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French Scholar Claims Computer Analysis Can Recover Paleolithic Mythology

10/2/2016

24 Comments

 
I could have swornI talked before about French scholar Julien d’Huy’s claim that a computer program can prove that world mythology can be traced back to a single set of Paleolithic myths. But it turns out that I was mistaken. I actually covered the incredibly similar work of Jamie Tehrani of Durham University and Sara Graca Da Silva of Lisbon’s New University, who applied a computer program to try to use a linguistic analysis to determine the origins of myths and legends. D’Huy, who has followed a similar research program since 2012 and who proudly uses the same methodology, has a new article in Scientific American alleging that he can trace world mythology back to the Stone Age. 
I’m not buying it. At least not in total.
 
Now that’s not to say that myths and legends don’t have deep origins. Walter Burkert suggested that the story of Heracles might date back to the Stone Age, and we know that many myths in the Indo-European family must have derived from a common source before the diversification of Indo-European languages around 4500 BCE. I know that I should be more open to d’Huy’s claims, but the weaknesses in his argument jumped out at me before he had gotten halfway through his argument.
 
Nevertheless, let us try to parse out what d’Huy has done and why it probably doesn’t prove what he said it does.

Note: My objections are based on the information presented in the Scientific American article. Perhaps in some of d’Huy’s other published work, unread by me, he provides answers to these questions. I do not have immediate access to all of it to find out.
 
D’Huy’s methodology is to take a myth and break it down into its component parts. He then fed different versions of stories from around the world (or, more accurately, what look like different versions of the same story) into a computer, which calculated the degree of similarity between versions based on the component parts, or mythemes, present in each. By comparing the mythemes present in each version, d’Huy could therefore create a phylogenic tree showing the relationship of stories to one another. This, in turn, allowed him to calculate the date at which versions diverged by making some rather generous assumptions about rates and reasons for change, ultimately calculating that mythology originated in Africa in the Paleolithic period. He is using evolutionary biology to study folklore.
 
“My phylogenetic studies make use of the extra rigor of statistical and computer-modeling techniques from biology to elucidate how and why myths and folktales evolve,” he writes.
 
In essence, this method is no different than what the early comparative mythologists like Edwin Sidney Hartland and Andrew Lang did. Hartland, for example, found versions of what he thought were elements of the Perseus myth located everywhere on Earth and therefore concluded that they must date back to primal times. Lang thought that a Polynesian myth had a shocking similarity to the Greek myth of the Argonauts and therefore concluded that a lost group of mariners had spread the story around the world. A still earlier generation thought that the presence of flood myths around the world proved that the Noachian deluge really happened and that all accounts therefore derived from those of the three sons of Noah. On the other hand, such comparative mythology can produce important results, as when it identified family relationships among the Indo-European myths. D’Huy’s methodology may be computerized, but it is different only in degree, not in kind. Indeed, he refers to his studies as the “nouvelle mythologie comparée,” or “new comparative mythology.”
 
D’Huy’s best example is probably the story he rather grandiosely calls the “Cosmic Hunt.” It is based on the Greek myth of Callisto. Here is how Apollodorus gives the story in his Library 3.8.2:
But Eumelus and some others say that Lycaon had also a daughter Callisto; though Hesiod says she was one of the nymphs, Asius that she was a daughter of Nycteus, and Pherecydes that she was a daughter of Ceteus. She was a companion of Artemis in the chase, wore the same garb, and swore to her to remain a maid. Now Zeus loved her and, having assumed the likeness, as some say, of Artemis, or, as others say, of Apollo, he shared her bed against her will, and wishing to escape the notice of Hera, he turned her into a bear. But Hera persuaded Artemis to shoot her down as a wild beast. Some say, however, that Artemis shot her down because she did not keep her maidenhood. When Callisto perished, Zeus snatched the babe, named it Arcas, and gave it to Maia to bring up in Arcadia; and Callisto he turned into a star and called it the Bear. (trans. James Frazer)
D’Huy claims that the story can be found in close parallel around the world, and he cites a Native American story from the Iroquois that the same constellation, the Big Dipper, formed when three giant hunters chased and wounded a bear, whose blood spread on the autumn leaves as he climbed a mountain and jumped into the sky. The hunters followed. The three hunters became the three stars of the Big Dipper’s “handle,” and the bear became the four stars of the “dipper,” likely because the four bright stars recall the four paws of the bear. Thus, the hunters forever continue the chase.
 
