>Crystals found across the planet and from several time periods have previously been linked to humans' spiritual belief and ritual. This includes in southern Africa.
Couldn't they just have been collected because they looked nice? When I was a kid I had a stash of more or less interesting rocks I found here and there.
It seems weird to me to go straight for the spiritual and ritual explanation.
>Many who visit Ga-Mohana Hill today for ritual practice see it as part of a network of places linked to the Great Water Snake (Nnoga ya metsi), a capricious and shape-shifting being. Many of these spiritual places are also associated with water.
>Places such as Ga-Mohana Hill and their associated stories remain some of the most enduring intangible cultural artefacts from the past, linking modern indigenous South Africans to earlier communities.
Is the article positing that (relatively) modern practices and beliefs could have a link to these 100+ millennia old crystals?
If true it would be fascinating, but it seems like a pretty wild conjecture to me. The culture, language and customs of people 100k years ago was probably very different from ours. It seems to me that you'd have to have pretty convincing evidence to be able to extrapolate that far into the past.
Couldn't they just have been collected because they looked nice? When I was a kid I had a stash of more or less interesting rocks I found here and there.
It seems weird to me to go straight for the spiritual and ritual explanation.
>Many who visit Ga-Mohana Hill today for ritual practice see it as part of a network of places linked to the Great Water Snake (Nnoga ya metsi), a capricious and shape-shifting being. Many of these spiritual places are also associated with water.
>Places such as Ga-Mohana Hill and their associated stories remain some of the most enduring intangible cultural artefacts from the past, linking modern indigenous South Africans to earlier communities.
Is the article positing that (relatively) modern practices and beliefs could have a link to these 100+ millennia old crystals?
If true it would be fascinating, but it seems like a pretty wild conjecture to me. The culture, language and customs of people 100k years ago was probably very different from ours. It seems to me that you'd have to have pretty convincing evidence to be able to extrapolate that far into the past.