Aboriginal flood narratives and the thunder complex in Southeast Asia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The ancestors of the dingo were brought to mainland Australia around 4000 years ago by people who arrived by boat. The identity of these voyagers from the north, however, and the nature of their interactions with the Aboriginal population of Australia, are unknown. Here, we propose that Indigenous flood narratives from the Kimberley contain evidence for contact between Aboriginal people and early Asian seafarers in the form of the “thunder complex”. The latter is a very specific repertoire of taboos, rituals and stories that occurs widely among ethnographically known societies of Indonesia, the Philippines and peninsular Malaysia, but has not previously been identified in Australia. Among Southeast Asian groups, this cultural complex revolves around the idea that certain prohibited acts perpetrated against animals – especially “mocking” them by treating them as though they were human – precipitate a punitive storm and/or flooding. We show that in some oral traditions of the Kimberley region animal mockery is similarly held to be the causative agent behind disastrous flooding events that took place in the past creationary epoch. We contend that this localised Aboriginal variant of the thunder complex reflects an episode of close interaction with early Austronesian‐speaking voyagers who introduced ancestral dingoes to mainland Australia, apparently via the Kimberley coast.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".