The following video cites a study on mice, concerning the ability of orphan mice to recognize smells that only their parent's were exposed to.
Below the video link I will place some thought and theories I have on this concept.
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Do We Inherit Our Ancestors' Memories? Epigenetics and Genetic Memory in the DNA of Mammals Bjorn Andreas Bull-Hansen
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I once read a book by a big game hunter who specialized in South and Central American Jaguar hunts. He made a strong case for a "6th sense" among animals, based solely on his experience. He was convinced that animals could smell or otherwise sense iron, steel, brass, lead and gunpowder, claiming that he could easily locate game on a scout so long as he was unarmed, when he went about with just a stick, but that locating game in the jungle when armed was difficult. Sounds like a smell issue to me.
I have been attacked by dogs many times in my life. Of course, when I pull out a knife they give me more space to work. But I have also noted that pulling out a pen from my pocket and clicking it brings the same response. Maybe they fear metal, even the sound.
The other aspects I have long considered might be imbedded in genetic memory are fear of forests as extant in agrarianism, modernity and the Wendigo complex, with so many folks around the world terrified of forests and of real and imagined primates within them.
Could this harken back to an ancient Arуan memory of invading the forest lands from the grasslands and having to deal with indigenous hunters?
Perhaps this is the province of Beowulf, a very ancient tale dealing with indigenous humanoids imagined as a threat long after they had been eradicated or displaced.
Might this, and the many legends and myths of hairy men, nocturnal predators and even werewolves stalking out from wooded "wastes" to kill and abduct humans, be and expression of a deeper memory concerning the Neanderthals displaced in Eurasia by Modern Humans, a subspecies of Human that it now seems Our Kind had shared borders with for over 100,000 years? In addition, these beauty and the beast, King Kong type legends tend to include the theme of female human abduction by the monster. Interestingly, although modern humans clearly displaced and exterminated Neanderthals between 40 and 20 thousand years ago, all the Neanderthal DNA remaining in our genome is patrilineal, where in other alien conquest areas, such as the Canary Islands, remaining indigenous DNA is overwhelmingly matrilineal.
These natural fears are more than humanoid, they are floral. Wherever modern humans have gone they have sought to eradicate forests, even when those forest environments provide better and more healthy provender. For instance, although there appeared to be little racial difference between Amerindians in the Eastern Woodlands of North America and the European Invaders, there was much better health, strength, stature and beauty to the indigenous human form than the invader, this according to invasion chronicles.
The abundant, protein-rich, managed forest habitat of these areas equaled that of the Pacific Northwest. However, total ecological replacement was sought as a goal by the earliest Planters, citing Genesis and the need to return the world to its original Christian state, of grasslands and gardens. People say that the need to switch to grass-based rather than forest and stream based ecology was to support larger numbers of people. The earliest sources, [1] however, claim the reverse, that extremely large nuclear families and the abandonment of traditional extended-family living, are a social tool for Man to destroy the evil forest, which is the Devil's Realm, and bring it to God, by putting it under cultivation.
Note that grass-based living in forest zones destroys the super-abundant river and coastal marine resources, and that within a hundred years of establishing farming and tanning industry, that the greatest fish runs and waterfowl harvests known to man were reduced to near zero. Rivers in the Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey areas were named "kills" for a reason. Thus a population of 6 foot 180 pound people as healthy as Paleolithic European Man, was replaced, over the course of 200 years of invasion, by a 5 and a half foot, 140 pound population of sickly men, most of them slaves for all or part of their life. Those men on the point of that spear, who lived like the indigenes, where known to exhibit ancient stature, heroic character, and almost all fled the civilization they had fought for and sought untamed lands.
We have an evolved sense of hatred and fear for the forest embodied in two civilized sources:
-The Arуan Herdsmen of the Sky God, invading the forests of the hunters, and
-The even more ancient fear of the forest by the slave societies of the river valleys, eating their grains like livestock
The farmer cannot displace the hunter, lacking the martial tool kit.
