Two recent archaeological discoveries have, I think, added more support for my crazy idea from 2018: That Yeti stories could be old ancestral memories of the mixing between Modern and Denisovans humans on Tibetan plateau. I talked about this crazy idea in my post "Yeti"...
Here's the jist:
In 2010 geneticists discovered that Tibetans have several genes that help them use smaller amounts of oxygen efficiently, allowing them to deliver enough of it to their limbs while exercising at high altitude...
Most notable is a version of a gene called EPAS1, which regulates the body’s production of hemoglobin. These genes are not found in any other human population outside of Tibetan plateau...
Since this gene was discovered the scientists wandered where it came from. And then in 2014, while looking through the genes found in Denisovans DNA, they spotted EPAS1...
The mystery was solved. The "superathlete" gene, which helps Sherpas and other Tibetans breathe easily at high altitudes was inherited from Denisovans, one of the archaic human species now extinct...
But there was a problem. It was commonly accepted (at the time when I wrote this post) that Denisovans went extinct soon after they mated with the ancestors of Europeans and Asians about 40,000 years ago...
So the only time when Tibetans could have acquired EPAS1 gene is at that time. But it was also commonly accepted at the time of the discovery of that gene that the Tibetan plateau has only been inhabited by humans for around 15,000 years...
Now considering that Tibetan plateau population is the only one in the world which possesses the EPAS1 gene, it is most likely that they acquired it on the Tibetan plateau...
Which means that either Denisovans survived on the Tibetan plateau until 14,000 years ago (35,000 years longer then anywhere else in the world), or that modern humans arrived to Tibetan plateau much much earlier than originally thought...
And then in 2018, the Nwya Devu Paleolithic site was discovered, and it confirmed that human ancestors arrived on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau at elevations approaching 5,000 meters above sea level around 30,000-40,000 years ago...
Which is what prompted me to write my Yeti article...
And this year, a newly discovered Denisovan remains in the Baishiya Karst Cave confirm that Denisovans indeed were still present on the Tibetan plateau between 48,000 to 32,000 years ago. The findings were published in Nature article "Middle and Late Pleistocene Denisovan subsistence at Baishiya Karst Cave"
So it turns out that modern humans did actually arrive to Tibet right on time to first intermix with Denisovans, acquiring the high altitude gene and then exterminate them...
Which is what Tibetan ancestral myths and the legends about Yeti might actually be talking about, as they both talk about interbreeding between humans and "hairy mountain creatures". Which would mean that these legends could be between 30,000 and 40,000 years old...
That ancestral myths and legends in isolated populations can indeed survive for a very very long time, can be seen from the legends about the Indonesian island of Flores about Ebu Gogo...
These creatures were said to sneak into human camps to steal children to try to cook and eat them. They were described as very small with broad faces, flat noses, and wide mouths...
Exactly like the now extinct hominid species labeled Homo Floresiensis, which lived on the island of Flores until humans arrived there around 50,000 years ago, and most likely exterminated them after a period of coexistence...
The memory of the coexistence of these two human species on the island of Flores survived in the ancestral myths about Ebu Gogo...Again among the isolated (this time island) population...
I already talked about another isolated population which also preserved ancient memories as ancestral myths over similarly ridiculous time periods in my post "Dreamtime" about Aboriginal dreamtime stories...
Some Australian Aboriginal "dreamtime" stories, passed orally from generation to generation, could actually be over 40,000 years ago...
This post was from 2016. Again, most people just shook their heads and said that no story can survive that long...
But this year's discovery of a 12,000 years old ritual burial in Australia, which was performed in exactly the same way local Aboriginal people still buried their dead in the 19th century, confirms that rituals can survive unchanged for 12,000 years.
Now rituals are practical manifestations of beliefs, myths, which means that this is a proof that the ancestral myths survived unchanged in this isolated population for at least 12,000 years...
I already wrote that belief systems, of which rituals are a practical manifestation, can survive for a very long time in my post "Third death" about the Cuvash "third death" ritual burials which have not changed for past 4000+ years, which are performed "when two people from the same family suddenly die one after another"...And why archaeologists should study folklore of their archaeological site area...
I know 4000 years is "not that long" (it's actually fu*king long) compared to 12,000 years, but it shows that this survival of a rituals over vast time span is not a freak isolated case...
Are there any other legends and rituals that are this old? Definitely...This is my favourite:
How old are legends about "the hunt for the firebird"? Well they could predate the time when people learned how to make fire...Which is an awful long time...Because before people knew how to make it, fire descended from the sky and had to be found and caught...
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