Early folklorists were struck that the Greeks (but only a few other Europeans before the Middle Ages) and some Native Americans (the Zuni among them) identified the Big Dipper as a bear. And yet many more groups did not: The Egyptians thought it a thigh, the Arabs a coffin, the Germans and some Celts a wagon, etc. But enough thought it a bear that it is an interesting comparison. D’Huy’s analysis concluded that if the Greeks and Iroquois both thought it a bear, then the story must have emerged before both groups separated, which is to say, more than 15,000 years ago.
 
Other versions don’t have hunters, or feature other animals, or even other constellations.
 
To support this conclusion, he boils down the myth to a group of mythemes: “a man or an animal pursues or kills one or more animals, and the creatures are changed into constellations.” Not ever version will possess all of these, but they are the abstract of the story. Yet surely the tale has been so simplified as to be meaningless. Every culture that recognizes constellations has some sort of myth for how they got there. Given the widespread presence of hunting in human culture, it seems ridiculous to suggest that there is no chance for two cultures to have independently struck upon so simple a story. Indeed, the Greeks themselves have another myth that fits the same criteria. Orion the hunter pursued Scorpius the scorpion, and Zeus placed them both among the stars. This myth meets all the same criteria D’Huy laid out in the article. 
Picture
So-called "well scene" at Lascaux.
Indeed, when we drill down into the 93 specific mythemes D’Huy uses (sample: the animal is “big,” the animal is “alive”), the only ones that are significant and widespread are the simplest and most obvious; the other traits are quite clearly arranged into culturally specific groupings. Nevertheless, he is committed enough to this idea that he looks at the Lascaux Caves and interprets the famous “well scene,” featuring a bison and a bird-beaked humanoid above what seems to be an arrow or spear, as this Cosmic Hunt. He even reads the black marks beneath the bison as part of the Iroquois myth! “The black stains on the ground under the bison suggest the bloodstained autumnal leaves of the hunted animal.” No, they really, really don’t. That isn’t even part of the story except in eastern North America, and nor would it be in Paleolithic Europe. European fall foliage doesn’t turn as red as it does here in the northeastern U.S.
 
This problem is even more obvious in his second example, the tale of Pygmalion. Most of us know the story of the sculptor who falls in love with his sculpture, which comes to life for him. D’Huy finds versions of the “living doll” myth around the world, and he similarly concludes that they are Paleolithic in origin. But surely any culture where sculpture was an art form must have had individuals who wondered what would happen should a realistic artwork come to life?
 
D’Huy assumes that similarity equals connection, but he provides no way to falsify this to distinguish coincidence or convergent evolution from actual connection. To put it in his favored evolutionary terms, he does not distinguish between analogy and homology.
 
This does not even begin to get into the problems of contamination, cross-pollination, and other ways that myths influenced one another in historic times. This is to say, when Europeans colonized the Americas, they brought their stories with them, and the traces of those European tales folded into Native American oral traditions (best seen in Noah’s Ark stories taken into Native mythology) quite clearly do not imply that Native Americans had those European tales in the Stone Age. Similarly, in Italy in the nineteenth century there were old women telling a folktale that is very clearly the Classical story of Perseus under a different name. Does that mean that Italians and Greeks both inherited the story from an earlier source? No, of course not. The Italian version is a derivative of Renaissance retellings of Classical myth. Would his computer modeling be able to distinguish between archaic Roman myths and the remodeled versions they took on from Greece?
 
