I certainly didn't enjoy the way Ancient Apocalypse dramatized the content and turned it into "the world hates me" paradigm. To the presenter's credit though, the Antarctic coastline and the Bimini Road does make one wonder how they ended up on an ancient map. Much like the discovery published here.

I read at one point it went 3-4 languages one way, and then of course, 3-4 back. 😂

Cultures from all around the globe have catastrophic flood stories. Cultures which we presume never had any contact all say long ago there was a gigantic flood. We have scientific evidence to support that story. It shouldn't surprise anyone once it's based on hard evidence.

I don't know of any sources for this specifically, but it certainly seems plausible, especially with the recent discoveries about other ancient stories being true.

Netflix just released Ancient Apocalypse, which talks about things like this as a result of exiting the last ice age. It's interesting, but definitely take it all with a grain of salt. It's got a little bit of Ancient Aliens flavor in it.

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It probably wasn’t any harder back then to be honest, the human brain hasn’t fundamentally changed enough in this amount of time. The internet may be helpful, but I would still say the easiest way to learn a language is to be exposed to it at a young age.

Children of merchants and diplomats likely shadowed their parents and that type of profession would simply give them the chance to practice frequently.

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It's not a theory; it's just sea level rise.

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Which completely blows my mind because I, a normal person, would have thought to do that first.

>His “rediscovery” of the Americas (because the Vikings “discovered” it for Europeans first) was a Spanish accomplishment, not an Italian one.

Columbus voyages moved the trade to the Atlantic away from the Mediterranean. In the long term Columbus damaged the Italian peninsula, if anything. Italy was crazy rich compared to a large part of the rwt.of Europe until yhe discovery age. Then became a secondary place and all of the countries in the peninsula suffered. (Granted I am not saying Columbus is the main cause of the Italian decline but he didn't help). PS my understanding is that it is not clear at all that Columbus genuinely believed he was going for the Indies or if that was sort of an excuse to get funded.

To your first point, I alluded to that in the 2nd paragraph. To your second point, which link are you referring to? I did not see anything in the article about aboriginal storytellers unless I missed it

>I don’t see there being an inherent problem with people taking pride in their ancestry,

The problem is that there's no reason to do so, unless you think being X, Y, or Z makes you inherently superior/inferior. National or cultural pride is silly at best, and a breeding ground for xenophobia at worst.

>But who cares at this point.

>I strongly oppose any Europeans clinging to their 4th generation cultural heritage though

When I first moved to the US I met people telling me "oh I am Italian too" I would start speaking to them in Italian and they are like "oh no, I don't speak Italian. My grandpa was from Naples" and I was like "what does that mean?". Now I learned. True for any nationality BTW. Met Japanese people never been to Japan, Polish who barely know where Poland is and so on. It's odd frankly. Nationality is a cultural thing, doesn't come with genetics. Someone that grows up in Italy from Chinese parents is actually Italian. Someone that has a grandparent Italian is not. No offense intended, just a fact.

> The "problem" with objectively believing folklore or oral traditions without any other evidence is that they are folklore and oral traditions.

They're not believed without any other evidence. Traditional stories can be used for "hypothesis generating"; suggesting what we can then examine using other methods.

> A story that gets retold thousands or tens of thousands of times is going to change slightly with each retelling

The link suggests that Aboriginal storytellers often have some kind of familial oath or expectation to maintain accuracy in the oral tradition. If they're keeping references to islands that no longer exist, rather than adjusting stories to fit their absence, then there must be a belief that that information is important to maintain. Even if it has no practical purpose.

Wow. Really interesting. Thanks OP.

Thank the Phoenicians.

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There are 2, and they're 7km away from each other

I live in Genoa, I hope he's from here. I've seen his supposed house many times

The "problem" with objectively believing folklore or oral traditions without any other evidence is that they are folklore and oral traditions. A story that gets retold thousands or tens of thousands of times is going to change slightly with each retelling. The broad strokes will obviously stay the same but the finer details may blur and bleed into each other. Even ancient written records will have this problem to a degree from all the copying, translating, recopying and retranslating (not to say anything about the biases of the storytellers either).

Ancient traditions and stories are certainly good jumping off points for investigation since there is likely some event or place they are building off of. Finding other evidence can start to untangle what makes a good story and what we can say with good certainty happend or existed.

Take the Illiad as an example. The Trojan war makes for a great story but most of it is likely fictionalized. There probably wasn't a Helen and the Greeks probably didn't launch a thousand ships to rescue her. But there's likely a good chance it preserves a memory of Greeks coming into conflict with Anatolian peoples in that region. Finding evidence of a city that is likely Troy in the modern era gives more credence to parts of the story having kernels of fact dispersed into the mythology.

Yes I had this remarkable conversation with my spanish colleague who said Columbus was spanish while I contended Columbus was Italian

Have you checked out N. A. M. Rodger's stuff? I don't know a lot about the topic but he's written a lot on it, some of it pretty specialized.