> >Don't worry, I'll believe you. How weird, when sea fishing was so
>>common elsewhere. Or was this a very VERY long time ago?
>
>It must have been or else David is making a distinction between
>ocean and sea fishing. After all King Canute levied a herring tax
>which was paid with catches from the Dogger bank in the North Sea.
Well before Canute. I can't remember for sure whether there was evidence for coracles at the same time period -- but isn't it accepted that the Britons had arrived there in boats?
>Still, Greg's given us the "real" answer now. I *can* learn by experience
>and by being taught - it sounds like they couldn't.
To take a perhaps more materialistic view of things than Greg suggests: each group of survivors had retrenched, and had pretty much one trick that had let them survive the Darkness. If they only lived by eating lichen like reindeer, what would be the point of considering something that grew on a tree as food? It's like me looking at a mushroom. I happen to know that many of them are extremely poisonous, and I don't like the taste of those that aren't. Why on earth would I start thinking about eating them? Even if the mushroom survivors know a really simple way to tell which ones are edible.
>the point here is that the missionaries couldn't
>just say "Look, this is edible" (munch) and be believed/understood.
But mushrooms are icky. And (if I were a Darkness survivor) I'd know the myths about the time we were almost all killed by the walking mushrooms, and only the crying baby saved us.
BTW, Keith's analogies for people who've survived the Darkness are great. There are also cases of groups where all adults were killed, and the kids had to survive somehow. (No, not Lord of the Flies.) My wife knows this one better, but their social structures were, well, immature.
And Guy reminds me it was the Tasmanians who lost their technology (I wrote Patagonians, which may or may not be true).
None of this implies brain damage. Cultural damage, sure. (If they were brain-damaged, they wouldn't have been able to learn from the missionaries.)
And I'll bet there's a Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in Glorantha, that you can only think about something if you have myths to think about...
-- David Dunham Glorantha/HQ/RQ page: http://www.pensee.com/dunham/glorantha.html Imagination is more important than knowledge. -- Albert Einstein
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