I find it utterly fascinating how long were humans capable of passing the information just by word of mouth. If I understood it correctly, in this case people were wary for 2000 years, so for around 100 generations.
"Some 50 generations later, on March 11, 2011, the Murohama tsunami warning tower — which was supposed to sound an alarm — was silent, toppled by the temblor. Still, without the benefit of an official warning system supported by modern science, the locals relied on the lesson that had been transmitted generation to generation for 1,000 years. “We all know the story about the two tsunami waves that collided at the shrine,” I was told.
Instead of taking refuge on the closest hill, the one with the shrine, they took the time to get to high ground farther away. From the safety of their vantage point they saw two tsunami waves colliding at the hill with the shrine, as they did long ago. Tragically, not everyone made the right choice; I was told of at least one person who died." https://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-xpm-2012-mar-11-la-oe-hol...
Maybe it could be explained by each new generation asking their parents why nobody is dwelling near the coast. Meaning, the information is passed down because it is necessary to explain the current situation. The passed-down explanation may even mutate significantly, as long as it still keeps people away from the coast.
There are many examples of this sort of thing. In Western societies many of the “universal” myths may be correlated to events 10,000+ years ago, yet persist!
Our modern society has vastly better data, unimaginable completeness in scale, scope, detail, and accuracy.
Yet we are consistently making insanely worse decisions than the ones that returned 2000 years after the disaster.
That hundred-generation perspective makes the Native American's 'Consider the Seventh Generation' ethos seem myopic.
Worse yet is our society's obsession on quarterly profits and this month's competitive positioning — makes the attention span of a cloud of coked-up gnats seem positively sagacious
>>And of course, people returned to the shoreline eventually, as people in tsunami zones around the world inevitably do and apparently always have done. "Knowledge of these giant events and their consequences seems to wane over the passage of time, a common occurrence throughout the Pacific region . . . Most of the hazard assessments for coastal northern Chile are based on historical data that goes back just a few centuries, but the fault system in the region runs on a much larger temporal scale. Data about ancient quakes and tsunamis like the one that reshaped society here 3,800 years ago could offer a longer-term perspective to hazard planners."
I'm doubtful. While individuals may respond to stories, cultures and settlement grow vegetatively. Communities would have grown back, and to my untutored mind in less than a century.
Unless the ecosystem was upset, which it was. Small camps that returned after the tsunami show a narrower diet, which is a red flag? I imagine folks didn't return because the food chain was disrupted, and they couldn't return.
Its not too unfathomable. Indigenous people are around today and they pass on lore to their youth the same way. Also looks like they use paint to make drawings. Probably recorded some of their history too.
Not necessarily. The biblical flood and a majority of flood myths around the world, go back much farther than that. Many seem to have been inspired by events during the Younger Dryas period, around 12,000 years ago. There's a "black mat" layer in soil all over the world, suspected to be the result of some sort of cosmic impact - a comet or asteroid hit North American ice, resulting in cataclysmic flooding and a radical reshaping of the geology. The fires from the resulting storms pumped so much ash into the sky that we now have a visually distinctive indicator. Anything above the black mat layer is younger than 12,000 years.
North American megafauna disappeared at this time, which is a pretty serious crack in the assertion that overhunting by people caused their extinction.
Storms from this event left evidence of massive flooding in the years following the impact all over the world. I have no doubt that there are cultural myths that stem from not recent flood events but the younger Dryas impact is likely the source for the oldest myths, as the destruction seemed to be so profound that it would have wiped out any coastal settlements all over the world, leaving us with evidence of the survivors and nothing of what they lost. Various sites and clues around the world hint that even 12,000 years ago there may have been relatively advanced cultures that built in stone and wood, planted crops, likely had advanced shipbuilding, math, astronomy, and navigation.
There are petroglyphs at sites all over the world resembling stick figure men that seem to be inspired by massive plasma discharge patterns in the sky, and the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis provides an explanation for storms powerful enough to produce such patterns.
The untold secret of the biblical flood is that, after the water rose and drowned everything anyone had ever known, it never went back down. All the water is still there. We just call it the sea now.
It didn't happen all in one week, year, or millennium. But, starting 20,000 years ago, generation after generation found the village its grandparents built washed by waves, and had to move higher and build again. Usually other people already lived higher up, so conflicts arose. Australian oral history still records compacts settling those.
After the rise finally leveled off 8000 years ago, 120 meters upslope and often hundreds of miles inland, the tales came unmoored from personal experience, and shifted gradually, over more millennia, to what we know today.
The whole Persian Gulf had filled in, and the South China Sea, a million square miles below what are now Indonesian islands ("Sundaland") between and around Australia / New Guinea ("Sahul"), off India and Japan, and between Ireland, Britannia and Europe ("Doggerland") were forever gone.
The oldest civilizations we know are uphill from a few of those places, and the oldest rock art we know was painted in the mountains offshore of what was, 40,000 years ago, Sundaland.
