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points by alexpotato 18 hours ago | 0 comments

This reminds me of Herodotus [0].

For those that don't know about him:

- he was an ancient historian

- he made a lot of "wild claims" e.g. there was a tribe that made clothes out of human skin

- historians assumed these were myths or exaggerated

- recent research has shown that many of his wild claims were true (even the one above) [1]

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus

1 - https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/ancient-scythians-us...

[–] kromem 9 hours ago

Part of the issue was that Herodotus reported what his sources said. So rather than it being 'Herodotus' as a single reliable or unreliable source, it was more like a collection of unvetted sources.

As a result, you got stories about dog sized ants that were nonsense but then also stories that were legit.

People tend to be rather binary with how they process information, so when there's things that are wrong they group everything in the 'wrong' category.

Definitely a lot of false negatives with how Herodotus was regarded. Much like how the prevailing consensus was that Troy was a fictional city until it was discovered.

[–] skoll43 5 hours ago

The dog ants with gold were the Marmota with gold dust in their mounds (if the arid place had gold)

Which if described by others and you never have seen them, they sound like mythological creatures

[–] pseudohadamard 1 hour ago

> So rather than it being 'Herodotus' as a single reliable or unreliable source, it was more like a collection of unvetted sources.

So a sort of one-man Greek Facebook then?

[–] science4sail 14 hours ago

I think that there is often a desire to downplay the ancients as liars and/or fools where their claims conflict with modern political sensitivities (even Thucydides just a few decades after Herodotus called him a tall tale teller).

I've been re-reading Herodotus and his work is actually pretty good for its time. You just have to remember that he, just like a modern day travel blogger, both sees the world through the lens of an upper class Greek and also has to keep his audience engaged with cool trivia and clickbait.

[–] adammarples 13 hours ago

Regardless, he reported a lot of made up stuff like dog headed men and so forth

[–] npc99 12 hours ago

well if a bunch of other stuff he said that ppl thought was false turned out to be true, why not that too lol

[–] alephnerd 10 hours ago

How much of that is just literary flourish.

[–] nemo 8 hours ago

Herodotus was an early kind of historian, in the context in which he was relating his histories he was as much an entertainer as much as a historian so he repeated every fun and weird story he heard. He did qualify the dog-headed men specifically as a thing he had heard in a ironic Greek tone, he was relating an entertaining tale, not trying to persuade you that dog-headed men really exist.

[–] QuantumNomad_ 7 hours ago

A human body with a canine head. My guy Herodotus wasn’t telling tall tales at all, he was merely giving accounts of some of the very first furry conventions. These “dog-headed” men were wearing fursuits!

[–] monocasa 6 hours ago

To be fair, Herodotus also didn't believe everything he wrote down. Both implicitly such as recording blatantly mutually exclusive accounts, as well just just explicitly stating that he didn't believe everything on several occasions such as "it is my business to record what people say, but I am by no means obliged to believe it."

He was pretty open about the fact that he basically wrote down any interesting stories, and was not attempting to find some historical truth, but instead transition as much as possible from oral tradition to written.

He mostly gets called the father of history for this semi-novel take. That you can (and in most cases, should) strive for recorder and interpreter to be separate tasks.