Complex Numbers

Mything the Point

From the BBC, an article at the intersection of science and mythology.

    The myths that hint at past disasters  
Myths and fables passed down over thousands of years are full of fantastic creatures and warring gods. But they also might contain evidence of environmental disasters of the past.

It's long been assumed that many, if not all, myths contain some elements of fact. (Like the article, I'm using "myth" in the sense of a passed-down story, not the more modern meaning of falsehood.) The tough part is teasing out the fact from the fiction.

The article opens with a bit about expected sea level rise, comparing it to past sea level rise. This might add fuel to the "climate's changed before and we're still here" campfire of climate change deniers, but so be it.

With the possibility of a catastrophic global sea level rise of 3ft (1m) by 2050 which could force millions of people to leave their homes, researchers have now started to look at ancient stories about land lost to the sea and downed cities in a new way.

Hell, it might have looked like the whole world was flooding, leading to one extraordinarily popular myth (though that one might have been due to its Mesopotamian origins).

Some researchers argue that tales of hot boulders thrown into the sea or the building of sea walls comprise factual information, albeit exaggerated and distorted to some extent.

Well, okay, argue all you want, but how about some science to back it up? I have this hypothesis that the "nephilim" mentioned exactly once in the Bible, in Genesis, are actually a passed-down memory of Neanderthals. There's no definitive translation to it, and the KJV muddled the waters by rendering the word as "giants," with even less evidence (we didn't know about Neanderthals at the time). Like I said, it's my hypothesis. I have literally no way of supporting or disproving it.

These researchers are geomythologists.

As good a name as any, and better than most.

“Geomyths represent the earliest inklings of the scientific impulse,” says Adrienne Mayor, folklorist, historian of ancient science and research scholar at Stanford University, California, and author of the important The First Fossil Hunters, “showing that people of antiquity were keen observers and applied the best rational, cohesive thinking of their place and time to explain remarkable natural forces they experienced.”

I suppose, for various definitions of "rational" and "cohesive," if such words can be applied to deciding that floods are due to gods yeeting boulders and whatnot.

There's a lot more at the article, including specifics; I won't quote much more.

Back when the glaciers retreated, humanity was already infesting the European lands (I'm including Neanderthals in that group). In that era, Britain wasn't an island; it was connected to the mainland by a low-lying chunk of land now called Doggerland. This wasn't particularly ancient, in geological terms; apparently, it flooded out about 6,000 years ago, around the time civilization was flourishing in Mesopotamia, thanks to beer.

I'd often wondered about undersea archaeology in that region, and what it might find in terms of artifacts. It's often called a land bridge, but that implies that humans mostly lived in Britain or Nederland, only crossing the "bridge," but there's no reason why people wouldn't have lived there.

Turns out, of course, that actual scientists were way ahead of me.  

The whole thing's fascinating to me, though I doubt the article's thesis that there's much practical use in terms of dealing with catastrophic modern climate change in an era when there are billions of people, not hundreds or thousands, living near a coast. But finding more truth about ancient humans is practical enough for me.