Were They High? And WTF is Archaeoacoustics? Could it be that children are the last folk singers, maintaining an oral tradition outside the influence of mass media. Hidden in plain sight - ancient secrets lost and hidden, are waiting and whispering in voices only children can hear!
Sound is arguably one of the principal superpowers of the human race. From language to song to sonic "tweezers" manipulating atoms in a lab, we've done and will continue to do amazing things with sound.
Two specific songs you mentioned, "Ring Around the Rosie" and "The Worms Crawl In, The Worms Crawl Out" are also ways of processing disease, loss and misfortune. I'm betting these were also features of ancient life that would have been tackled in either song or ritual or both (as they are today), although we might not have any direct evidence.
And a side note on drugs. I think our culture is stupidly remiss in ONLY seeing drugs as addiction and escapism. For literally thousands of years and across hundreds of widely varying cultures drugs were often used as a way to broaden the mind, process trauma or deepen spiritual connection. It's really only recently (within the last 100 years or so) that drug use has become entirely pathologized and shunned. It's a sad state of affairs that changing one's state of consciousness in one particular way (gambling, alcohol and sex are still legal and have addictive properties too) has become illegal and subject to the whims of the state for it's own failures in dealing with poverty/inequality and unhappiness/lack of fulfillment more generally in our society. I suppose the error lies in society's and government's nearly complete and total abrogation of providing guidance in favour of merely providing rather shallow and spurious rules. No wonder most people use them wrongly, without curation and towards the purpose of enlightenment. We really have gone backwards from our ancestors on this.
Sound is arguably one of the principal superpowers of the human race. From language to song to sonic "tweezers" manipulating atoms in a lab, we've done and will continue to do amazing things with sound.
Two specific songs you mentioned, "Ring Around the Rosie" and "The Worms Crawl In, The Worms Crawl Out" are also ways of processing disease, loss and misfortune. I'm betting these were also features of ancient life that would have been tackled in either song or ritual or both (as they are today), although we might not have any direct evidence.
And a side note on drugs. I think our culture is stupidly remiss in ONLY seeing drugs as addiction and escapism. For literally thousands of years and across hundreds of widely varying cultures drugs were often used as a way to broaden the mind, process trauma or deepen spiritual connection. It's really only recently (within the last 100 years or so) that drug use has become entirely pathologized and shunned. It's a sad state of affairs that changing one's state of consciousness in one particular way (gambling, alcohol and sex are still legal and have addictive properties too) has become illegal and subject to the whims of the state for it's own failures in dealing with poverty/inequality and unhappiness/lack of fulfillment more generally in our society. I suppose the error lies in society's and government's nearly complete and total abrogation of providing guidance in favour of merely providing rather shallow and spurious rules. No wonder most people use them wrongly, without curation and towards the purpose of enlightenment. We really have gone backwards from our ancestors on this.
"It's really only recently (within the last 100 years or so) that drug use has become entirely pathologized and shunned."
So true. It may be part of the binary 'good v. evil' narrative that we are stuck with and anything that adds complexity is branded 'evil' and shunned.
I think this might be the the next line of thought for these posts.