I've suspected for years that people sometimes develop similar ideas and practices entirely independently because they are wired the same way and exposed to similar environments, and not necessarily because they shared those ideas and practices.
I learned from Prof. John R Hale, quoting Sir Walter Raleigh in Exploring the Roots of Religion (which itself is a quote from his thesis), that this concept has a fancy name: antidiffusionism. It's also known as inventionism, autochthonism, or indigenisim (or how about indigenesis?).
I regard it to be a very reasonable position. Why? It makes sense (everything starts there, doesn't it?[1]), and it's a social extension of a generally accepted evolutionary concept that similar physical changes can evolve independently; flight, for example, is often cited as having developed a number of times over millions of years.
Sir Walter Raleigh wrote this after finding canoes in a variety of cultures that couldn't possibly have borrowed the idea from each other:
The human mind has the ability to look at an array of means and materials that exist worldwide and choose the same things and craft the same objects and practices from them.
Diffusion is of course is the norm and lets us make connections between related languages, beliefs and practices, but if taken to extremes results in hypotheses like that in Thor Hyerdahl's Kon-Tiki, which Hale treats gently but discards.
I read most of Hyerdahl's books and enjoyed them immensely, as speculative as they were; Thor had an adventurer's soul that facts could not deter.
Hale, for his part, delights so much in the diversity and similarities of the cultures he discusses, you can't help but share his enthusiasm.
[1]
Of course, an idea that "makes sense" has more value when it makes sense to someone already knowledgeable in such things.
Started: 1/18/2012
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