and not enough bright young Aborig-inal people are willing to adopt the traditional lifestyle, andforego other opportunities, to continue the tradition.
I feel like any other way they could have phrased this would have been better than the way they chose here.
Ethnoscience
In my opionion, creating another name for science done by non-european ancient people is...I can't think of a word that doesn't sound super combative...but not ideal. All science (and all things ever) that any human has ever done has been in a cultural context. Why is it 'ethnoscience' when an Aboriginal person did it but it's just 'Science' when Pythagoras did it?
stone arrangements
I've noticed several times in this paper that they have refrained from using language that I would sort of expect. For example, they use "stone arrangements" instead of 'megalith' or 'dolmen'. I don't know a whole lot about archeology, so maybe certain terms are reserved for specific geographical areas. But I wonder if they are doing that purposely.
An alternative interpre-tation involving childbirth has been suggested by
Earlier in the introduction they mentioned that there were some Aboriginal groups whose cultures had been relatively reserved through colonialism, while others had been destroyed. Do any of the still existing cultures have similar myths or engravings that would give better insight? Or maybe that's how they came to these conclusions in the first place.
the Sydney engravings contain a significant astronom-ical component.
What would be the reason that this particular site contains a lot of astronomical imagery? Would it have been a school or a religious gathering place?
Cairns’ hypothesis
I feel like being the person who gets to try and figure out what newly discovered ancient rock art means would be a super cool job.
thousands more have been de-stroyed by roads and buildings
Thanks, colonialism :'(
hrough the constellationsof Scorpius and Sagittarius
It's weird that I never really thought of other cultures creating different constellations. I knew of course that cultures have different names and stories for the same constellations. But for some reason I never really considered that different cultures created different constellations. It makes sense, it's just not something I ever learned or considered.
Perhapsthe crocodile stories are a distant memory from when Kami-laroi people lived in northern Queensland.
It's pretty amazing if they were able to orally carry a story along for 40,000 years.
identifies the ‘scratches’ in painting and rock-carvings as a variety of symbols, which he says would beunderstood by other Wardaman people
Why are they hesitant to compare these to heiroglyphs or pictographs of other ancient cultures?
This paper therefore marks a watershed,in that it is unlikely that a review paper written in the futurecould reasonably expect to include all peer-reviewed litera-ture, because of the rapid expansion of research in this field
I didn't know you were allowed to just brag about yourself in your papers.
making Aboriginal Australiansamong the oldest continuous cultures in the world
I have learned almost nothing in school about Aboriginal Austrailians, despite this. Do we just tend to learn mostly about the indegenous people of North and South America because that's where we're located? Or did I just live in a really bad school district? (I already know the answer to that last one)
The studies by the eccentric Irishwoman Daisy Bates arepotentially very important, because she wrote extensively onAboriginal sky-beliefs, based on her immersion in an Abo-riginal community (Bates 1925, 1944), but her writings arenot often cited because errors of fact and judgement (DeVries 2010) mar her writings, marking her as an unreliablewitness. Nevertheless, there have been valuable attempts todeconvolve her errors from her writings (e.g. Fredrick 2008;Leaman & Hamacher 2014).
All of the writings about Aboriginal astronomy seem to come from Europeans,but earlier they mentioned Aboriginal writings. Are there not really many Aboriginal writings, or do we just not pay attention to them and choose the European writings instead?
Of the circular form of the earth they havenot the smallest idea
I feel like this guy's account might need to be taken with a grain of salt. I find it hard to believe that a group of people who navigated to Australia over the ocean wouldn't have a better understanding of at least the stars and the curvature of the earth.
There is also evidence thattraditional Aboriginal Australians made careful records and measurements of cyclical phenomena, recorded unexpectedphenomena such as eclipses and meteorite impacts, and could determine the cardinal points to an accuracy of a fewdegrees
There's all kinds of information I've seen about ancient languages and documents, but I've never seen anything about Aboriginal Australian documents and language. I want to learn more about that culture.
and for navigation.
I remember reading that Aboriginal Australians migrated to Australia from SE Asia by sea and I also remember reading that most of the pacific islands were populated with migration from SE Asia. There is a lot of info about Polynesian Wayfinding, but I haven't seen a lot of info about Aboriginal Australians at all. I wonder if Polynesian Wayfinding and Aboriginal Australian navigational methods have a common root?