I just wanted to thank everyone for taking the time to reply. It is very appreciated. Thank you.

pry because turks were nomads warriors for large parts of their history as they moved down from the east siberian steppe. so their culture adept to fit itself into preexisting culture while implementing its own.

This is Roman, not Greek, but two examples from Livy come to mind.

First, he suggests that the she-wolf who raised Romulus and Remus was not an animal but that "lupa" was a euphemism for prostitute. Back when people practiced exposure (one might say fourth-trimester abortion), it was not uncommon for women who couldn't have children to scout such locations in the hope of claiming a healthy infant who had been abandoned.

Later he comments on the story that the second king of Rome, Numa the Lawgiver, had regular congress with a wood nymph who instructed him on the laws and customs he was to implement. Livy surmises that there was no such nymph, but that Numa knew the crude and superstitious populace would more readily accept his reforms if they supposedly came from a higher power.

Good post but I think you're going the wrong direction with it. This seems to be a rational person just saying the truth of what some Greeks believed and that not many dared to write about. He's not the only ancient Greek to think the mythological stories weren't literal truth. There's a long line from these guys to educated Greek monks in the monasteries even suggesting they were simply parables.

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Thank you!

Thank you!

A decade spent in a cave eating bugs and bone marrow, followed by 990 years of cold hard living, would certainly select out the most socially cooperative of our species.

The paper:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.070039597

Found it: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/london-taxi-memory/

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2022/feb/london-taxi-drivers-brains-being-scanned-alzheimers-research#:~:text=Previous%20studies%20have%20shown%20that,confusion%20associated%20with%20the%20disease.

That's the article which has a link to the source paper at the bottom.

And the actual paper: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.070039597

Very cool. Another poster mentioned it too. Do you have a link?

That’s really interesting. Do you have a link?

Great answer, thank you

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Outside of the Byzantine/Eastern Roman Empire which is literally just the part of Rome that did not fell, any of them as other commenter said.

But I would add also the Catholic Church. It was the only institution of the Empire that survived in the West. (I'm not familiar with Eastern Orthodoxy but I'm sure you can argue the same thing for at least the Patriarch of Constantinople).

aren't you born with whatever sized brain you have?

Yup, that's it. Somebody else figured it out though, I cant take credit.

Gouge → Wentuged

Is that it?

The what crowd? Sorry, I was thinking of a tv show I haven’t seen in 5 years

While those living 250k years ago would have looked very very similar to us physically, the evidence suggests we did not become as smart as we are today until about 70k years ago. My understanding is that this claim is based on the fact that the earliest evidence we have of things like art, musical instruments, fish nets, etc. don’t appear in the archeological record until 70k years ago.

My personal theory on this is that humans became significantly more intelligent around 74k years ago as a result of extreme selective pressures due to the cataclysmic eruption of the super volcano known as Mount Toba (in Sumatra I believe). We know for a fact this eruption occurred and that it sent the world into a 1000 year ice-age (think nuclear winter minus the radiation for a decade followed by a thousand years of significant global cooling). During this period the human population fell to only a few thousand or less. That this population bottleneck occurred is a result of the eruption is a fairly well known hypothesis supported by some genetic evidence.

The part of this that I came up with on my own (my personal theory - though I’m probably not the first to connect the dots) is that during this period of genetic bottlenecking only the smartest managed to survive. The extreme environment those people must have lived through would have challenged them far beyond anything they had faced before. Most did not make it. Whole clans/tribes died out in those first years after the eruption. Only the cleverest (and perhaps most cooperative/social) managed to survive and procreate. With a massively reduced population, any genetic variation that could provide additional survival advantages would be selected for, and that selected process would have an exaggerated effect due to the low population numbers.

This theory would help explain why we start seeing archeological evidence of modern human intelligence (again, via art, nets, etc.) around 70k years ago. Perhaps it also explains why we almost seem “too smart” or seemingly smarter than necessary today.

