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Science

Myths Help Geologists Understand Modern Threats 61

Posted by samzenpus from the based-on-actual-events dept.
morleron writes "According to a report in the "Guardian Unlimited" geologists have begun using ancient myths as clues to geologic events in Earth's past. Among other things scientists have followed the tracks of ancient stories to uncover the huge Seattle earthquake and tsunami that obliterated large parts of the coasts of Washington and Oregon roughly 300 years ago; the discovery that a volcano on Fiji is active instead of dormant as has been thought for years; and that the Biblical and Near Eastern myths of a world ending flood are probably based on the sudden inundation of the Black Sea when the landbridge that used to link Turkey with Europe - what is now called the Bosporus - suddenly collapsed some 7600 years ago. It's amazing how much information our ancestors passed on in oral and early written myths...we're finally getting smart enough to listen."
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Myths Help Geologists Understand Modern Threats More

Myths Help Geologists Understand Modern Threats

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  • have they found the place that the Earth makes contact with that giant turtle it is supposed to be sitting?

  • Eve and the apple (Score:3, Funny)

    by Kyeetza ( 927172 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2005 @08:55PM (#14206992)
    It's only a matter of time before they pin original sin on women cause of Eve's apple eating incident. Oh Damn..... Catholic Church beat me to the AGAIN! Somebody call Kansas before they find out about the monkeys.
    • Would that be the monkeys Kansas School Board members evolved from, or the Flying Monkeys that I'm trying to get H1B visas for?

      ..because sometimes, the right solution to the problem involves Flying Monkeys.
    • Interestingly, the fruit being an "apple" comes from Greek mythology. Hera stands in the place of Eve. The Greeks have it all upside down, of course. The serpent is the liberator, rather than the deceiver in Greek mythology, and Athena takes the serpent as her protector, etc, etc.

      There is an implication of a historical basis.
      • Ah, and there is one of the most fun parts of discussing the Bible, how many things people "know" but aren't really in there. The fruit being an apple (although I like Ivor Bigguns "Cucumber Number" version too, "In the garden of Eden Eve started to fall / but the fruit that she fancied weren't an apple at all / It was Adam's cucumber..."), the "Three Kings", Mary riding into Nazareth on a donkey... They're all things which have crept into the narrative over time and now they've become "facts" that people r

  • NO problem... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Spytap ( 143526 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2005 @08:57PM (#14207004)
    Hey, as long as Myths are treated as such, and not absolute fact. At that point it gets hard to sort through what may be helpful, and what may just be white noise...
  • I shall have to start up my Volkswissen and search for ancient truths....

  • It's not all on us... (Score:3, Funny)

    by centauri ( 217890 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2005 @08:59PM (#14207014) Homepage
    Yeah, it's great that "we're finally getting smart enough." Why weren't the people who came up with the "myths" in the first place smart enough to write them literally, instead of making up stuff about thunderbirds and killer rocks?

    • Re:It's not all on us... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Tanmi-Daiow ( 802793 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2005 @09:41PM (#14207204) Journal
      Because they still believed that Gods/Great Spirits did everything and controlled everything so all they had to do to understand what happened is make up something that appeased that and didn't contradict it.

    • Re:It's not all on us... (Score:5, Informative)

      by whitehatlurker ( 867714 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2005 @11:10PM (#14207811) Journal
      Well, the stories that were written (well, spoken, since most of these are verbal cultures) as things really happened got lost as that was too boring.

      The story tellers had to "sex it up" to be certain that the story got through. And the sexed-up stories survived. So, we get thunderbirds [thunderbirdsonline.com] ;-)

      It's rather cool that things haven't really changed that much over time. People flock to movies "based on a true story", but aren't willing to pay to see a documentary on the same story. (Unless the story's already "sexy".)

      • Well, the stories that were written (well, spoken, since most of these are verbal cultures) as things really happened got lost as that was too boring.

        It's not so much as they were boring stories -- I'm sure they were exciting and fascinating.

        But when a culture with no scientific understanding witnesses something astounding, they will interpret as fantastical.

        Much like the saying that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", in this case it's a matter of "anything spectacular a

    • "For the same reason" that you couldn't read read a 5 1/4" floppy today (arcane knowledge aside). Most English speakers have a hard time reading their own language from a few hundered years ago. Grow a cortex...

