alt Hacker NewsOne thing that i think should be considered in human archaeology is the narratives/stories/myths from different cultures featuring "different sorts of people". Many were handed down orally from the misty past before being written down and hence may contain some truths to them.
We are often quick to dismiss them as mere fanciful story-telling of primitive cultures but i am not so sure.
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Some Aboriginal Australian cultures have folklore describing the rise of sea levels at the end of the last ice age. Also, Songlines are fascinating.
It is really not far-fetched that these passages describe some ancient memories of coexisting with another quasi-human race. And certainly the narrative of interbreeding is tantalizing. Perhaps if it did not actually happen this way, we believe it now, because many Christians would need to interpolte truth about the past and reconcile these passages.
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/genesis/6?1
1 When human beings began to grow numerous on the earth and daughters were born to them,
2 the sons of God saw how beautiful the daughters of human beings were, and so they took for their wives whomever they pleased.
3 ...
4 The Nephilim appeared on earth in those days, as well as later, after the sons of God had intercourse with the daughters of human beings, who bore them sons. They were the heroes of old, the men of renown.
27 They do not rest with the warriors
who fell in ancient times,
who went down to Sheol fully armed.
Their swords were placed under their heads
and their shields laid over their bones;
For there was terror of these warriors
in the land of the living.
33 There [in Canaan] we saw the Nephilim* (the Anakim are from the Nephilim); in our own eyes we seemed like mere grasshoppers, and so we must have seemed to them.”
Agreed. Considering the range from neaderthals to homo florensis etc...
I have a soft spot for such folklore. Strictly speaking, much doesn't hold up to scrutiny but I see no wrong with wild conjecture for the fun of it.
For starters, some catastrophes do shine through more recent history:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flood_myths
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter_of_536
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
Then, Nuclear Evangelism is a fun idea, proposing a religion teaching us to stay away from nuclear waste for 10k years: https://www.nahomatsuda.com/nuclear-evangelism
Or you can poke around linguistics
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_linguistics
- https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/does-your-name-belong-...
The Arthurian legends and Robin Hood are two English-speaking examples of folklore snowballing into what we have today. I bet James Bond will join them in a few hundred year's time.