h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hmm, don't you mean the Black Sea and a few thousand years ago?

I could be wrong, but I'm not aware of any Neanderthal remains anywhere in Ireland, and I thought that the colonisation of Ireland is really relatively recent, about 8000 years ago, which is later than the last known Neanderthal skeletons. My guess is that it's unlikely.

No I definitely mean the Meditteranean. There was a land bridge between Africa and Europe for a long time then due to seas rising (or it lowering not sure which) around this time the Atlantic flooded in catastrophically. I've heard that it is estimated it took only a few weeks for it to fill in completely.

I'll try and look it up for a link...

Hmmm, fair enough Xanatic, just did and it certainly appears that the Black Sea appears to be the main theory there. Being flooded from the Meditteranean 7,500 years ago.
The epic of Gilgamesh, Noah's ark and several Greek legends have a flood mythology that may well be a race memory of this.

I'm sure I've heard that the Meditteranean was formed by a catastrophic flood too - must investigate further...

That Discovery Channel, eh!
According to them the wooly mammoth did not completely die out as previously believed, sometime before the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 yarn ago.
No sirree, there is an island (near Ireland strangely enough) where the bones of pigmy mammoths and mastodons are as fresh as Eric the Red (circa 1,000AD).
Other sites are alluded to, but this isolated environment allows a theory for their survival, and it coincides with world wide evidence that horses on islands grow smaller and smaller until we can safely call them ponies. Sable Island, The Shetlands, etc...

Maybe the cold and the poor rations and a bit of Darwin's theory allowed the smaller,less greedy elephumps to survive on less.
This might also explain how the Irish Neanderthals got by until the Homo Celtic types came sailing in from the flooded Middle Earth regions.
And they would have shrunk considerably by then too. The 'little people' aren't necessarily fairy sized, more dwarfish and elfish than fairy-flied.

jwf

Ahhhh, further searching has revealed that during the last Ice Age there was a time known as The Flandrian Progression - it seems both the Meditteranean and Black Sea were flooded during this time. in addition the Guld of Arabia was formed also and this seems to be used as a speculative argument for the origin of the Garden of Eden story (and it's disappearance). The North sea rose rather spectacularly too during this period...

Excuse me while I muse to myself...

The faeries at the bottom of my garden look nothing like neanderthals or aliens.

Interesting that no one's mentioned the 'Saga of the Exiles', by Julian May. He's brought in the two sorts of racial memory (the tall, glamourous elven-kind, and the short, squat neanderthal-kind); he's also given a reason for the flooding of the Mediterranean Basin .

Interesting thread!

x x Fenny (UT)

*proving she's a journalist, not an academic*
what were the [differing] origins/routes of Neanderthals and Homo whatwearenowandwerethen? Did they originate from the same ape, or whatever, or did they start at different places too? *considers the possibility of investigating this further elsewhere, but recollects that on h2g2 you get the information already filtered for trash*

GP

Always happy to provide the dumb (TV) version in simple English and let the experts correct me on the important details...

Neanderthals were Euro monkeys, lived in caves all over the EU. Hunter gatherers with fire, flint tools and weapons and a fondness for the large airy caves of Europe. God only knows when they had drifted across from Africa. 100 to 250 thousand BC perhaps?
Well wait, yeah, this was before the flood wasn't it?
What Med?

The Homo Sapiens are usually represented by arrows coming up around from the middle east through the Balkans and eventually pushing the Neaderthals west into the Atlantic with better tools and stuff. (The 'last' Neanderthal remains are in Spanish and French coastal caves, about 30,000 years old.)

But if the Mediterranean wasn't there yet, one wonders why modern representations of the Homo Sapiens encroachment on Neanderthal Europe always show them as arrows coming via the middle east. Revisionism? Maybe Homo Sapiens wanted to see Egypt first, who knows.
Anyway they completely took over the EU before the end of the last ice age (10,000 BC). And ate the last of the wooly mammoths that hadn't swum out to Ireland.

