Discussion Main / OlderThanDirt

"Older than dirt" is a stock phrase meaning something is very old, though.

Johannes Gutenberg didn't invent the printing press either - the description for The Oldest Ones in the Book notes this, and agrees with me. He was certainly very influential for the printing press.

It's not comparable to that. Using flood myths as proof for the Biblical Deluge is incorrect because it's saying that since there were floods in a lot of places, that proves there was a single worldwide flood. Floods simply happen around the world, not related to each other.

However, those particular examples of Aboriginal folkore depict things that are specific to Australia. For example, it was proven by the geological proved that a land bridge existed thousands of years ago in a specific area, and Aboriginals have stories about how that exact region was once covered by land and was later flooded to become what it is now. Another example is how a palm tree ended up in Central Australia, while the species it diverged from lives far away to the north. DNA testing proves that it only became genetically distinct during a time when humans lived there, and Aboriginals recorded a story about 'gods from the north' who brought the seeds.

It's just a recurring joke on the wiki.

My response:

You continue to be uncivil and brusque.

It appears to me that you assume that the Celtic myths, in the exact form and with the exact same tropes and values recorded in the medieval Hijacked by Jesus texts, existed word-for-word before 509 BCE. Nevermind that we don't even know any recognizably Celtic oral stories existed back then, since no written source from that period had recorded anything of the sort, let alone the specific tropes from the surviving medieval versions. This kind of assumption is exactly what the page description explicitly warns against. It is an assumption that everything oral is automatically older than the dawn of all writing. Nobody has a clue what was in unwritten oral stories. As the description of the page specifies, early folklorists assumed that oral stories never ever change until after they're written down, but this assumption is demonstrably false. Science Marches On and History Marches On.

We KNOW that oral stories change continually, and that written stories also change every time somebody writes a new version. Claiming that they never ever change is demonstrably false, and the page definition stated explicitly that it is false before I Got Known. Not being Wikipedia doesn't mean actual falsehoods, known to be false, should be posted on T Vtropes and declared to be historical facts.

Examples Are Not Arguable. Any trope on the entire wiki "might" be older than 509 BCE. That does not mean that X Just X should be on that index with no applicable example.

I realize that no POV means the wiki can't, for example, take a side in creationism vs. evolution. But if these assumptions are to be published on the wiki they should not be labeled as historical fact. This index, as currently defined, makes a historical claim about the date of invention of specific artistic concepts.

I started the cleanup because the demonstrably false historical statements bothered me hugely. I'm not disputing the Comet of Doom example you added or demanding a scientific paper proving it exists. I didn't add it before because I merely did not know about it... which doesn't make me a pedantic jerk. But I am opposed to putting falsehoods and/or "arguable" assumptions on this wiki and declaring them to be historical facts.

Celtic and Norse myths are not Older Than Dirt. This was stated explicitly by the page description/definition before I Got Known, and the reason was explicitly because they were not written down before 500 BCE. If you disagree with the current page description, (which I did not write), please take it to the Trope Repair Shop thread for this index.

If you dispute that Examples Are Not Arguable, this is not the place to discuss that either.

I will continue to maintain this page according to the current description (which I did not write) until a consensus is reached on the TRS to redefine the index. I will continue to discuss it only on that thread.

I agree with Arcades Sabboth.

Part of the problem with “Celtic Mythology” is that “Celtic” is a rather vague term. The page is almost exclusively about two things: Irish mythology and Welsh mythology. Which is no wonder because there is almost nothing else we have of Celtic mythologies, and both of these are definitely “only” Older Than Print.

It’s true that the rule is "we don’t need sources" on this wiki. But my opinion is that it’s justified to moderately deviate from this guideline on the “Older Than X” pages. If these indices are supposed to have any value, an entry should bother to point out a source and (if needed) an explanation. Otherwise, these indices (especially Older Than Dirt) will be flooded with inflationary assertions till this page loses all meaning, and nobody will care to read it. The source where something is found first is the interesting thing here, and the reason to have these pages.

It doesn't have to be a scientific source, or a scientific citation, but a source.

I don’t think it is much of a problem on these pages, but while there is no “No POV” rule, we have a Rule Of Cautious Editing Judgment.

Its still nitpickery. In your analysis in the TRS thread, you specifically discount anything that cannot be "proven" to be older than your arbitrary cutoff, despite the fact that common sense says that it has to be. Your repeated statement that the oral traditions were not written down by X Cutoff is a perfect example of what I mean... the traditions were oral prior to that point. Do you know how much older? No... neither do I... but its probably safe to say that they weren't suddenly thought up the day they were written down, as you seem to be implying.

You are being pedantic. You're demanding sources for things you don't agree with, simple as that.

And if simply disagreeing with you is all that need happen to be considered uncivil, then I suppose I can live with that.

My thoughts on these arguments:

• Common sense does not categorically say that anything has to be older than its oldest surviving version. Sometimes, authors make up new things from scratch, without a pre-existing Oral Tradition to draw on. Otherwise, we would have no new stories at all.
• If you have good cause to believe (or proof) there was an Oral Tradition prior to the work that is your source, you should make an argument that the trope you talk about was in the Oral Tradition before it was in the written source. That the Oral Tradition was exactly the same as the written version is not very likely in most cases. If there is such an argument (not mere speculation), then I’m fine with it.
• There’s nothing wrong with demanding sources. Sabboth would be hypocritical if he only demanded sources for things he doesn’t agree with while not doing the same for the things he agrees with; but as far as I can see, he doesn’t do anything like that.

But maybe we can relax this discussion by focusing more on specific cases than on the general "problem of Oral Tradition"?

It seems the trope that caused this dispute was Comet of Doom, currently commented with "Ten thousand year old Australian aboriginal cave paintings." I made a google search on comets and Aborigines and found this interesting (and quite recent) paper.

It also discusses Aboriginal rock carvings, concluding right at the bottom of page 9: “We are currently looking into the possibility that these engravings represent comets, but any connection at present is simply speculation.” And a little below at the end of the first paragraph on page 10: “However, we remain puzzled by the fact that nearly all accounts are from colonial times, with few accounts in the recorded oral tradition and no apparent trace of comets in in pre-colonial Aboriginal art.”

In other words, it’s not accepted fact that any aboriginal cave paintings/rock carvings represent comets. And all the described cases when Aborigines saw comets as portents of doom date from the 19th and 20th century.

The earliest documents interpreting comets as portents of doom seem to be ancient Chinese bone inscriptions that are alluded to in the paper and also mentioned in the wikipedia article on comets. I am going to update the index accordingly.

You are right. All the "Older Than X" pages need a clean-up. I think a good idea would be to make a thread for this task on the 'Special Efforts' forum.

Well I gave it a start, but there's a lot of Norse and Celtic myth to move around. And I don't know how to change which Older Than trope shows up on the index ticker on the bottom of a trope or source page.

Well I'm not staying up extra-late just to do that. How can these time-zone rules on the forum work for anyone not living in California, the Pacific islands, or Japan?

Sorry, I did not look here recently. The index tickers should be no problem: They will update automatically, as soon as you save your edits on the index page. For every bulletpoint on the index page, the first link after the bulletpoint gets indexed.

Older Than Feudalism and Older Than Dirt are fighting for custody over most of the Old Testament. Since each page specifies which parts of The Bible belong to it, this should be possible to sort out.

Well I started a thread on Special Efforts. No responses yet, but I don't know how fast these things move on the fora.

So many links coming into this index from trope pages are just "this trope is really old!" instead of "this trope predates the Roman Republic" that I think renaming it to something less vague could help reduce the abuse. The original name could redirect to Oldest Ones in the Book.