'The Invention of Prehistory' Review: Facing Deep Time | Hacker News Reader

'The Invention of Prehistory' Review: Facing Deep Time

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24 pointsHooke22 comments

This reminded me of the French movie "la guerre de feu" about the people who found fire in the cave period. The interesting part of the movie was not in French. It's not in English either. There are no words in the movie. You should watch it.

i just saw this video yesterday: "The Magic Of 80s Fantasy Movies Before The Lord of the Rings | Top 10 Most Underrated Fantasy Movies" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLarGiXN864

the movie you speak of is the first on the list: Quest for Fire (1981)

The English title is 'Quest for Fire'.

There are actually two distinct languages (a kind of Proto-Proto-Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Proto-Proto-Uralic) spoken in the movie, created by Anthony Burgess. He later wrote an essay (the title of which escapes me ATM) about the thinking behind it.

Some background: https://www.anthonyburgess.org/quest-for-fire/about-quest-fo...

This might possibly be the essay you refer to:

https://archive.is/20240311220449/https://www.nytimes.com/19...

> a kind of ancient taboo on certain words, like fire, that they are not spoken directly but instead connected with other, similar sources; it is like calling the toilet or jakes the bathroom

I find it amusing that we can reconstruct that PIE speakers had a verb for "to get high", but we can't reconstruct their noun for "bear", because it was taboo: speaking of the bear was like speaking of the devil, and so all we know are all the different ways the different languages chose to talk about the bear without saying its name.

On prehistory: It’s strange and a bit sad to me that we have zero cultural memory of neanderthals.

All we have left is modern speculation and imagination.

How far back do you think human cultural memory extends? The earliest writings would be preserving stories known at the time, but how far back did those stories go in prehuman history? I'm guessing most of prehistory was forgotten even before you get to neanderthals.

Probably, but there is some evidence that Australian aboriginal oral traditions have preserved information for at least 16,000 years or so, i.e. well into the last ice age. IIRC there are two specific instances, one involving astronomical observations that can be dated to about that long ago, and another involving geography, where the stories speak of an area of land as it would have appeared when sea levels where much lower during the ice age.

https://www.science.org/content/article/aboriginal-tale-anci...

Notable because it's so old, but it gives you an upper bound.

I have sometimes wondered if ideas about dwarves, gnomes, trolls or other vaguely human-shaped mythical creatures might have originated in encounters with other, now-extinct human species.

The same is true of greek gods. Some of them, like Zeus, were probably real people that existed a long time ago

Or possibly several people: it's worth remembering that there were no photographs in most of human history.

The story of who a person was can easily be a combination of many.

Absolutely right! Famously every town in the ancient Mediterranean had a Hercules story about how he came around and did some unique thing.

No, probably not. The word “Zeus” is far older than Greek - it’s a Proto-Indo-European word, and he is an Indo-European sky god, with analogues from India to Iberia. (“Dios,” as in the Latin languages’ word for the Christian god, has this derivation.)

This all to say that the word (and the sacred culture attendant) is far older and far broader than can be ascribed to some just-so story of a prehistoric, let alone proto-Greek, warlord. If I were to look for origins of “Zeus,” the god, I would instead first contemplate how vast the sky appears when seen from the steppe (whence the Yamnaya, first speakers of this language family). How does one not imagine a sky father in that seeming infinity?

Nothing you wrote here negates what I wrote. Just that it goes far back, and probably originates in pre-history. Its not inconceivable to think about figures like Jesus existing 20-30-40k years ago. Over time they turn into legends, which are bigger and more vast than the living human ever was.

Dwarves are short people, so there's really no mystery there. As for gnomes and trolls, they could be explained as birth defects. The myth of "changelings" are probably these birth defects that might not be noticeable in a newly born child, but later become obvious.

I think the real cultural memory of the Neanderthals and other species related to us is in the myths of Titans and Giants. People who were on earth first and who battled furiously with man-like gods for dominance.

Are you sure? There is a convincing argument that Neanderthals were the original boogeyman, and carried down to the present through the stories we tell our children and works like Beowulf:

https://treeofwoe.substack.com/p/when-orcs-were-real

AFAIK the idea of neanderthals as original bogeymen is closer to anthropological fanfic than a credible hypothesis, but would love to have an anthropologist/paleonthologist to chime in.

I think it is beyond something we can know definitively. We know that our species interacted because we share DNA. The nature of that interaction is largely guesswork.

I like the argument that our time coexisting with neanderthals is the reason the uncanny valley exists: we have in the deep past had very good reason to be made uncomfortable by entities that almost, but not quite, seem like humans.

But then, when chimps and gorillas do something human-like, it inspires laughter and delight rather than discomfort.

Ungated: https://archive.is/PdX5d

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