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community weblog
Aboriginal ritual passed down over 12,000 years, cave find shows
Two slightly burnt, fat-covered sticks... ... discovered inside an Australian cave are evidence of a healing ritual that was passed down unchanged by more than 500 generations of Indigenous people over the last 12,000 years, according to new research.
posted by symbioid on Jul 02, 2024 at 10:30 AM
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It's cool that this ritual was able to be transmitted via oral tradition over such a long period of time.
But I'm also kind of surprised that the ritual did not apparently undergo refinement or replacement in that time. Not due to information decay, but because people are always trying to tweak things, try new things, and get a better result.
Would that suggest this ritual was particularly effective?
posted by keep_evolving at 11:32 AM
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...effective?
posted by kickingtheground at 11:39 AM
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Should I ask how they smeared the sticks in human fat, or is it better not to know?
posted by daveliepmann at 11:42 AM
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I couldn't help but find this, from a French scientist involved, amusing:
He lamented that the ancient animal paintings found in French caves would probably "never reveal their meaning" in a similar way.
If only the French had continued hunting the mighty aurochs up until the present day!
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 11:55 AM
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wombat details are interesting [pdf, Nature], though i understand why they might not be highlighted elsewhere...
posted by HearHere at 12:44 PM
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Would that suggest this ritual was particularly effective?
Given the description of the ritual it's hard to see how it was effective at anything except maybe as a placebo.
In the notes, Howitt describes in the late 1880s the rituals of Gunaikurnai medicine men and women called "mulla-mullung".
One ritual involved tying something that belonged to a sick person to the end of a throwing stick smeared in human or kangaroo fat. The stick was thrust into the ground before a small fire was lit underneath.
"The mulla-mullung would then chant the name of the sick person, and once the stick fell, the charm was complete," a Monash University statement said.
posted by Reverend John at 12:45 PM
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Also, it's possible that the tools for the ritual were the same, but that's not necessarily the whole ritual. It's still impressive that even part of the ritual remains.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 12:50 PM
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To guess, if you are conducting a ritual of any real length with some prep work, the person is probably receiving additional care and attention. At a minimum water, food, shelter, and rest?
posted by Slackermagee at 1:02 PM
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Also, it's possible that the tools for the ritual were the same, but that's not necessarily the whole ritual. It's still impressive that even part of the ritual remains.
Technically it's not even clear whatever purposes the tools served were the same as the purposes they were used for later - it's an assumption, though not a surprising one.
This is really interesting regardless. The research paper wasn't gated for me and has a lot more details, including that the cave showed evidence of ritual use for a period of 23,000 years and that the 1800s rituals weren't just for healing (they were also for malicious magic...)
To guess, if you are conducting a ritual of any real length with some prep work, the person is probably receiving additional care and attention. At a minimum water, food, shelter, and rest?
According to the (short snippets of) description in the paper, the person the magic was supposed to affect wasn't or didn't need to be present (that was what the "article belonging to the intended victim" was for). The caves were apparently used only for ritual - no meal remnants or other evidence of habitation was found.
posted by trig at 1:59 PM
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Also
By law in Victoria, Australia, Indigenous cultural materials (including archaeological materials) remain the property of the Aboriginal Traditional Owners. This is the case with all the materials reported here. The samples do not have accession numbers and will be returned to the GunaiKurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation, who will in due course decide how and where to store or display the materials.
posted by trig at 2:05 PM
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... people are always trying to tweak things, try new things, and get a better result.
posted by keep_evolving
Well, with your user name, you'd probably think that!
Seriously, my understanding is that people with traditional oral histories actually didn't tweak things. Even today rituals are patterned formal acts of custom, done for certain reasons, with an expected outcome, and things have to be 'just so' to be effective. Not that there probably wasn't some drift due to misremembering or other errors of passing things on verbally, but overall, staying the same. I would think that an important 'medical procedure' would be subject to memorization and practice to assure a novice gets things right. Otherwise, what's to stop any shaman-come-lately happening along? The article also mentions from the get-go that it's a ritual 'passed down unchanged' so apparently immediately recognizable by current tribal members.
Can anyone knowledgeable comment on this?
Didn't our modern penchant for tweaking things really come about along with the definition of the scientific method?
posted by BlueHorse at 3:14 PM
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Otherwise, what's to stop any shaman-come-lately happening along?
But someone had to create the ritual. Or, more likely, it evolved over time with tweaks from many someones until at some point it was considered too sacred to keep changing. And, as noted above, the evidence can't support the "passed down unchanged" statement because we only have the physical objects and traces but no way of knowing how they were actually used. We can only say that the physical objects and the cave appear to be the same objects and place with the same physical traces as the current rituals use.
posted by star gentle uterus at 6:06 PM
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Didn't our modern penchant for tweaking things really come about along with the definition of the scientific method?
On a larger level no - think how much religion, social organization, economic organization, technology, philosophy, art, fashion, music, literature styles, and so on changed over the period of recorded history before the scientific method or the European enlightenment, even if the rate of change may have accelerated since then.
But it's interesting to think about what drove those changes: how much of it was the human instinct to experiment and tweak and differentiate yourself, and how much followed historical events and clashes and cultural exchanges between different groups, where people not only learn new ways to do things but adapt them to be a better fit for their group, culture, or circumstances, or in order to appropriate them and claim ownership, or to prove superiority, or to differentiate themselves from other groups or cultures, and so on.
And how large does a culture need to be to support any experimentation, does it correlate with population density and the existence of urban centers or not, is agriculture or a certain level of physical/economic comfort required? Can frequent innovation happen in more collectivist cultures or does it require a culture where the names of individual contributors are passed down, or where individual leaders or their followers may want to differentiate themselves or build up their glory (and if so, what would cause cultures to be more individualist or collectivist)? And so on.
In the case of ritual and beliefs, though, especially with respect to things like superstition (as opposed to origin stories and so on) and medical practices, my (totally unfounded) feeling is that those tend to be more conservative than other things, maybe partly because of a fear of "messing around and finding out", maybe because of strong cultural pressure to perform rituals in ways accepted and expected by their audience, maybe because many of these practices were treated as mysteries to be taught and overseen in a way that stressed the necessity of exact adherence. But that's just a guess based on intuition, and those have a spotty track record overall.
posted by trig at 10:51 PM
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Just the the length of Aboriginal Culture is mind-blowing! What in second place? China? Egypt (not sure about this given the drastic change with Islam)? The San? Anecdotally I've seen 55k years? How is that possible given.... humanity. Should something untoward happen to humanity I'd put my money on this culture being the one to survive.
I found the Wengrow/Graber book the Dawn of Everything pretty fascinating on its speculation of humanity's 'pre-history' and its experiments in culture, society and 'governing'. https://www.powells.com/book/dawn-of-everything-a-new-history-of-humanity-9781250858801.
posted by WatTylerJr at 8:47 AM
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NO BOWL! STICK! STICK!
posted by xtian at 10:54 AM
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