      .
      -shpoffo
    • I personally think it's a control issue. Saying "rocks fall, everyone dies" leaves the world as a tremendously random and scary place where it doesn't much matter what you do because things will just happen. Ascribing the events to magic or the like makes the phenomenon something that's potentially controllable. You can negotiate with a god. You can't negotiate with a tornado.

      And if you think we've risen past that, witness how many people still have "a lucky shirt" or pass around chain letters. *grumble*

  • Yet again... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yet again modern science bitchslaps the bible. Suck it, Jesus!
    • You seem confused. This is more proof that the Bible is accurate. It changes the nature of the stories from myth to fact.

      When you consider that the writers didn't use the same language that we do, they may have been unable to clearly articulate what they witnessed. Compounding that problem is the loss of meaning in the translation to Greek and then English from the original Hebrew. The translators had never seen these types of things and wouldn't know how to explain them in a scientifically robust manne

  • hardly surprising, really (Score:5, Insightful)

    by quest(answer)ion ( 894426 ) <admin.mindofmetal@net> on Wednesday December 07, 2005 @09:00PM (#14207022)
    folklorists, ethnologists, and anthropologists have been trying to track down the historical basis for myths and legends for as long as their professions have existed. i guess the real news is that geologists and other hard scientists are starting to listen to folklorists and anthropologists, taking cross-cultural similarities traditions seriously as sources of insight about global climatic events in the pre-historical or semi-historical past rather than as amusing consequences or the result of some sort of freakishly convergent cultural evolution.

    i figure as the amount of what we know about the earth's climatic and geological history increases, the more of these correlations with myth we'll find. i think the idea of being able to predict localized patterns of geological events like eruptions and earthquakes is what's really seductive, i don't know what kind of value this sort of new insight will have for predicting major natural disasters will have on a human timescale, though. saying an earthquake will happen in the next 200 to 1000 years is next to useless in terms of preparing for it in the short-term.

    hell, the history channel loves to tell us that according to the mayan calendar, this age of the world will end in 2012. doesn't necessarily mean we'll have another great flood on our hands, but it certainly makes for good tv.
    • > folklorists, ethnologists, and anthropologists have been trying to track down the historical basis for myths and legends for as long as their professions have existed.

      The problem is that thinking of "explanations" for the myths is easy, but verifying them is all but impossible.
      • The problem is that thinking of "explanations" for the myths is easy, but verifying them is all but impossible.
        Easy to explain them. You make them fit, however it takes, same as psychology.

  • Alien contact? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Darth_Mehal ( 910244 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2005 @09:07PM (#14207059)
    I look forward to finding out that the Greek Gods were aliens with advanced Quantum Technology (read Ilium by Dan Simmons for that interesting diversion) Actually, isn't there a Star Trek ep based off this?
    • Then there's Firefly:

      "Noah's Ark is a problem. We'll have to call it 'early quantum state phenomenon.' Only way to fit 5,000 species of mammals on the same boat."

    • I look forward to finding out that the Greek Gods were aliens with advanced Quantum Technology (read Ilium by Dan Simmons for that interesting diversion) Actually, isn't there a Star Trek ep based off this?

      That would be Who Mourns for Adonais? [treknation.com] from season 2.

    • yeh! and the egyptian gods were parasitic aliens that wrapped themselves around the top of your spine..
    • If you look at the myths, the gods would not necessarilly need to ave advanced quantum technology, but technology at about our current level, give or take. Firebirds, flaming chariots, etc could just be a nontechnical explanation of a rocket or even a jet, similar to the misunderstandings inherint in cargo cults [wikipedia.org]. There are people who have taken this, as well as a lot of other cultural phenomenon, as evidence of a previous culture which has often been indentified as Atlantis.

      Some of the cultural phenome

  • Strait of Gibraltar also? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Progman3K ( 515744 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2005 @09:15PM (#14207089)
    If there really was Pangea millenia ago, then it looks like the same thing happened at the Strait of Gibraltar to first fill the Mediterranean, Adriatic and Agean seas...

    It looks a lot like the Bosporus.