There is a problem in that d’Huy is inputting into his model only those stories that he prejudges as to be part of his scheme. This means that there is a potential for his judgment of what stories to analyze to bias the results by selecting only those versions of stories that most closely conform to the model he wants to find. The Callisto story, for example, has more than a dozen variants in the Greek and Latin writers. Forgive me for copying the list from James Frazer rather than trying to look it all up myself: “Paus. 1.25.1; Paus. 8.3.6ff.; Eratosthenes, Cat. 1; Libanius, in Westermann's Mythographi Graeci, Appendix Narrationum, 34, p. 374; Tzetzes, Scholiast on Lycophron 481; Hyginus, Fab. 155, 176, and 177; Ov. Met. 2.409-507; Serv. Verg. G. 1.138; Lactantius Placidus on Statius, Theb. iii.685; Scholia in Caesaris Germanici Aratea, p. 381, ed. F. Eyssenhardt (in his edition of Martianus Capella); Scriptores rerum mythicarum Latini, ed. Bode, i. p. 5; First Vatican Mythographer 17; vol. ii. p. 94, Second Vatican Mythographer 58.” How do you pick which version to declare official? How much more complex is it to do so when all that survives are European missionaries’ culturally biased accounts of non-Western stories?
 
Yet another problem is the issue of mythemes. By breaking the stories he explores down into very simple scenarios and situations, D’Huy accidentally exposes the weakness of his argument: How can we distinguish between the movement of myths and the movement of mythemes? I have no doubt that Paleolithic people had myths and legends, and these could have included elements—“strong hero,” “angry monster,” “evil snake,” etc.—that traveled with the people who migrated out of Africa. But how do we distinguish between a myth that moved wholesale and one that was reconstructed out of very simple mythemes that are universally shared? For example, “hero hunter,” “big animal,” and “animal in sky” are simple elements that might could be recombined without the Callisto story going with them.
 
It did not surprise me to see that d’Huy similarly worked himself back to simplistic (but not universal) ideas that he also considers Paleolithic in origin: the sun as a “big mammal” and women as keepers of sacred knowledge.
 
D’Huy, though, is so confident in his methodology that he believes—get this!—that he can reconstruct early Homo sapiens’ interactions with other hominid species from his computer analysis!
Eventually I hope to go back even further in time and identify mythical stories that may shed light on interactions during the Paleolithic period between early H. sapiens and human species that went extinct. Evolutionary biologists have identified possible interbreeding with Neandertals, Denisovans and perhaps other archaic humans. Material exchanges, as well as language and mythological borrowings, may have also occurred.
This is less than a stone’s throw away from the common fringe idea that Bigfoot is a “racial memory” of Neanderthals or Gigantopithecus or whatever, or the weird idea that the Nephilim were memories of Neanderthals mating with anatomically modern humans.
 
Given how stories change almost beyond recognition even over a few generations, it seems extremely difficult to imagine that d’Huy’s method will uncover genuine Neanderthal encounters. Consider, for example, another piece of the Perseus story: In the 1300s, the author writing as Sir John Mandeville recorded the bizarre tale that was all that remained of the once widespread story of how Perseus rescued the princess Andromeda from where she had been chained to a rock at Joppa for a sea monster to swallow: “And yet there sheweth in the rock, there as the iron chains were fastened, that Andromeda, a great giant, was bounden with, and put in prison before Noah’s flood, of the which giant, is a rib of his side that is forty foot long” (Chapter 5). Mandeville’s Andromeda was a male, and a Nephilim-Watcher bound beneath the Earth (as in 1 Enoch), and had been killed. The only element of the story that remained the same was binding in iron chains. Given how easily mythemes can recombine at will—and Mandeville’s tale is a perfect example of Nephilim mythemes recombining promiscuously—how could we possibly expect to discover stories unchanged from Neanderthal times? How could we distinguish between a genuine Paleolithic myth and one that simply recycled in unrecognizable form some mythemes that might have been Paleolithic?
24 Comments
Time Machine
10/2/2016 08:49:23 am

None of these scholars (or alleged scholars) know anything about the origin of myth. Ethnobotanists and anthropologists who study shamanism, however, may have a better idea.

Reply
David Bradbury
10/2/2016 09:18:33 am

What is the origin of urban myth?