The east to west process, over thousands of years, supposedly fits with the carbon dating of what remains are found so far. But why do things always come from the East? Isn't this just projecting later Classic and Modern evolutions on the pre-historic past? Maybe it's just too hard for TV producers to find maps without the Med there between the continents.

Who knows ..TV is so dumb.


jwf

The East to West (ie Eastern Europe to Western) thing is probably just another analogy or metaphor that doesn't bear close scrutiny.

It only seems to be that things go from East to West if you confine the topic to Europe. There's no reason to assume that cultures outside Europe didn't mythologize their ancestors in the same way. Though perhaps not with Neanderthals.

Some migrations of Semitic peoples (with whom the Basque share a genetic heritage) may have enetered Europe through Gibraltar & N Africa as opposed to going through Europe. It's also been hypothesized that the Celtic ancestors of the modern Irish came from Spain directly to Ireland. And their mythical ancestors, the Sons of Mil are also supposed to have come from Spain.

Ok, really doesn't dispel the East to West theory, just posits that it doesn't have go through the length of continental Europe.

According to Julian May in *her* Saga of the Exiles, the Mediterranean dried out and them was flooded again catastophically in 6 Million BC. This may have happened again later, though. All it takes is for Africa to move a little bit north and Europe to move a little bit south.

Woodpigeon is right. There were never any Neanderthal remains discovered in Ireland. But there were people in Ireland since about 7000 BC (Mayo celebrated its 9000th anniversary a few years back). Complete farms have been found underneath the bogs in the west of Ireland dating back that far. So people have already been in Ireland more than 6000 years when the Celts arrived. The Celts are the ones who told the stories about the fairies.

Many Irish people in country areas as recently as twenty years were very wary of disturbing "fairy forts". I don't know whether with the advent of cellphones, the internet and digital TV this sort of belief has died out now.

Not really. I noticed the aliens creeping in earlier in the thread. Modern day mythology inspired by Star Wars and the X-Files.

Fairy forts - like burial mounds, that sort of thing?

Apparently in Finland they still make sure their roads and such steer clear of the fairy mounds.

Mammoths a thousand years ago? I guess that means they could still be running around in Siberia as well.

The ancient Irish built rings of earth. The top of the ring was then fortified with a fence. The whole enclosure became a living place for people and animals. There are literally tens of thousands of these rings. Some of them were occupied as late as the 17th century. At this stage, all that is left is the earthen ring itself, usually covered in grass and sometimes with a ring of bushes on the top. These are known as fairy forts. In the Irish language they are "rath" or "lios" and many placenames in Ireland start with Rath or Lis. Another sort of fairy fort is an ancient burial tomb. These are much rarer: there are probably only a few hundred of these in the country. Rings of standing stones are very rare in deed, but they are also owned by the fairies.

I heard or read somewhere once (not sure ) that some anthropololgists had visited nomadic tribes in Siberia and discovered that they still had folk stories and songs about 'killing the great woolly beasts' or something. They seemed to think that it is possible that Mammoths may only have truly died out a couple of hundred years ago.
That's the wildest claim I've heard though and this is of course very scant evidence.
What a conversation

I haven't heard of those folk songs before. But the songs can be very old. However I have heard a lot of people say they have seen mammoths in Siberia. How many of those had been drinking vodka and was just confusing pink elephants with mammmoths I don't know.

These fairy folk are quite extensive landowners - I hope they pay their fair (fairy?) share in rates.

And it's probably very wise that Finland's highways go around the fairy forts - considering the problems you might run into with archaeologists and historical preservation folk.

Not fairy forts, those are in Ireland. These are placed where the fairies live. I don't know if they are of any archeological value.

Thanks for that 'Lis' info.
What a thrill for me to learn that my ancestral home of Lisburn was built round a fairy fort.

Ah, the improbable give-and-take of intellectual gems that makes h2g2 such a wonderful place to be. Where else would that bit have come up in a conversation? I might never have found that out, web or no web?

It all makes sense now. The family legends, the gypsies, the excommunication, Howland and Wolf, the Titanic...


jwf