    • The event is calles the Messinian Salinity Crisis. [leeds.ac.uk]

      In a nutshell, the movement of Africa towards Europe managed to close the straits of Gibraltar around 6 million years ago; as the rivers feeding the Med don't make up for evaporation, the whole sea evaporated (the degree of this is disputed, but large deposits of salt lie under the sediments of the sea).
  • I thought that claim had been refuted.
  • Geologists selectively observe what they want to see.
  • I think Velikovsky [wikipedia.org] did this before (but badly?).
    • I think that Velikovsky was born too early. He was the kind of pioneer that the early reformers were. His ideas were radical at the time and were ridiculed as unscientific simply because the ideas were different from established theories. Without his work, of which I am impressed of its depth and breadth, we would still be in the dark ages scientifically.

      Why can't some scientists objectively approach these kinds of subjects instead of dismissing them outright without applying rational scrutiny. To sug

      • His ideas were radical at the time and were ridiculed as unscientific simply because the ideas were different from established theories.

        No, they were ridiculed because they were - and still are - completely wrong.

        Why can't some scientists objectively approach these kinds of subjects instead of dismissing them outright without applying rational scrutiny. To suggest that his theories were flawed or some type of voodoo science is in itself unscientific

        Some scientists DID apply rational scrutiny to Velikov

    • I believe Carl Sagan made this point that scientists as he were criticizing the astrophysics of Velikovsky but were impressed with his grasp of archaelogy and ethnic myths, legends, and sacred writings, while the archaelogy community more or less assumed that the astrophysics was impressive but thought that Velikovsky's interepretations of ancient cultures was totally bogus.

      If we are on the subject of ancient writings, myths, or oral traditions, the bit about the planet Venus being ejected as a flaming co

  • It's amazing how much information our ancestors passed on in oral and early written myths...we're finally getting smart enough to listen.

    No -- we were listening before. We just didn't have the tools to prove that there might be something more to this than just myths. This is called the scientific method.

    Now me, I don't give a rat's ass about earthquakes or floods. It just isn't news. Wake me when they have found proof that there really were dragons and unicorns and elves and orcs and cool old guys with

  • A *Terrific* Example of this! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FFFish ( 7567 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2005 @11:13PM (#14207825) Homepage
    Down at the south end of the border between British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, is an area known as the Crowsnest Pass. Over on the Alberta side was the small town of Frank. Frank existed solely because the Crowsnest is choc-a-bloc full of coal.

    Anyway, not to get into too much detail: the residents of Frank lived at the bottom of a mountain they named "Turtle Mountain," but which had a much older Indian name of "The Mountain That Moves." Throwing all caution to the wind, the mountain was soon being mined for coal.

    Needless to say, thirty million cubic meters of mountain moved -- downhill, rapidly -- during the night of April 29, 1903, burying the town under hundreds of feet of rock. It's a great story, [sympatico.ca] though sad.

    It is well worth the effort of visiting the site. Fascinating history throughout the area, lots of superb dayhiking, and if you hump it up Turtle mountain (or even partway up) you get the most astounding view of the destruction. When that mountain moved, it moved a long way. There are house-sized boulders halfway up the opposing slope. It was a massive landslide.

    Point of the Story: Listen to the myths, people! The natives weren't just making shit up for the helluvit! It was the bleeding Mountain That Moves! D-oh!
    • You'd think they would have paid more attention with a name like 'The Mountain That Moves'. There's also a great song called "Crashing Down" by the Canadian folk band Tanglefoot commemorating this. I had been interested enough about the disaster from the song to read about it, but hadn't read about the original name.

      The disaster would have been even more terrible if a brave soul hadn't been able to make his way across the fields over gigantic boulders left from the landslide to warn an oncoming passenger
  • but don't mention this anywhere near Kansas!
  • Else three rednecks will beat them up on the side of the road.
  • "followed the tracks of ancient stories to uncover the huge Seattle earthquake and tsunami that obliterated large parts of the coasts of Washington and Oregon roughly 300 years ago"

    300 years is "ancient"? Really??
    • Yes that's what I found comical too. I'm sure the number of books we have from the 17th Century must number in the tens of thousands aside from all the documents and factual data which is available by the ton. The house up the road from me is older than this !

    • Re:"Ancient" myths? (Score:5, Funny)

      by meringuoid ( 568297 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @07:06AM (#14209340)
      300 years is "ancient"? Really??

      A wise man once say: the Americans think a hundred years is a long time, but the English think a hundred miles is a long drive.

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