Surely not exactly what you're looking for; I can't recall something. But perhaps these are possibly relevant in a really broader way as a disturbance of rites:

Plutarch writes about Agesilaus II, king of Sparta [396 BCE ca] that after a vision he tried to perform a sacrifice in Aulis using with his own seer for the ritual, against the customs of Boiotenas, who forbade the rite and threw away the sacrificial animal [Plut. Ages. 6.4-6]. The incindent had been narrated previously by Xenophon [Xen. Hell. 3.4] but with no claimed reason. Check also Paus. 3.9.3-5 where more possibly this disruption comes after some boasting [?].

Also one more where a priest seems asking for no disturbance before some ritual [?]... Heliodorus Aeth. 4.5: 'καὶ οἱ λοιποὶ πάντες ἔξιτε· τρίποδά τις καὶ δάφνην καὶ πῦρ καὶ λιβανωτὸν παραθέσθω μόνον, ὀχλείτω δὲ μηδὲ εἷς ἕως ἂν προσκαλέσωμαι.' Προσέταττε ταῦτα ὁ Χαρικλῆς καὶ ἐγένετο. Not aware of the plot here, it would need surely good checking before use.

You may also find of some interest Polybius [Plb. 6.56.6ff] where a general approach on Romans' rites, beliefs, religion [as his comparison somehow ?], but really not to the point.

War of the Roses by Dan Jones is a good narrative history of the conflict.

It was me. I was trying to play a prank and it got out of hand. My bad.

I don’t have any references handy, but I have anecdotal evidence that supports the idea of the super mundane being affected by the viewer.

Essentially all of the non-divinatory mysticism of the Near East, Europe and Northern Africa requires the practitioner to be ritually clean; physically, mentally, and spiritually. A key element in achieving that state is often isolation from the mundane world, with the duration of that isolation being directly proportional to the power of the magical working being performed. If the intent is to directly communicate with or control a super mundane entity the requirements for isolation can get pretty extreme; spending 40 days in the wilderness with extended periods of fasting and stuff like that.

In addition to isolation during preparation, secrecy during the working is explicitly required. I can’t think of any examples where multiple people are prohibited from participating in a working. But the requirements for achieving the necessary level of purity often prohibit speech and combined with the other requirements it would be extremely problematic to involve multiple people.

Problematic ranging from the magic simply not working to the summoned being obliterating or possessing the practitioner. So the stakes are pretty high to get it right. The overall implication is that if you want to summon angels or demons or bend the very fabric of existence it’s not a party trick. It’s something done by an individual, in isolation.

There are plenty of less esoteric mystic examples of super mundane practices requiring isolation. In Judaism only the High Priest could enter the Holy of Holies and speak to G-d on the Mercy Seat of the Ark of the Covenant. Elijah carried the dead body of Zarephath’s son upstairs, apart from the others, and brought him back to life. Elisha did something similar in Shunem where he laid on top of a dead boy and after some time apart from the others he took the now living boy to his mother. Peter did the same with Tabitha in Joppa where he explicitly cleared the room and brought her back to life.

Conversely, there are many examples of public displays of super mundane acts in the Bible. The feeding of the 5,000, resurrections, casting out of evil spirits and all kinds of things In Exodus. The Rod of Aaron turning into a snake and eating the snake conjured by Pharaoh’s magi. These public events are treated specially because they were witnessed by regular people and demonstrate that they were of divine origin. The super mundane that didn’t have to be practiced in private to witness the results (magic was accepted as real, it was the fact these events were public that made them notable).

I used a lot of Biblical examples because there’s little separation between the mystical practices of Sumerian inspired Babylonians, the Jews, Egyptians, Greeks and Islam. The deities, beings, spirits and creatures vary, but the actual practices involved are not very different. All demand privacy and secrecy. Only certain individuals could engage in these practices and the public are prohibited from even knowing about what goes on.

The implication being that the involvement of, and even the presence of, the uninitiated and unclean will prevent the super mundane/paranormal from being actualized. It cannot manifest except in the presence of the pure, the believer. The exceptions to this invariably involve the direct intervention of a deity (Achilles, Hercules, Moses, Gilgamesh, etc… all had direct involvement with deities).