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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7830160" data-attributes="member: 4937">Yeah, but another one for which we aren't really sure if the mythology predates 1600. The 'ancient' Polynesians were some of the greatest explorers the world has ever known, but the settlements that they founded have surprisingly late dates. They seem to have discovered New Zealand sometime in the 14th century, and may have settled Hawa'ii as late as the 13th century (or as early as the 3rd, with somewhere in the middle being the conventional dates). They also seemed to have discovered South America right about the time the Vikings were discovering North America.As the article you link to notes, we aren't sure when the stories about the Menehune were invented. Did they exist in the folk lore going back to antiquity, or were they introduced sometime after Western contact in 1778? This is actually a point of significant interest, since it effects your entire model of human culture. If you model human culture as something like having a single source which radiates out from antiquity and gradually diverges, that gives you one picture of what human thought has been like through the ages. But the more interconnections that you have at later dates - the more one cultural groups ideas bleed off into another ones - the less certain you can be about everything that happens before. The situation is bad enough when you have a set of texts to look at, which you can hopefully date and which may or may not reflect the ecosystem of texts that existed at the time and which are likely copies of earlier texts but at least give you one data point. But it's almost hopeless when you are dealing with oral tradition.So, are dwarves of myth some common global inheritance with a great antiquity, or are they a meme that appeared relatively recently and just spread all over the place? In particular, were prior to 1800 were the Menuhune just some ethnic group or caste on the island and they were reinvented as conventional fantasy creatures along European lines sometime after that, or were the Hawaiians just another example among many of tellers of tales of little forest people? Is there some global ancient notion of creation passed along like a game of telephone to many of the worlds cultures, or all the similarities the resort of relatively late reconciliation with dominate global memes? Humans love to tell stories, so how much did different groups influence other groups and we just have no textual evidence of when the thinking and stories shifted or why.I guess I'm just saying if we get picky about it, it's going to be really hard to know just how ancient your ideas really are.  One of the reasons Greek is so influential is we actually have significant ancient texts.   Where as even for something like 'Spanish Folk Beliefs prior to 1600', I'm guessing there are going to be relatively few texts.  Probably sometime after 1600, as with French or German folk beliefs, someone decided to set them down on paper, and in the process probably worked a significant transformation on those works, leaving the original oral stories that were the inspiration something we can only guess on.   If we want to know what sort of folk stories the French or Germans were telling each other in say 1200, we're going to only have a very few examples.</blockquote>

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