The herdsman cannot displace the hunter who retreats into or stays within his forests, for the forests will not provide the grazing feed for his herds, although the herdsman has the martial tool kit to take on the hunter, being an adaptation of the hunter rather than a degeneration like the farmer.
However, once the herdsman conquers the farmer, he will have grain stores to supply his livestock and slaves to cut down the hunters' forest and provide more grazing and slave raising territory.
In Europe, hunters held against farmers for over 1,500 years. But when the Arуans invaded both human populations were replaced, with little or no patrilineal DNA surviving from the archaic populations. In societies such as the Celtic and Norse, where forests were not viewed as evil, it may be possible that there was an adoption of the forest lifeway. In any case, the forest is the traditional enemy of the farmer and the horseman, which ended up forming the structure of mature Arуan society. This structure, exported as Planters, Pirates and Slaves was uniquely suited to displace indigenous forest populations in temperate zones by eradicating the forests.
Yet the deeper, primal, pre-civilized fear of the forest remains even as modern people, divorced from nature for so long, covet time in national forests and state parks, the fear that Gilgamesh and Enkidu had for the Guardian of the Cedar Forests, the fear etched in so many Hollywood films, where the bad man is always European and living in the woods, a fear extending to the shape of American politics, in a mindscape where everything good is proposed by the sainted, feedlot soul of suburbia, for the subhuman slaves of feral urbania, against which everything evil is embodied in the person of the pale hunter in his forest.
Do not forget the fairy tale menace of the forest, home of witches and beasts, and even its survival in the metaphor of the forest as a sojourn into evil times, such as brilliantly illuminated in Ernst Junger's Forest Passage.
From earliest times the forest and its skulking heroes were ever the enemy of The Sky Gods.
The Roman Imperator showed his might by pitting slave warriors against each other in the sands of the amphitheater and charioteers in the Circus Maximus. But, his greatest triumph among the common man, his legitimacy, was embodied in the hunts of the Beast-Fighters [echoed weakly in those bull fighters and lion tamers what may remain] in which hundreds and sometimes thousands of wild animals from the remotest portions of the world were slaughtered in hunts and battles—with a cohort of the Praetorian Guard once matched against 400 tigers—proving to the lowly slave folk of Rome and the surrounding estates, that Civilization had triumphed over the wild places, most fearsome of which were the forests concealing bears, leopards, wolves, lions and tigers. The reader should be reminded that lions and leopards [larger than their tropical cousins] were native to Europe and survived in European forests through much of antiquity.
Kings and lords of the Middle Ages owned the forests, as exclusionary zones, just as governments do today, seemingly afraid of any folk who would dwell in a forested land, such as the single most reviled type of person in Modern Smearica, the Appalachian, having committed the sin of retreat from the sacred maw of Modernity.
In these end times, those few humans outside of the cloisters of holy governance, who remain associated with the forest in any other capacity than tourist, are the enemies of The God of Things, standing forever in the way of the ethos of material accumulation and meaningless life extension, while their masters attempt to become God themselves.
Notes
Thomas White, in his Planter's Plea, 1630, makes clear the lesson of Genesis, that the ever-expanding nuclear family is a tool for recalling gardens and pastures and fields which have reverted to Satan's Forest realm. Increase Mather, 1677, upholds his case with ecclesiastic vigor.
Under the God of Things
Brilliant analysis and wording.
You really can’t use the steppe superweapons (horse and wagons) in a forest. Even if there’s paths wide enough to pass, you’re a sitting duck to get Mel Gibsoned. It’s telling that IndoEuropean Baltic, Slavic and Scandinavian cultures didn’t really make much headway into the Finnic and Sami forest zones until well into the Middle Ages. Also interesting that the Finnic peoples were never know for their Christian piety, never big on the Sky God like we IEs are.
I think the Teutonic Knights will still crusading against pagan Balts well into the 1300s.