Have you ever played the telephone game? Things change as people retell a story. Science is based on information directly from the source. It has to be verifiable. It’s ok to use the stories to learn about a culture and their history, but they aren’t suitable for science.
Yeah but you can gleam certain real details by listening to all the stories.
All the stories are going to be unique and different but if they share certain details repeatedly then you can generally assume those details as being actual events rather than just mythology.
Like if every story you hear talks about a mountain breaking and breathing fire you can logically assume there was a volcanic eruption. If every story talks about the earth splitting apart and swallowing buildings whole you can logically assume there was an earthquake.
People didn’t always know what certain natural disasters were or why they happened so they would create stories to explain them. Sometimes those stories are simply explained in such a way that a modern person couldn’t possibly understand the meaning behind them.
Like sacrificing someone to a volcano to appease the fire god. The fire god is the volcano itself and they’re just trying to keep it from erupting and killing them all.
There are a number of examples of oral traditions including description of events a few hundred years prior. Further than that, and stuff tends to be garbled enough that it’s tough to tell whether people are talking about the same event
Have you ever played the telephone game? Things change as people retell a story. Science is based on information directly from the source. It has to be verifiable. It’s ok to use the stories to learn about a culture and their history, but they aren’t suitable for science.
Yeah but you can gleam certain real details by listening to all the stories.
All the stories are going to be unique and different but if they share certain details repeatedly then you can generally assume those details as being actual events rather than just mythology.
Like if every story you hear talks about a mountain breaking and breathing fire you can logically assume there was a volcanic eruption. If every story talks about the earth splitting apart and swallowing buildings whole you can logically assume there was an earthquake.
People didn’t always know what certain natural disasters were or why they happened so they would create stories to explain them. Sometimes those stories are simply explained in such a way that a modern person couldn’t possibly understand the meaning behind them.
Like sacrificing someone to a volcano to appease the fire god. The fire god is the volcano itself and they’re just trying to keep it from erupting and killing them all.
There are a number of examples of oral traditions including description of events a few hundred years prior. Further than that, and stuff tends to be garbled enough that it’s tough to tell whether people are talking about the same event