Re:Mysterious Stone Orbs Stashed All over Neolithic Britain
by vkou on Sunday October 03, 2021 @07:59PM
(#28741625)
> Sure, except your story doesn't any explanatory power for unusual modern day behavior, so it's not actually that beautiful.
Sure it does. The explanatory power is that not all human traits have a strong impact on evolutionary fitness, either on the individual level, or on the social level.
Unless conclusively demonstrated otherwise (which a story composed post-facto is not), this is all meaningless noise.
The first thing about knowing something is being clear about the limitations of that knowledge. Just-so stories have no such limitation, which is why they come up so often as unfalsifiable nonsense. They can explain everything and anything, and therefore, explain nothing. All they are is a vehicle for repeating the biases of the storyteller.
If your story is true, then you would expect the trait of collecting useless bling to have died out a long time ago, or at least not be as prevalent as it is today.
And by the way, you could extend my story to not just being about collecting lots of physical things, but also seemingly useless information and skills. Rare knowledge and rare abilities aren't a huge leap from rare physical resources.