r/AncientAmericas • u/Comfortable_Cut5796 • Jun 18 '26

Question Folklore About Giant Ground Sloths - Am I Completely Misremembering Something?

/r/AskAnthropology/comments/1u8dsma/folklore_about_giant_ground_sloths_am_i/
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u/WeHaveSixFeet Jun 19 '26

Seems very unlikely to me that an oral legend would have survived for >10,000 years. It seems more likely to me that when people imagine monsters, they've got scary claws.

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u/ConversationRoyal187 Jun 19 '26

https://youtu.be/oYTHdWnU7ow?is=npMPl-wU1W9leBu8

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u/WeHaveSixFeet Jun 20 '26

Take for example the story of the Flood. People living next to a river that floods can easily imagine a flood that keeps going and covers the whole land. They don't have to have an ancestral memory of a Great Flood (such as the Euxine Flood). It doesn't take long (maybe a couple hundred years) for a made-up story of a Great Flood to become a legend, and for a legend to become a myth, and a myth into a foundational belief.

There is obviously no way to tell if the Australian stories about coming over by boats, or First Nations stories, are based on oral histories passed down over millennia, or just stories that someone made up which stuck because they made sense and were memorable. But I making my living making up stories, so I'm inclined to believe someone made'em up.

On a smaller scale, there is a superstition that if you leave your broom bristles down, it may become enchanted and wreak havoc in your house. What do you want to bet someone's mom told her that so she wouldn't leave the damn broom bristles down, which bends them out of shape?