Reply
Time Machine
10/2/2016 09:43:59 am

There's a whole genre of historians who reject the world of ethnobotany and shamanism. Look on Amazon.

Jonathan Feinstein
10/2/2016 02:01:32 pm

I've been out of the field since I left grad school, but let's see...

That some, perhaps many, myths and legends might date back to a known or even reasonably hypothesized common culture from which related cultures developed (let's say Indo-European, that being the one most commonly bandied about) is not unreasonable so far as that goes.

However, as Jason said above, we cannot discount the possibility that some themes are the sort that might come up in any culture. Using Pygmalion as an example. I think he is right that any culture with images of people might develop stories in which one of those images comes to life, whether that image is a statue, a painting or just a scratch in the sand.

One hypothesis I see taken up from time to time is that the animal paintings in caves like Lascaux might have been painted to symbolize real animals. Having the symbol become the reality in a story is not hard to imagine, but that does NOT mean that Galatea was originally a cow even if the name Galatea is derived from "Milk-white". Certainly there is no way to prove such a thing. no matter how you program your computer.

The plain fact as I see it is that once you get back before the earliest writing any changes to a myth are going to be pure conjecture. You can study the material culture of such pre-literate cultures but you cannot know for certain what their language and the stories they told in it were.

Also saying "Paleolithic" is as nonspecific as you can get sinceit started roughly 2.6 million years ago (depending on whose chronology you accept) and ended about 10,000 years ago. I imagine a lot of common cultural elements started sometime during that period, but to track the ages of a story simply based on the changes observed in historic times is conjecturing without any proof to back up your hypothesis.

You might as well say that the story of Superman meeting Batman for the first time is just a modern rendition of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, therefore the story itself goes back to 50,000 BP. Without a written record, which we can never have, there is no way to prove it.

Reply
Tom
10/2/2016 10:11:44 am

We seem to be slipping into the realm of Dr. Jung's archetypes and the old racial memory fiction.

Reply
Time Machine
10/2/2016 12:02:31 pm

Jung was, is, and always will be a theorist.
The human personality is not subject to superficiality and be pigeon-holed.

Reply
Duke of URL
10/2/2016 12:14:44 pm

The biggest flaw I see in that theory is D'Huy seems to think that only one man ever can have an idea. So, ALL bear-in-the-sky stories have to originate with Patient Zero...

Reply
TheBigMike
10/2/2016 06:38:33 pm

It's kind of like looking for Patient Zero in a series of unrelated broken limbs. They do have some commonalities, limbs, broken bones, types of fractures, blunt trauma, force, etc. Yet just because you can compare many different breaks does not mean that all broken bones come from the same source.

Reply
Alex C
10/2/2016 12:22:01 pm

For me, the Kumarbi cycle, with its clear (not necessarily direct) precedence to Hesiod and mixture of Sumerian and Hurrian deities pretty much falsifies the concept, or at least any importance to, language family centred ur mythologies.

The similarity focused side of comparative mythology is in the end pretty inane. If you're going to study diverse cultures, it should be the differences of interpretation and use of archetypes that reveal how their cultures actually function. Even if you could re-create an ur-mythology (and there are so many ways to do so each one is basically fantasy) it would be a minor curiosity.

Reply
Tom
10/2/2016 03:22:39 pm

Given the obvious proliferation of myths, the millennia since the stone age and the intermingling of peoples it would be astonishing if various vague story themes were not at times widely shared, forgotten, revised and then finally written down as myths but wildly different from their origins, all merely by coincidence

Reply
Time Machine
10/2/2016 04:38:09 pm

>>>merely by coincidence

No "coincidence"

Reply
Time Machine
10/2/2016 04:41:36 pm

I am the world's greatest archaeologist, ethnobotanist, anthropologist, Biblical Expert.

None of the others on this planet have got a clue.

David Bradbury
10/3/2016 08:35:29 am

I am what I am, and what I am needs no excuses

El Cid
10/2/2016 04:47:34 pm

Do many stories with potentially ancient roots specifically reference the days before metal use?

The reference to iron chains for example in the above story.