Possibly what triggered the beginnings of civilization was the continuous need to adapt to new circumstances, and habit of discovering a new way of life among strangers, generation after generation, over the millennia from 20,000 years ago to 8000 years ago, and then ending, leaving uninterrupted stability.
The Younger Dryas cataclysm 12,000 years ago that wiped out most big animals in North America and darkened the whole world for years after must have had some impact. Gobekli Tepe, the oldest documented temple, was built after.
But Gunung Padang on Java was in use before the water ever started to rise. There were no ice ages there.
[+] [-] i_like_waiting|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mazsa|3 years ago|reply
edit: No. This is the real word of mouth story:
"Some 50 generations later, on March 11, 2011, the Murohama tsunami warning tower — which was supposed to sound an alarm — was silent, toppled by the temblor. Still, without the benefit of an official warning system supported by modern science, the locals relied on the lesson that had been transmitted generation to generation for 1,000 years. “We all know the story about the two tsunami waves that collided at the shrine,” I was told.
Instead of taking refuge on the closest hill, the one with the shrine, they took the time to get to high ground farther away. From the safety of their vantage point they saw two tsunami waves colliding at the hill with the shrine, as they did long ago. Tragically, not everyone made the right choice; I was told of at least one person who died." https://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-xpm-2012-mar-11-la-oe-hol...
[+] [-] layer8|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spooky23|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toss1|3 years ago|reply
Our modern society has vastly better data, unimaginable completeness in scale, scope, detail, and accuracy.
Yet we are consistently making insanely worse decisions than the ones that returned 2000 years after the disaster.
That hundred-generation perspective makes the Native American's 'Consider the Seventh Generation' ethos seem myopic.
Worse yet is our society's obsession on quarterly profits and this month's competitive positioning — makes the attention span of a cloud of coked-up gnats seem positively sagacious
>>And of course, people returned to the shoreline eventually, as people in tsunami zones around the world inevitably do and apparently always have done. "Knowledge of these giant events and their consequences seems to wane over the passage of time, a common occurrence throughout the Pacific region . . . Most of the hazard assessments for coastal northern Chile are based on historical data that goes back just a few centuries, but the fault system in the region runs on a much larger temporal scale. Data about ancient quakes and tsunamis like the one that reshaped society here 3,800 years ago could offer a longer-term perspective to hazard planners."
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|3 years ago|reply
Unless the ecosystem was upset, which it was. Small camps that returned after the tsunami show a narrower diet, which is a red flag? I imagine folks didn't return because the food chain was disrupted, and they couldn't return.
[+] [-] mark336|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alophawen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hemreldop|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teh_klev|3 years ago|reply
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abm2996
[+] [-] dr_dshiv|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] concerned_4u|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robbedpeter|3 years ago|reply
North American megafauna disappeared at this time, which is a pretty serious crack in the assertion that overhunting by people caused their extinction.
Storms from this event left evidence of massive flooding in the years following the impact all over the world. I have no doubt that there are cultural myths that stem from not recent flood events but the younger Dryas impact is likely the source for the oldest myths, as the destruction seemed to be so profound that it would have wiped out any coastal settlements all over the world, leaving us with evidence of the survivors and nothing of what they lost. Various sites and clues around the world hint that even 12,000 years ago there may have been relatively advanced cultures that built in stone and wood, planted crops, likely had advanced shipbuilding, math, astronomy, and navigation.
There are petroglyphs at sites all over the world resembling stick figure men that seem to be inspired by massive plasma discharge patterns in the sky, and the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis provides an explanation for storms powerful enough to produce such patterns.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0800560105
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesi...
[+] [-] ncmncm|3 years ago|reply
It didn't happen all in one week, year, or millennium. But, starting 20,000 years ago, generation after generation found the village its grandparents built washed by waves, and had to move higher and build again. Usually other people already lived higher up, so conflicts arose. Australian oral history still records compacts settling those.
After the rise finally leveled off 8000 years ago, 120 meters upslope and often hundreds of miles inland, the tales came unmoored from personal experience, and shifted gradually, over more millennia, to what we know today.
The whole Persian Gulf had filled in, and the South China Sea, a million square miles below what are now Indonesian islands ("Sundaland") between and around Australia / New Guinea ("Sahul"), off India and Japan, and between Ireland, Britannia and Europe ("Doggerland") were forever gone.
The oldest civilizations we know are uphill from a few of those places, and the oldest rock art we know was painted in the mountains offshore of what was, 40,000 years ago, Sundaland.
Possibly what triggered the beginnings of civilization was the continuous need to adapt to new circumstances, and habit of discovering a new way of life among strangers, generation after generation, over the millennia from 20,000 years ago to 8000 years ago, and then ending, leaving uninterrupted stability.
The Younger Dryas cataclysm 12,000 years ago that wiped out most big animals in North America and darkened the whole world for years after must have had some impact. Gobekli Tepe, the oldest documented temple, was built after.
But Gunung Padang on Java was in use before the water ever started to rise. There were no ice ages there.