) are more likely to see articles (etc) about "look at this wierd thing we found".
It's also worth noting that "ritual" doesn't mean "religious". Yes there are a lot of religious rituals in the world today, and throughout written history - so there's a reasonable assumption that often the "ritual" stuff might have been associated with religion. There are however many secular rituals in modern life (and throughout history). Some examples from the present day US:
* Swearing in for various offices/jobs
* Many aspects of court and the legal system (gavels, the whole trial format, the bill signing ceremonies, etc)
* the national anthem before sports games
* parades
* school graduations, awards presentations, and other ceremonies
Many objects associated with these are "ritual objects" - gavels, mortarboard hats, medals on soldiers, fancy diplomas, and on and on. Just because you can provide a deeper explanation of the symbolism doesn't change the fact that they are ritual objects.
Even outside of those secular ceremonial rituals, old "religions" simply don't look like new religions.
In old Finland, they believed you could transfer a sickness from a person to a rock, and then throw that rock away. Was that religious?
They believed you could heal an arrow wound if you chanted the origin story of how arrows came to be, and told the prototypal first arrow it was used wrongly, that it should be ashamed and take back the harm. Was that religious?
Pseudoscience consists of statements, beliefs, or practices that claim to be both scientific and factual but are incompatible with the scientific method.
What if say only 5% of people within each discipline do so, what is the epistemic value then of the claim "Archeology & history claim to be scientific"?
This is explained by complexity. The more components involved in a field, the less feasible the scientific method is. (E.g. math > physics > chemistry > materials science > cell biology > human biology > psychology > sociology)
Math is not a science. Math is fundamentally opposite of science.
In science nothing can be proven. Proof is exclusively the domain of mathematics. The Lack of proof is foundational to science, it’s built into the core axiom of the scientific method.
This axiom is actually the reason why science is so “bad” because nothing can really be confirmed. But something like psychology is on a whole different level because of the replication crisis. Psychology has outright fraud going on.
That's what I was thinking, math has 0 atoms, physics works with ones of atoms, chemistry tens, polymer physics, tens of thousands, biology trillions, psychology 10^25, etc. :)
Testability is also a big issue. It's extremely expensive, labor-intensive, and time-consuming to build a facility like the LHC to test physical theories and develop new ones. But that's nothing compared to how hard it is to conduct reproducible, unambiguous, and actionable psychological studies on large populations.
Ethical experimentation involving live human beings is always going to be one of science's greatest challenges, IMO. There are questions we're not allowed to ask and answers we're not allowed to use. That hasn't been true in physics since the Renaissance.
Edit: full paper is freely available on Nature here:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01912-w