Reply
Jonathan Feinstein
10/3/2016 05:02:52 am

I suppose a Neolithic version might have featured stout ropes instead of iron chains, or the giant might have been bound by an oath or a spell, or that feature might not have existed in an earlier version.

I still don't buy the basic premise that all or even many of these stories go back to the Paleolithic and that if they do they can be traced using computer analysis, but story-tellers like to embellish (I've actually heard stories that I was originally part of get embellished out of all recognition and with an entirely different cast of characters because the person telling the story thought it would sound better with extra details and people the listeners knew) and will add details that make the stories sound better or, in many cases, more believable. That varies from one culture (or even one audience) to the next.

Reply
Chris Lovegrove
10/2/2016 06:33:28 pm

Jason, out of interest does d'Huy's mention the software used for analysis?

Reply
Shane Sullivan
10/2/2016 06:40:28 pm

"This does not even begin to get into the problems of contamination, cross-pollination, and other ways that myths influenced one another in historic times. "

"But how do we distinguish between a myth that moved wholesale and one that was reconstructed out of very simple mythemes that are universally shared? For example, “hero hunter,” “big animal,” and “animal in sky” are simple elements that might could be recombined without the Callisto story going with them."

I have an example that either covers one or both of these.

Among the Wurundjeri of south-eastern Australia, there is a myth telling of how the crow stole fire from a group of sisters, burning his feathers black in the process, whereafter the sisters are swept into the sky, where they become the Pleiades.

Obviously this bears some resemblance to the Greek myth of the same constellation, each tradition identifying the seven stars a group of sisters. It also includes the motif of the the crow's feathers being blackened by a fire, a theme that, as d’Huy points out in his article, is also found among the Blackfoot people of North America.

The trouble, of course, is that the Greek myth says nothing about a crow, and the Blackfoot story makes no mention of the Pleiades. Furthermore, neither one has the Fire-Theif mytheme as the Wurundjeri story does.

So, assuming that the resemblance is not a coincidence, either there was an original story, dating back to the paleolithic, about the pleiades, a dark-plumed bird, and the stealing of fire, and those mythemes broke apart to be found separately in Europe and North America, or the mythemes started out separate and came together--either in ancient times or modern, due to cultural exposure--in Australia.

Either scenario presents problems for d’Huy's system.

Reply
Charles Gaulke
10/2/2016 06:52:34 pm

This doesn't seem all that different from all the linguistic speculations (by non-linguists) based on two languages having some words that share both morphemes and meaning. Of course, with the countless words in any given language, the flexibility of definitions, and the finite inventory of morphemes humans can produce, it would be astonishing if you could not produce a long list of such words for any two randomly selected languages. Certainly, there ARE relationships between different languages, and they can be examined, but the methods are more complex than just cherry picking things you think are similar to compare and discover, low and behold, they are similar!

This is even worse, because "mythemes" are, seemingly, arbitrarily defined by the researcher himself. He chooses the stories to compare based on the assumption his theorized relationship exists, encodes them based on the assumption his theorized relationship exists, and interprets his results based on that same assumption. The basic plausibility of stories being related by common derivation from earlier stories does nothing to support his particular, ridiculously biased "analysis."

That Scientific American would publish this kind of unfalsifiable dross by someone telling another field how his field trumps all their work is disappointing if not very surprising.

Reply
E.P. Grondine
10/2/2016 09:59:25 pm

My current operating view is that not enough is known about ancient constellation systems of different peoples to come up with any evolutionary scheme for them.

The same goes for "myth" systems.

Perhaps with more hard data on the formation of peoples, and more written accounts or artifacts from excavations, such work may be possible some time in the future.

But not now.

In my view, It is far useful to examine each one as a coherent system, and then trying to understand its evolution through time.
This differs greatly from the crippling Boasian or Jungian approaches.

Without that foundation of knowledge, one is trying to build a house on a faulty foundation.

Reply
Ph
10/3/2016 04:05:39 am

Computer models are still to simplistic and only work with a reduced reality.
This usually skewes the result towards the programmers bias.
It will be quite some time before computer models can really simulate human or environmental behaviour.
Currently we can barely simulate the workings of a human brain on all levels with all our tech.

