Posted: Oct 04, 2016 8:13 pm
Animavore wrote:
Language doesn't fossilise, but the author also used rock art, which can be dated.
That's a kind of writing, isn't it? Even if it isn't 'writing', it's an inscription, and you have to interpret it. There is the danger of modern people interpreting ancient inscriptions to suit their own agendas. But I guess I already said that, didn't I?
I know that people try to treat that kind of stuff as evidence of particular ideas, but it's just evidence that somebody scribbled on a wall, unless you really know how to get inside the head of somebody who lived forty thousand (or whatever) years ago. The pretense that people can get inside the heads of ancient scribblers is written all over the Historical Jesus threads.
Did you want to go back to the drawing board of 'human nature to do that'? One thing is not too much of a stretch, and it is that the desire to make representations of stuff we experience is as old as those paintings. You can say that's what myths are, too, but you don't get to dress it up in the hoo-hah agenda of "humankind's common spiritual journey". What we experience, we experience with our eyes and ears and so on, and yes, people embellish that. We could call it 'storytelling', but experience is all that people have to embellish into stories. Did you want to make a fancy shirt out of 'storytelling'?