What is the oldest culture alive

Discussion in 'Human Science' started by arauca, Mar 10, 2013.

  1. arauca Banned Banned

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    How many cultures have survived more them 3000 years
     
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  3. Buddha12 Valued Senior Member

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    Tibet, Tuvan, Chinese to name a few.
     
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  5. arauca Banned Banned

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    Would you say they are older then the Hebrew culture ? which is probable 3500 to 4000 years ?
     
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  7. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    East Korea.
     
  8. arauca Banned Banned

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    could you elaborate on East Korea
     
  9. Buddha12 Valued Senior Member

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    Just another old culture.
     
  10. arauca Banned Banned

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    It is a culture that prevail t until the present most other cultures have changed and disappeared
     
  11. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    East Korean culture has existed intact for 100,000 years.
     
  12. arauca Banned Banned

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    Do you hAVE ANY REFERENCE

    According modern man merged from Africa 60 000 years and you are talking 100000 years you must be BSing
     
  13. Dinosaur Rational Skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    The Australian aborigines are oldest. Until the last 100-200 years their culture was the same as it was 30-50 thousand years ago. Today it is closer to the original culture than any other culture still in existence. I cannot think of another modern culture which is close to what it was 20-30 thousand years ago, although there might be some African cultures which make me a liar.
     
  14. KitemanSA Registered Senior Member

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    How do you know?
     
  15. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    Of course I do. I'm referencing myself. I, the Great Leader of East Korea, just said it. Jesus, dude.
     
  16. Dinosaur Rational Skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    KitemanSA: Until recently, the aborigines had no writing/engraving technology. They maintianed a knowldege of their history orally. Fathers passed on the history to their sons. I am not sure, but I think there were families which had the obligation of maintaining the oral history.

    Their oral history seems to go back 20-30 thosand years. That oral history & their culture when Europeans first went to Australia strongly supports the notion that their culture was unchanged for 20-30 thousand years.
     
  17. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    All cultures change over time, so no present-day culture existed 3000 years ago. And every culture that's currently found on earth has historical antecedents that date back as long as there have been human beings. It's also true that cultures sometimes display discontinuities, they may change suddenly and dramatically for internal or external reasons. Occasionally those changes are so great that we might want to say that an old culture has disappeared and a new one taken its place. Other times changes are slow and gradual, but the result remains the same. Even if there's been a high degree of continuity in the culture, the present day might bear little resemblance to the distant past.

    So perhaps the question in this thread is about which present-day culture survives least changed from some culture that existed 3000 years ago. That's a tough one, since 3000 years is a long time. I'm not sure that there are any cultures on Earth that retain a high degree of continuity with cultures 3000 years ago.

    2000 years is easier. By that time Han China existed, and Chinese imperial culture survived in recognizable (though certainly not unchanged) form down to about 1910. But over the last 100 years, Chinese culture has entered into one of those historical discontinuities, and is in the process of changing into something quite different.

    Tibet doesn't really work, since Tibetan culture didn't really take form until around 700 CE. And it certainly hasn't been unchanging, the Gelug school and the Dalai Lamas originated in early modern times, around the 1600's.

    I don't think that Hebrew culture works either. While today's Israel is a conscious recreation of an ancient state, those who created it were themselves highly Westernized. Today's Israelis and their mode of life and thought bear little resemblance to the ancient Hebrews of David and Solomon's time. They have been dramatically reshaped by many centuries living in Christian and Islamic cultures and by the scientific and industrial revolutions. Even the minority of religious Jews among them are probably influenced as much by Jewish communal life in medieval ghettos as by anything inherited from ancient times.

    The Japanese maybe, but their traditional culture (which was never unchanging) entered into its period of discontinuity around the middle of the 19'th century.

    The Greeks are still around, but reshaped by their Byzantine experience and by the Ottoman Turkish occupation. The Greeks emerged from that around the middle of the 19'th century, and have been trying to catch up with western Europe ever since.

    Islam is about 1400 years old. It's undergone lots of changes since, but currently seems to be undergoing some kind of medieval revival in reaction to the modern West, that is consciously trying to return their culture to the worldview and modes of behavior that once were prevalent in the dark ages.
     
  18. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    I'm not entirely convinced.

    The Australian aborigines were one of the peoples that the European explorers encountered who were still living a paleolithic old-stone-age style of life in terms of their technology, economy and material culture. Archaeological evidence suggests that had remained largely unchanged for many thousands of years.

    It's easy to assume that because their physical style of life hadn't changed very much over tens of thousands of years, that their religions, myths and lore must have remained the same too. But I don't see any way that we could really know that. The Australian aborigines certainly had a wide variety of languages, and that suggests that quite a bit of cultural change and variation was taking place among them.
     
  19. arauca Banned Banned

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    Thank you . I agree with you all culture have evolved with time into a new shape due to exchanging with their neighbors
     
  20. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    What about Egypt?
     
  21. Crunchy Cat F-in' *meow* baby!!! Valued Senior Member

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    All hail the great Myuu!
     
  22. arauca Banned Banned

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    More of the same BS
     
  23. arauca Banned Banned

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    Egypt as a while is old but they don't have the old Egyptian language thy have been converted to Islam, in this case the Hebre would be older ?
     

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