Henry Markram has a nice presentation about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37SFQri8g_U

Reply
Chris Aitken
10/3/2016 02:22:06 pm

Hmmm? More to the point...myths are often an extension of reality. It's simply a matter of interpretation. Troy was believed to be a myth, which turned out to be astoundingly accurate. Myths can be exaggerated truth. Homer was blind, but was a great storyteller. Take for example Hercules. It's my belief this person may have existed. Only the deeds are exaggerated. Like the Gordian knot. There are plenty of sources that suggest it may have existed. It is human nature to tell the best stories again. We do it today! Even rehashing the same story again and again to suit the needs of which ever society it's being presented to. I don't think it's so insane to suggest these myths may have developed from a set of protothemes. Take for instance the Panchatantra, and Aesops fables. Whilst the stories are different, they follow a similar theme. Lessons in morality mainly.... More to the point, I think many represented Gods were probably great people a long time ago who's deeds over time becamemore exaggerated until eventually they were transformed through mythology into gods. It can work the other way too. Like Mary Magdallen. Transformed from disciple to harlot after about the first millennia.

Reply
Charles Gaulke
10/4/2016 05:47:40 am

"Lessons in morality mainly..."

Another possible source of commonality between stories with no historic relationship. Didactic morality tales would surely often enough be trying to teach the same lessons in disparate cultures (theft within the group is generally frowned upon, large predators are not to be trifled with, etc), and it's to be expected they would sometimes hit on the same basic illustrations of those principles.

Reply
Chris Aitken
10/6/2016 07:08:26 pm

Most poigniant. But I chose this comparison specifically because they are related. As many IndoEuropean cultures are, culturally, linguistingly, et al... and no doubt through proto association. For instance, much like Romance culture extending into modern society, so too did Sumerian culture extend into Mesopotamian culture well beyond their era. Also, many things can correlate through natural transcendence. Like Jesus being the 9th disciple of Buddah...since during his lifetime he travelled to India and studied there. Or Kashmir being the true promise land of Moses. Or Greek culture in Bactria, etc... etc... Fact is, people travelled and cultures spread their influence far more then they have been given credit for for millennia. I'm still not convinced an algorithm or two can quantify this though. A recent find in ancient greece shows they just stole their culture from the minoans...

Reply
Chris
10/10/2016 11:54:47 pm

People from various fields periodically get all excited about the apparent ease and objectivity of dating old things by counting the "differences" in "characters" and making some simple assumptions about rate of change to arrive at divergence dates.

Even for biological evolution using molecules as your data, this is in reality far more complicated than it looks. With molecules, it's fairly easy to decide what is "the same" and what is "different" -- although you do have to be wary about assuming that every individual in your population has exactly the same molecules. (Like any assumption, this must be tested in order for your results to be meaningful.) Likewise, different "molecular clocks" in the very same organism can and do give different estimates of the date(s) of divergence from related organisms. Which do you believe and why?

It gets far more subjective when you begin comparing "characters" rather than something countable like molecular differences. Who decides what is a valid "character" and what is not? On what criteria? Who decides whether something is one "character" or many? (To invent an example, is a large red head-crest one character, three, or four?) if you are judging similarity by number of shared characters, these choices make a substantial difference. Do the "characters" you have chosen each independently, or are there clusters that go together? Yet more assumptions.

The sheer number of assumptions made in such analyses escalates very quickly the further you get from considering molecules.

The added fact that literary analysis can often determine which manuscript in a series probably came first (by studying additions, omissions, and various kinds of mistakes) can give researchers in other fields a false sense of confidence that such an exciting, and currently fashionable, easy sort of formula must be universally applicable.

I too am disappointed that Scientific American would publish this sort of thing without treating it as strictly speculative. Personally I'm skeptical that it is even *usefully* speculative, for the reasons others have stated.

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        • Fragments on Giants
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        • The Faith of Ancient Egypt
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    • Miscellaneous Documents >
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